3 posts tagged “university of pennsylvania”

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!

 

 

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.