10 posts tagged “college”

I'm finally done with setting my room up, and I'm so very proud of it. Pictures of my room will follow soon, but right now I'm choosing pictures to put up. I don't want a photo mosaic, because that is, in my roommate's words, "so summer camp". Here are my options:

This is by far my favourite, but if I saw this in a friend's room I would totally think she's got parent problems.

Very cliched, journey-esque message photo. I like the wet footprints. I remember halting my mum and dad from crossing the bridge before I could snap it.

Whimsical, cheers me up, but doesn't resonate deeply at all.

I returned to Singapore last Friday, and since then I've done nothing conversation-worthy. I like to think that my vacation attachment with CAAS does not qualify as a conversation topic or something that should be prodded into because, really, it belongs to the rest of my life, which is already an inevitability I signed up for one year ago, and that I will have abundant opportunities to talk about.

I miss Penn to bits. I really do. I speak not with a banality that underlies small talk and idle banter, but with a very real inertia that consumes my thoughts almost every second of the day. I've met so many people (I probably should add customarily that they are awesome people) that made me feel awesome and brought me into bits of knowledge and experiences and what-ifs that I used to deliberately exclude from my comfort zone. I was also given an independence that I loved through and through and that I never for once took for granted. Most important was an independence of time. My time was my own, and it was up to me to manage my time relative to others. Right now bits of my time is arbitrarily given to my parents.

Gah. Pictures!

Philadelphia is pretty in Fall.

After a week of exams, I took a break on Saturday morning by taking a four-hour stroll around City Center.

 

 

And got aquainted with the fabric of America's fun.

 

 

Still, I much prefer fall within Penn :)

 

 

 

Yep, Fall is the best season ever!

 

 

I can't wait to get my life up and running!

 

Official training starts soon. One meeting more and we'll have concrete stuff to do for Int'l Student Council. I got my first fortnightly illustration published in today's Daily Pennsylvanian (the college paper). Mid-terms start next week. I've been to the gym 4 times this week.

I have a committee dinner tomorrow. I have tickets to see Anderson Cooper on Saturday. Next Sunday I have tickets to see Aqualung. Ít's getting colder and I must do more shopping.

 

Weeee!!!

I enjoy the independence and the responsibility of getting my business done myself. And everything's been perfect except for a few things, surmountable things.

Okay, so this is how my 1.5 weeks have been:

I painstakingly set up my room myself, which might seem unfathomable to most, but oh well I like my room now.

 

Essentially the view I get: A bird's nest on close-up, you can't see it here but sometimes I see squirrels.

I thought it might be nice to leave the windows open and have some natural breeze. But the tree outside happens to be the habitat to lotsa insects. The fugly ones. Sometimes there are nice ones.

 

I moved in early, so I got to see everyone else move in on Thursday, the day I went out to run some errands (cancel phone line, make immunization appointment, get insurance card). Being a student in a school as big and as rich as Penn tends to make you feel very privileged and honoured. The first picture actually shows roads being condoned off especially for students moving in. Same thing happens for moving-out. Seriously. The rest of them minions have to detour.

We had talks, inspirational talks in a huge hall.

And in that same hall we had totally sophisticated comedians giving up stand-up on Comedy Night. (that was when I really felt special I think)

We had lotsa outdoor parties with lotsa FREE FOOD.

Actually you know what forget it you don't have to know everything. I'm way too lazy to wait for the other gedzillion pictures to load and to write about the gedmedbezillion other events.

But I did buy a new journal. The train metaphor I illustrated the cover with is quite literal I think. Could have done better. But didn't. So there.

 

The Antonioni retrospective has sparked within me an interest in 50s and 60s cinema. This interest is by no means epicurist, but rather a childlike wonder at the alterity and enduring qualities of the times. This has been in tandem with another new interest in 18th and 19th Century England, what with my reading The Importance of Being Earnest and Sense and Sensibility. And now, I'm tuning into Turner Classic Movies like nobody's business! The channel is quite a treasure, if anyone should care to tune in every now and then. Beyond the value of screening classic movies, TCM screens them daily by themes. For instance, today they will broadcast movies by Stanley Kubrick, starting the day with a documentary on the director. Tomorrow their listings might include the filmography of Robert Wagner. The last few movies of the day will have both Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in their cast, then segue into a day of Natalie Wood movies. This day will end with West Side Story, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, and proceed into the following day of Richard Beymer works. Marvelous!

I am juggling my movie-watching with another very time-consuming endeavour: reading. I finished Sense and Sensibility in the last 2 weeks, and now I must get started on Penn Reading Project's pick-of-the-year, Your Inner Fish, a book that all freshmen have been assigned to read and that we will discuss in clusters during orientation.

 

 

 

When I was a kid and my mum took me out gallivanting, she sometimes bumped into ex-pals and ex-classmates. The exclamation of choice was always, "It's a small world after all!" And I would snigger. I thought such a notion was parochial and small-town. I didn't believe we were really all that connected. I simply believed we lived within isolated circles of friends, and that if you had maybe, 3 circles you would be the only common thread amongst all 3. So then, it was completely possible to assume different personas with different groups of people, and I mean radically different.

This has changed over the growing years, and I've been proven wrong time and again, and it's always been a pleasant surprise to discover overlaps.

