The art of the question

Why should people obey the law?
Why do people obey the law?
Why do people think they should obey the law?

Gotta love political theory!

Candid Camera

Yay, captured on camera! This is me asking a question at a lecture on China's economic/political future by a guest speaker on campus last week. My prof sent me the photo. Love how my electric blue tennis shirt (had tennis practice after that) stands out in the pic, haha. Anyway, the big guys behind me, the girl to my right in glasses - all are my classmates in my Diplomacy and Intelligence in Modern History class. I was the last person to ask a question, and the speaker was like, "of course we have to have a question from a Chinese," so I had to clarify that I wasn't from China. Lol.

08/09 The Year Ahead

Urgh, I didn't manage to get into any of the economics classes that I wanted. That's the crappy part of the system here, the utter randomness of class selection, much unlike the points systems Singaporeans are used to. Sure, it purports to broaden your horizon, allowing to take and maybe fall in love with a class you would never have expected to take, but on the flip side, if you already have a set academic plan, you have little or no control over it.

But this year will be interesting. I'm taking four classes, one more than the usual 3 (we take fewer class because we do independent research papers for each class on top of class work).

There's Intermediate French, which I'm already shitting myself over, because some of the kids in the class are pretty darn fluent, and the teacher speaks really quickly and uses a lot of cheem (to me) vocab, unlike my Beginning teacher last year who took time to speak and enunciate very clearly. On the first day of class, he played us this satirical French political news broadcast which poked fun at Sarkozy. More than half the class didn't understand a single word. I know I didn't. But one or two managed to laugh frequently at the jokes. Damn them. Je pense que je dois peut-etre ecouter plus de chansons francais et regarder plus de films francais.

Modern History of Diplomacy and Intelligence with a teacher who's got a really great reputation in the school. He's an ex-CIA intelligence officer and is just amazingly intelligent, really cool. Really excited about this class. Again though, crazy knowledgeable peeps. In the first class, since we hadn't done any readings, we talked about the Ruso-Georgian conflict. And these kids began throwing out their ridiculous history knowledge, referring Chechnya, Baltic problems in Estonia and Latvia, possible separatism issues in Ukraine, Poland, and some Hungarian revolution.... Yeah, I did not speak at all that class, except for the introduction (Reminded me of how lost I felt in my first Intro to US Politics class year, which incidentally also had one of the above-mentioned crazy knowledgeable kids. He knew a alot about US political history too. And he apparently edits Wikipedia entries on US military subjects...). Damn these kids too, let's see you talk some Qing, Ming, Song, Tang, Manchurian, etc. history!

Cultural Studies of the Pacific Rim is the first lecture I will take here ('lecture' used loosely as there're just like 30 ppl tops). It's classfied as a Lit class, about Asian, Asian-American lit mostly. I signed up because we're gonna be be reading my fav author, Ishiguro! And Murakami, and other such Pacific authors. We're gonna be watching some familiar movies too: Chung King Express, 2046, even Eric Khoo's Be With Me (which my teacher mistakenly announced as Indonesian in the class. WTF)! But I'm really not a Lit person, I realise. The first class, the teacher was talking about all of these abstract terms that I just felt so lost (yeah, recurring theme there). Stuff like identity, nationalism, orientalism, tropology, paleonomy ("using old words, old categories with the purpose of launching new inquiries, new investigations"). Most interestingly to me, there're quite a few Asian-American kids in this class, and many of them relate to this struggle for identity, for the search of their roots, etc. I just thought: It's funny how I've never really thought about tracing my roots, or even questioning where exactly do I draw the line on where my roots begin. Hmm. Oh well, I get to read Ishiguro!

Statistics: This was my third choice in alternate registration. It's math, 'nuff said. I didn't even bring a freakin' calculator over, lol. So I have to go get one. This will be interesting. And to show the astounding popularity of math in my school, we have 9 people in the class. Haha.

And in more exciting news, soccer! We're forming a club team this year, and will have three games, including one up to Mass. against Hampshire College. Roadtrip! Training, 3x weekly, begun Monday, and it was fucking tiring. We did what is commonly termed here as "suicides", which is basically running back and forth the field, stopping at the midpoints to do pushups, crunches or jumps. Fucking tiring for this old uncle. Earlier tonight, we had a 4 mile (8-9km) run scheduled. Are you freakin' kidding me? I didn't even run that much in the army! Erm, yeah, so I didn't go for training tonight. Lol.

