i came up from dinner today watching the cashier colouring the 'o's and 'e's in a piece of paper. quel m�tier! maybe i would have told you about capitalism a few years back, but i read "the story of the toll booth" a couple years ago and i decided i couldn't. after all, it was just a temporary lapse. even i draw on my lecture notes.

in the class the other day about communist russia, there was the comment from the russian girl about how workers got a lot more respect for being in their profession, how they would watch nice ballet and the arts with their free time. but i guess it wasn't the russia that imprisoned solzhenitsyn and restricted shostakovich. "the eighth symphony of 1943 was considered too dark for authorities, who promptly banned it"). it was after fucking stalingrad. it's his centennial anyway, so london phil will be playing more of him. repression can't stop you, but it stops you from trying. (it's not the same, in case you think i'm talking rubbish. think.) in the end, it collapsed. what could be better than everyone trying to make good for themselves, having their own ambitions? (think before answering)

travelling in europe is so sanitized. we're planning a trip to marseille, provence and the like in spring, with a stop in the rh�ne-alpes region (lyon, annecy etc), and not forgetting paris. i like france in a different way from england (i love english towns and cities, but the french have real countryside), yet i can't help thinking that europe is for rich toffs with money to burn. or at least own a car. research which consists of clicking on assorted easyjet and ryanair websites and hostels on hostelworld.com hardly sets the pulse racing. i really should be going to poland.
i need to do the kind of backpacking spending 12 hours on a crumbling train watching not-very thrilling scenery go by, occasionally being rewarded by the large mountain or lake. "go west". i miss looking for the correct train on the correct platform. i really love trains because i don't think they'll last long. the days of iron and steel are over. soon the whole world will be popping up with mini-easyjets and ryanairs and we'll all fly from place to place at low cost. until then, us spoilt brats who grew up never having to take 3rd class or sit atop carriages will continue having to go to places like china (beijing-urumqi) to get our kicks experiencing standard gauge railways and carriages which actually travel at a speed where you can see the scenery. and not the tgv. i know it saves a lot of ass pain but since when have i liked comfort?

learning a new language. it's so dr�le. especially when you're at the part where you can't really read the papers, literary works or the like. when you're doing tons of exercises on the preterite just so you can speak in the past tense and you have no looming trip to make it seem worthwhile. writing puerile essays like "my ideal home" or "what's good and bad about television in your country."

so i searched on the internet trying to plagiarize something. (to plagiarize: shameless use of the copy and paste function to try to pass someone else's work as yours). or at least get some ideas for what television was like in singapore. i haven't watched tv in ages, (i mean sitting down and junking around). i liked chinese drama serials but once i grew out of them (and i don't wanna go into what i watched as a kid, sesame street and the like), and laughable local attempts at drama ceased to amuse me (vr man, but never to bash the efforts of local actors and actresses, they were just there to get some dough), i was really just a kid sitting around waiting for cable tv to happen. even then, mtv was just a fancy name for black hole, football was nice until they stopped trying to raise the prices every year. (arts central was really a little bit subversive, with bits of documentary showing savannah and wide open spaces and giraffes eating leaves, and french movies with girls trying to slit their wrists). and they have the occasional british comedy for me to laugh at. so i end up blogging, and the top search result for "good and bad television in singapore". i got in the meantime was sarongpartygirl's blog. it's a good place to go to refresh your memory and it is good, intelligent entertainment, from tolstoy's "all happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families and unhappy in their own way", to the maths bit about finding the missing dollar, and how kids have a visceral realization of death, more so than the adults who philosophize and rationalize it away, although it gets closer to them. it made me feel guilty about putting up all these bullshit posts. anyway, i guess television in singapore is really not as trashy as it can get here, but i agree, television is a crass medium, i have little interest in it, except for the occasional belgian commercial with 2 lesbians advertising their phone number in the middle of an american soap translated into dutch. it was only nice because of the dodgy music and the horrendously bad timing. but if it happened every day, i wouldn't bother getting a tv license. everything's on the internet anyway.

spanish essay and the laundry left then. i know i can get really boring at times, but i try to keep myself entertained. i'm no artist, but i like good art, especially a bit of creativity. even in mathematics. and hopefully my trips will realize themselves soon.