A connected matter is that recently I've been mentally pre-occupied with sociopaths and self-validating internal worlds. Last night I watched Shattered Glass, and it gave me a portrayal of the effects of an individual who managed to create an internal reality and successfully projected it out onto the world. This doesn't just refer to his fabrication of news, but also to his personality and identity. Stephen Glass, the journliast, eventually got caught fabricating stories. Anyway I've been quite intrigued with Glass, and found out that he attended Penn! I know I know, thousands of people enter Penn every year. But hello, there're hundreds of colleges out there, thousands of publicized scandals, hundreds of movies, and I had to find a movie that a) I related to, b) was based on a true story, and c) had a protagonist who attended my school.

Amazing right? So anyway I looked up Penn's alumni, and stumbled upon some childhood heros of mine: Noam Chomsky, John Legend, and Stephen Glass!

Yeah great opening paragraph and discussion, but I really just wanted to state this coincidence.

This week has probably been the most eventful and potentially cathartic one this year. I say cathartic because exposure to the arts supposedly purges one's soul of negative worldly emotions and bestows upon one an immediate ecstasy, even if only spiritually. I don't know if I've benefiited in that manner, but I certainly have been absorbed into an effortless trance when understanding the works of art.

On thursday morning I wandered round Cathay, a very puzzling building, though I quite liked the quirky, indie-style tenants in there. More importantly, I watched what is probably one of my favouritest movies EVER, The Black Book.

 

 

On friday night I went to the Singapore Art Museum to catch a screening of esteemed Franco-Swiss director Jean Luc Godard, done by Alain Fleischer. The documentary certainly exalted Godard's enterprise to a very inaccessible art. When he talked about his thoughts, when his contemporaries discussed poltiics and cinema and history, when members of his round-table discussions broached questions, it basically seemed that no one could ever be on that same wavelength. So that documentary was quite demoralizing for a while, and it made me feel superbly shallow. But I was very much comforted when I discovered that one of Godard's films, Breathless, was the very movie that got me hooked on European films in the first place! Yes, I remember that evening after the last paper of my first Common Test in J1, I went to the NLB and picked the DVD because it just so happened to pique my interest. Anyway, though it wasn't my first French film (that was Wasabi, followed by The Spanish Apartment), it carried certain properties that were so different from the movies that I was accustomed to at that time. The free-spirited relationships, the emphasis on everyday conversation (with the camera following the characters down the street, a la Before Sunset), the realism that the people had in their lives as they made important decisions in a bedroom as the man dresses up and smokes and cigar and the woman in her underwear throws a pillor at him, but careless ones while negotiating with someone holding a gun - yeah my intro to Euro convention.

 

 

On Sunday morning I spent 2 hours in the Asian Civilizations Museum, skimming through the West Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia exhibits and spending a hour in the new Viet Nam exhibit, YOU know, the product of a collaboration with the National Museum of Vietnam to mark the 35th anniversary of strong ties between our two countries.

 

 

After that I watched Comrade Don Camillo at the Arts House. I think Giovanni Guareschi is pure genius! Really, more genius that other people befitting of a "sheer genius" commendation. To create characters like that amidst the political landscape of that time, and to imbue them with such caricatured and stereotypical traits that manifest SO COMICALLY, and to think of such outlandish events but connect them in a very understandable storyline.. like seriously, I wish I was able to watch the other four Don Camillo movies.

 

 

And then after that I went for Sotong Fest, a gathering for all incoming freshmen at UPenn, which lasted from 6.30pm to 11.30pm. Solid. I think, I'm gonna be fine there :)

So I am currently amidst the herculean task of packing and spring-cleaning my room. It's the 2 weeks in the year when I have unbridled authority to be as messy as I need to. Mum doesn't complain because she's pleased that I'm re-organizing my most nuclear environment, and by extension, or so she thinks, my primary mindsets. Well, who can blame her? Every year before I pack my room, I run my ideas by her, coupled with the reasons why I intend to do it up in a certain manner, like which objects I need most immediate access to and which objects I would like to see more of. Also, she's sometimes pleased that I change my methods of say, stacking books, because it shows my increasing sensitivity towards practicality.

But really, I pack my room because I get sick or getting bruised by the table corner everytime I squeeze into the gap between it and the shelf for a dictionary or empty notebook. I pack my room because I get sick of looking at things I never use or read or even appreciate.

This year however, the theme is not so much planning around my use of things. It's more about how to keep things contained as much as possible, and how to organize them as simple and idiot-proof as possible. This is because I'll be leaving for college for the next few years, coming back for 3 months each year, and I don't want my things being dust-magnets, or being packed in too complicated a manner lest I forget where I put my things.

So, the chaos that is my room:

 

That was a few days ago. Today, it looks like this:

5 gold stars if you can spot the differences.

6 years of school work, all cleared out:(everything except the balustrade and black shelf of World Book encyclopaedia came from my room)

Also, the piles of clothes that I've set aside to pack for uni:

 

 

 

This is the mundane post. My next post about my room will be slightly perkier, and more... topical.

Someone explain to me why I've gotten so interested in diaper bags lately. Everytime I see one with a pretty print, I think, that has gotta be the one for me! I have a million and one things to do and books to read, yet I'm hooked on Etsy surfing for diaper bags. I've picked out some which I like, I hope mum agrees to buy them for me.

I wouldn't like to pigeonhole myself and call me a Bohemian, because I pretty much still adhere to my clean-cut, monochromatic dress sense. What I do appreciate, however, is a good work of art. And diaper bags seem to provide ample surface area for all these independent artists to really spread their creative wings in designing prints and patterns, and I love what they've done.

Some I've picked out:

• http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=12404335
• http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=1020&order=&section_id=&page=1
• http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=74196

While I'm on Etsy, I better look for colorful crochet throw rugs for my dour carpeted Gregory room, and for my white-washed brick wall too.