So, all in all, I''ve observed that my classes seem to work diff. parts of my brain. There's the linguistic part, the analytical part in both Math and Hist., and finally, art in the form of Lit. to soothe my soul. Heh. And soccer now and tennis in the spring to keep in shape, and I'm set. And since Stats is a fall-semester class only, hopefully I'll be able to successfully register for a freakin' econ class in the spring.

And of course, more trips into the city, hopefully! Maybe see more of Brooklyn, and its hipster-haven parts.

To a good 08/09 then.

School's Out!

First semester of college is officially over! Woot (now recognised in dictionaries apparently)! What with the (mostly) no-exams policy here, I wrote two 20+ page research papers instead, one on China's environmental protection/economic development conundrum, and the other on same-sex marriage and the US political system. In some way, I might actually prefer exams. Because for exams, if you don't study, you can still show up and try to crap something. If you don't write your paper, then that's that, no way to salvage the situation. I will have a French exam at the beginning of next semester though. It's arranged that way so we have to work on it during the hols and thus not lose touch. Urgh.

It was a worrying last few weeks trying to confirm lodging for the winter break. The school has a fucked-up policy of not allowing students, even int'l students, to stay on campus during break. Thankfully, my int'l advisor offered me a job in the admissions office for January so I was able to petition for housing. I'll be staying on campus from the 1 Jan onwards. Now till then though, I'm housed in my Serbian friend's apartment in the UES. It's nice and cozy. Apparently, it was merged into one from four studios, so it's not very big, but there're plenty of bathrooms!

I went to Chinatown earlier today to get a haircut. I found this slightly dodgy looking place, which was in located in a basement, and it cost a mere US$5! Haha, there are things which can be done cheaper here than in SG! It was like I was transported into another city when I entered the salon. There was only one hairdresser, a Chinese woman with hair styled in the vein of HK stars circa mid/late 80s. She spoke Cantonese, and her boombox broadcast some Cantonese station where, from what I could make out, the DJs were discussing Formula 1, particularly the Schumacher brothers. She ostensibly got sick of the DJs yakking because halfway through my haircut, she stopped and went to put a CD in. It was some classic Mandarin oldies CD. Like I said, in that time, I did not feel like I was in NYC.

P.S: Snow is pretty and all, but ice which remains for days is annoying! It is so freakin' slippery and I've almost fell a million times walking. It's as if you're ice-skating, and you don't even need skates.

The Universal Language of Music

Heard at the last Friday's school Bhangra-themed dance party held to celebrate Deepavali (or Diwali, as they call it): Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy by Tata Young! Who knew third-rate pop songs by ASEAN artistes transcended geographic boundaries? 'Twas a moment of pride when I heard it. I know the lyrics (in no small part thanks to two pals' love for the song during karaoke sessions) to a song by an obscure artiste no one else knew of! Take that, indie kids!

'Twas really nice to eat some Indian curry, samosas, etc. for a change too.

The classroom isn't always walled

For some reason, my American Politics class was locked out of our classroom last Friday (Apparently, our teacher was supposed to call security to get the room opened every time, but she didn't do that). The solution? Thanks to the still summer-like days, we had class outdoors on the grass next to the classroom building instead.

Our teacher sat on the ledge while the rest sat, in various positions, on the grass facing her. About halfway through, one student got up, moved to another patch of grass, laid flat down with his stomache facing the ground, lit up a ciggie and began enjoying his puffs.

Meanwhile, our discussion continued unabated.

Ring, Ring, Ring Goes that Ol' School Bell

Well, there obviously aren't any school bells on campus, but it's so interesting, to me at least, to see scenarios so often depicted in movies/TV come to life in front of your eyes.

I've always been amazed at how, in movies/TV, kids in school rush out of the class the minute the bell rings, while the teacher shouts something like "Remember, pop quiz tommorow!" to no one in particular as most have already zoomed out of the class. How rude!

Well, it's sorta how it is in real life!

Say a class ends at 11. Even though the professor might still be explaining crucial stuff, at 1055, students are already stuffing paper into their folders, packing their bags, etc. One even got up, pulled his chair back in, and stood there basically waiting for the official dismissal before zooming off. And the professor doesn't feel offended or feel that it's rude that students are doing all of these even whilst she's still teaching. Fascinating!

As such, I'm usually among the last few out of the class because I wait for the word of dismissal before scooping up my stuff. Seems like the polite thing to do, I suppose.

