January 2004 Archives
It was kind of like in the movies; the movement itself was swift, but when the cold plastic struck him across the face in that featureless instant, the precious moment subtended by cause and effect, action and reaction, everything just slowed down.
I’ll always love you, no matter what you do. You’re my flesh and blood.
Fantastic connection. He can’t tell what comes first, the sensation of impact, the dull awareness of pain, but his head is forced sideways in deference to grand majesty, exhaling sharply from the depths of his lungs as if the blow were to his chest. He feels that; the twisting, the breathlessness. The momentary jarring of vision, like de-gaussing a cranky computer screen, comes suddenly clear as the head exceeds its own inertia, dazed eyes lifting in the moment of recovery to catch flecks of iron-tinged saliva intent on making their own way; decelerating, in their own time, to wall, to floor. Red on white.
No matter what you do.
Red on white. Mine. Please. Oh, fucking please, somebody, help me... find me here; the door; just push. Plea… ...I can’t do this alone… there are too many... people.
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A pile of the white stuff arrived overnight. No, not Colombia's finest, but about 3 inches of snow, which is even more fun. Alas, my commute is three minutes on foot, so today will not be a snow day.
A girlfriend of mine turned Doctor today; she passed her viva voce with flying colours, and then we went out on the piss. For a moment, I felt a degree of envy in that she is, now, where I wish I was already, but all in good time I suppose. Besides, I imagine that the work and stress of the interim will be utterly thrilling, and that isn't something I want to pass up on.
I made an early exit from the off-facedness to attend a guest lecture at the Union where artist, Grayson Perry, was to speak about his work; it turned into more of an easy question-answer discussion than lecture, which is unsurprising, in hindsight, given his intensely sociable nature, apparent from the outset. He insisted we not hold back with our questions, and for a while, no one really paid heed, which seemed a little insensitive. So I asked him if he had been abused as a child and whether it had affected the nature of the pieces he creates. He smiled before answering. People got more brazen thereafter.
Talk ranged from paedophilia, classism in society, and the behaviour of the latter in the face of polemicism, to S&M (which Grayson enjoys), forms of abuse, and the meritocratic nature of the art world. It was free flowing, oftentimes amusing, and almost like talking to a friend; very pleasant in all respects. I just wish I had gone to the toilet beforehand as the porter ale went through me and my empty stomach something quick.
If he wasn't straight, married, not my type, and maybe a little too old for me, I'd certainly give his mind the time of day.
He didn't wear a dress because of the cold weather. Bleh.
Fairly typical a morning and brilliantly blue-skyed, though the layer of ice over the car porch, cracked by an uneven freeze and dry as the crisp air, said plenty about the temperature outside. Turned on the jets, upped the temperature and jacked off in the shower after weeks of self-neglect, then packed, headed out, and waited for a bus. The bus came. Got on, got off, slumped into a seat aboard a train and watched jaded morning-people while listening to Beck's impassioned Lonesome Tears. Fell out at Vauxhall. Waited for the tube; the tube came. Got on, got off, jogged up the escalator and came out onto the Euston Road. Walked towards King's Cross to find a train to Cambridge, but took a planned detour to the British Library, along the way, to see an exhibition I've wanted to catch for a while, featuring, as it does, Zhao Yannian's graphic-novel-like lianhuanhua ("linked serial pictures"), The Biography of Ah Q; really something else. Got back, caught a movie, solo, at the last minute - Lost in Translation, finally - and sat down here to type this.
Last night, was a little less ordinary, courtesy of Matt; after a rather fine dinner at The Real Greek - I warmly recommend this one to gourmands and sitiophobes alike - we landed at The Circus Space, where he dabbles in body slinging, to watch a variety of performances in the circus arts. I enjoyed almost everything, to a greater or lesser extent, from the exciting acrobatics to the more static pieces involving strength, coordination, and a keener sense of balance than I'll ever have. I don't think that any of the performers were professionals, which was rather impressive, if not inspiring outright. Yet something else to try, though the abilities of the utterly captivating contortionist will forever be out of my reach, accidents notwithstanding.
Afterwards, we went in search of an artery.
Between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, I might well have eaten my body-weight in food. Jon, wherever you are, I love you, but you're evil and I never want you to visit me again. Unless you bring brownies.
I'm currently cooling off over a glass of salt water, having arrived back from the gym a short while ago. In order to prevent my knee injury from flaring up between now and the marathon, I've begun running short four to five mile distances on the mill as often as possible in order to condition my tissues (advice from the physio I saw on Friday afternoon) without subjecting them to longer runs on the tarmac, which isn't easy on the joints and pretty much all I'd been doing to them previously.
Indoors boring? Well, actually no; tonight was the most fun I've ever had on a treadmill; having pulled a bunch of fun and energising tracks - geared towards putting me on the moon or higher - from my recently fortified iTunes library (a big thank you to my dearest patron of the arts), dullsville was just not going to be on my list of destinations.