A House is not a Home

My current place of residence. The college has a variety of dorm offerings, including the more regular many-rooms-in-a-long-corridor kind; then there are a few such houses converted to dorms. In related news, I have a kitchen! Which I have utilised thus far to boil water (I think I'm fast developing a rep for being 'the guy who boils water'. Everyone drinks bottled water.) to drink.


My room. I'm the bed in yellow. FYI for the unfamiliar, that black bag of mine on the floor is a made-in-Singapore SAF product. Who needs Samsonite?

A Change is Gonna Come...

It is Sunday evening as I am typing this, just over 1.5 days since I landed at JFK on Sat morning at about 4.15am. I'm still feeling kinda awful, probably from the heavy jet lag, with slight dizzy spells every so often.

Just some quick notes then, based on the 40+ hours I've spent here thus far, as that's about all my brain can muster.

*I spend about 12 hours in the Detroit airport. My flight landed there at about 2.15pm on Fri, and my connecting flight was scheduled at 9.11pm. How horrible, a 7 hour wait, you think. If only. The flight was delayed, delayed and delayed more before it finally took off at about 2.40am. It didn't help that I didn't get much sleep on the plane rides (of about 20 hours in total) before and couldn't do so at the airport for fear of getting baggage stolen. So, yeah, that sucked and was not a good start.

*The ironic thing about that flight delay was that towards the end of the wait, I was sorta hoping it might as well go beyond 6 hours because then I could actually claim insurance. Of course, it had to be so near yet so far.

*Met and spoke to 2 people on my plane journey. The first was a fellow int'l student from China who also studied in New York. We shared a plane ride from Narita to Detroit. From her, I learnt that there're so many Chinese students in most of the universities that it's like they never left home.
The second I met while on that interminable wait in Detroit. She was a Filipino-American who lives in NYC and worked at Dunkin' Donuts. She offered me her cell to call my mum, so that was cool.

*My very first meal on American soil (in the Detroit airport) was . . . a McDonald's Fillet O' Fish set meal. As I've mentioned before, it's the reason why obesity here is so closely linked to poverty. McD's is the cheapest thing here.

*You're right, Ad. I realised as I was unpacking that I had way, way overpacked. For the curious: My two checked-in baggages weighed 26.7 and 32.4 kgs respectively and for my carry-on stuff, I had a big blue Adidas bag which weighed probably about 10-11kgs and a separate laptop bag, and a tennis racket. Adamant of not spending money for stupid reasons, I refused to pay the USD3 bucks needed to get a trolley at JFK. Thankfully, I found a free one after lugging all my barang barang for about 50m. That was not fun.

*I have a bad, bad case of culture shock. Most of the other international students here are the ones who've lived in 5,0000 countries in their lives, or they went to American int'l schools, so they are basically Americans. The locals here are as I expected: Very individualistic, very loud, quirky, eccentric (at times, a euphemistic term) (One theatre guy is a professional fight choreographer. Said dude is to be called by Yoishi, instead of his official name, Robert, which he says he will not respond to.) (Note: This is more characteristics of students here, not generalisations of all Americans). It's tough to relate to their conversations. My roommate's kinda not like that though, which is nice.

*I've to qualify almost EVERY single introduction of my name with a "you know, like the silver or the pound." It's because I don't pronounce it the American way with the heavy emphasis on the R sound.

*Michael Fay is old news. The apparent thing most locals ask when I mention Singapore is if we jail people for littering.

*Army stories impress too! It's too bad my NSF posting was rather un-Army-like. Haha.

*True to media depictions, everything is "awesome".

*I've already had pseudo-intellectual discussions on religion, abortion, gender/race identity, etc. Harry Potter is a great cultural unifier too.

*Speaking of identity, I find that mine has been reduced to "Asian foreign student". For now anyway, hopefully.

*I live in an old, postcard-ish 2-storey bungalow converted to house 13 people. It's very pretty but very creaky. Will post pictures in time. The weather right now is bloody brilliant (some Brit-speak to keep me from getting all American-speak-ised). Hot sun with very cool winds. Picture-perfect late summer weather. Still a tad dry for my liking though.

*The school (and apparently, most US unis) blocks P2P software like uTorrent and Emule. And it is really, really, really NOT awesome. I am very upset and frustrated over it. It's THE most disorientating thing right now. Seriously.

*Mostly, seeing the youthful enthusiasm of fellow freshmen, I am feeling very, very old and weary, and four years now seem like a very, very long time.

*rueful smile*

Zaid and I at Changi Airport. How, erm, awesome that he was working a graveyard shift that day. Thanks Lina for reminding me to contact him!