It felt great, actually to the point that I lost track of time and ran for much longer than I'd intended (oops), at a higher intensity (oops), and at full incline (to add to the pleasure of the pain, no oops, it was highly erotic). By the time I stepped off the treads, the litre of water that I drank was pretty much apparent on my clothes; my tank had become a second skin, my lycra felt downright saucy. Straight boy drops his dumbell, grins at me and says, "Looks like you've been having fun!"
"Yeah, pretty intense, that..."
He pauses to notice a great big bruise at the top of my left shoulder, pulls a sly expression and motions towards it with his chin,
"At least some of us have been getting some!"
"Huh... yeah!" ...and away my eyes roll.
Of course, I'm too innocent to know what he was talking about, but it made me chuckle all the same. I'm bushed; time to wash the layer of homegrown sandpaper off my face and back, and crash. There are days when you just know you're going to sleep like a baby.
Climbing into bed at a relatively early 0048 this morning, I could do little other than drift fitfully between wakefulness and a semi-conscious dozing, looking at my watch every here and again to see the hours ticking by slower than ever. I gave up at around 0400, and stared at the ceiling, fingers gently massaging scalp, and thought about me.
In these twenty three years, I haven't done anything to leave my mark upon the planet, though there are a couple of trees in the rainforests of the world that bear my unobtrusive signature, effectively lost forever, but what I realise is that I really don't care to do so in any case. I've done alright for myself, and maybe even a little something for those who are bound permanently to me by life's tether, and I'm happy with that. It feels... nice.
Do me a favour and smile today.
A few metres from where I'm sat is a girl, most likely a Cambridge undergrad., judging from the orgillous drone of wordy and slightly comical psychobabble of a not-so-great-philosopher in the making. I could be mistaken; not about her being a student, she's quite clearly cast of the mould, but of her potential; if she can get around talking about the things she mistakenly thinks her audience will be interested in (her comrade is glazed over, just look at him) when clearly not informed enough to make the rather terminal observations that she is, she might very well get somewhere.
Ack. I take it back; she descends steeply...
"I think that rationalists are taking away from nature in denying its obvious divinity." She's a hardened creationist. Also a bible quoter. While I'm not a proponent of blind faith, I care little about what people choose to believe in provided they don't make a point of forcing their logic, particularly the unprovable, upon others. She's explaining the flaws of evolutionary theory now; natural selection is not possible because there's no way that a random process could give rise to the kinds of adaptations that we see in nature. Further, the laws of physics state (I can only assume that she's referring to the second law of thermodynamics) that disordered states are more probable than ordered ones, and that there can be no rational explanation for our [ordered] existence when there's nothing there to drive the unfavourable coalescence of energy into living systems.
Bleh. First off, I think that the ascription of the divine to nature is far worse a thing than 'denying its divinity'; nature isn't miraculous, it's better than that; it is brilliant, wonderful and inspiring in its complex diversity, and putting it all down to supernatural intervention diminishes its awful splendour. As for her treatment of Darwinism, sorry sister, but natural selection is not random; the mutations that drive it occur spontaneously, and yes, randomly, but selection itself is about as stringent and non-random a process as you can get; it's only the beasties with greater developmental advantages that survive and reproduce most successfully in the long run.
As for Law Thermodynamicus No. 2, Madame, I offer you... the sun. The ball of fusing hydrogen, that is, not the newspaper; the latter would very well demand divine intervention to do anything more than irritate.
The Cambridge-London route always has something interesting to offer.
In other news, I bumped into someone special on Portobello Road today; she stopped to ask me for directions to Ledbury Road (Notting Hill), and as we parted, I exclaimed, "Hey, you look just like Maggie Gyllenhaal!"
"I am!" came her smiley reply. Bloody obvious too.
Cue the broad, embarassed grin, "Oh, right!"
I turned and walked away a bit giggly. Stairs, you big idiot. Still, a nice coincidence in light of the last post.
I found myself sitting in a cinema, this evening, for the second time in as many days; the tentative plan had been, perhaps, to go and see a film tomorrow with a friend, but events have left me craving solitude, here and there, and so I bailed. As someone who never bails, it was a bit of a cop-out all the same, since the trip to the local picturehouse was t.b.a. in any case.
And so I ended up sitting in front of what I would have been sitting in front of anyway, but instead of a friend, I was accompanied by even more vital a companion; there's a lot of love in a tub of Ben & Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream... grrrowf. And I got the badge; independent cinemas are so much more fun.
Rather different from last night's Cold Mountain, which I enjoyed with some minor reservations (I'm easy to please, but no critic; I recognise a bad movie; it wasn't that), American Splendor was a warmly crafted piece based on the comic book writer, Harvey Pekar, who, from 1976, penned an autobiographical series under the same title as the film.
Harvey Pekar the movie blends fictional and documentary styles together with an easy manner, splicing together interviews with the real Harvey, his wife and his friends, with the fictional portrayal of his life, played by actors and, occasionally, drawings. At one point, the actors are seen next to the people they represent, and it suddenly becomes easy to appreciate just how accurately they emulate their subjects. Somewhat novel. And if you see the film, you'll understand why I was repeatedly transported to the Simpsons universe; think Barney Gumble and the fabulous comic-book geek.
It wasn't phenomenal, but it was both gently humorous and touching; liked it. Just one tear.
The film release schedule goes haywire, hereonin; starting with Lost in Translation, tomorrow (and bloody late by present UK standards), a whole volley of releases and re-releases begins, including Girl With a Pearl Earring, again featuring Scarlett Johansson (who I remember best from The Horse Whisperer), Belvaux's three-part Trilogy work, which I have to see, Tim Burton's Big Fish, which arouses some curiosity, Sylvia, a re-screening of Timecode, and Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
Secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is being re-screened too; missed it the first time around, and then thought about buying the DVD blind (£8.00 from Blockbuster), but I'm tempted to see it on the screen since Adam and my own film-friends, all with rather similar tastes to mine, assure me I'll enjoy. Subjective, as all things, but experience has shown that such recommendations do alright, on the whole.
This is why I need a real job.
It's a fine line that exists between making a rash decision and not. Would that it were otherwise; some actions just can't be undone, and unlke cats, we only get one shot. Some things never change.
Life is all about the rest, no?
Perhaps, but it's always a pleasure to be reminded of how good company and friends can turn most any time and place into a wonderful experience. Or simply make life feel, more than it already does, so worth living.
Augh, the sky is lightening already. Fuck. There goes Sunday.
The festive season officially ends for me with the passing of this weekend; yes, most people have been working since Boxing Day, but life in academia occasionally has its plus points, and this has been one of them. Ultimately, it is all up to me; last year I took just a couple of days around Christmas and the new year, but this time round I felt like a proper holiday. It has been... refreshing.
This evening, I got just a little bit pissed (UK - inebriated, not angry) in a couple of bars around Soho with a chap who has, for years, been like a brother to me. Fun; cocktails and breezers. Avoided the mistletoe in the bar. Close call. You'd understand had you been there. Still pissed; I had wine with the fillet I just cooked. Steak before bed. Lunacy.
Tomorrow, dinner with a friend, most probably, and when we part company, I'm expected to go dancing at a club, Heaven, which I haven't been to in bloody ages. I'm hesitant, because it's not always the friendliest of places and I certainly never know anyone there anymore, but the music is usually alright and, running and mad sex aside, dancing is a great way to let off steam while having fun. There's the appeal. Sunday, finally, back to Cambridge.
Right, off to bed; there won't be much time for sleep tomorrow. Oh, and now that 2003, a rather wonderful year bar certain personal issues, is out of the way, I have statistics for the first nine months of my life... the raw data is even more fun. Mmm, street-cred zeroed.
~ the year in numbers ~I like to imagine my mother a harried and frantic termagant, slightly crazed and in distinct need of sedation. I like to imagine her this way, because it is exactly what she is not; despite working crushingly long hours, days and nights, striving to keep her interior design firm healthy, and dealing, at the same time, with problematic tenants, incompetent servicemen, particularly deficient members of our removed family and - why not - even a hectic social life, she manages to do so with efficiency and a remarkable degree of calm.
In time, they are forced to leave the trucks behind; keeping to the roads has become too dangerous, and at great risk to themselves - one danger for another - they enter the jungle to make slow progress toward the Naga foothills, the border, the Indian state of Assam. On a number of occasions, their scouts encounter the Japanese and they are forced to lie low. My grandaunt speaks of constant gunfire, the screaming of women and children, sometimes only tens of metres away, and of how it is to feel hunted. The family will make it across the border, on foot, after months of travel, but at cost; the girl who would be my eldest aunt, dead from diphtheria near Taunggyi, though she was not alone; maids, porters, other innocents, their children, lost themselves too.
Aged seventeen, my mother became responsible for the wellbeing of six of her seven sisters, and a younger brother. She and her eldest sister took charge of the timber business, and at a time when capitalism was being crushed by the general's Burmese Way to Socialism, actually turned a profit, the aim being to secure passage for each of the Ahmed children in turn, youngest to oldest, to Pakistan and the frantic, open arms of my grandmother. As the head-of-the-family elect, it was my mother who was thrown into prison in 1963, aged eighteen, for trying to preserve some of the family's wealth, having been turned in, rather unfortunately, by a misguided relative. She made headline news; to see my mother in her youth, all I need do is travel to the British Museum reading rooms, and there she is, in black and white, surrounded by 'stolen' jewellery. And when she was released, she went right back to what it was she was doing before, until she was the last of the immediate family still left in Burma. Delayed only by her trial, she finally booked passage aboard a tanker and sailed alone to Karachi, to join the rest of the family in exile. We are forbidden from returning to Burma.
Saya cinta awak, ibu.
