Did they not say it would be bliss?

Come let me betray to you and everyone else my total and utter ignorance of the Income Tax Act.

*puts head in hands in despair*

I can still remember bits of Hamlet - how long has it been, 7 years now? - but I'm damned if I can remember tax law. Do you ever get the feeling that we have had, in every sense of the word, a magnificent education in futility?

If so, unwind me

"A man once showed a so-called indestructible watch to Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker at Tony's. They whammed it against a table top, then put it on the floor and stamped on it. The dismayed owner picked it up and put it to his ear. "It has stopped," he said incredulously. "Maybe you wound it too tight," said Benchley and Parker together.

"Maybe I wound myself too tight. If so, unwind me."

That's taken from Thurber and entirely out of context. I'm re-reading his selected letters, which Minz gave me (or I stole it, like all the other books I stole from her - darling, I still have your Borges, do you want it with you?) and am almost inspired enough to put pen to paper. Almost. But write me and I'll write back.

In search of lost karma

After mussels and fries and a grand bitching session at Oosters tonight it's time for some redemptive action to prevent rebirth as a cockroach. I'm declaring a moratorium on bitching, whining, and all other forms of complaining. Which will leave me with very little to write about - but have done already. I go.

(For the record)

Saturday evening/night came with Leslie Low of The Observatory at the Esplanade Recital Studio, which I rather enjoyed, whatever cp thinks about void deck poems (not that he mentioned void decks - give the man some credit) and after that Aural Defect doing something post-rock (that's a genre? Well I suppose we are living in a post-modern post-structural post-materialist world. And in a recentish Economist it said that Britain was a post-Christian society.) and in mixed media. Which was pretty good except that I can't concentrate for long on anything that doesn't have words. And then drinks at the Arts House and later satay under the flyover, and all after the Malaysian budget in the morning and the office D&D and subsequent drunken binge at Velvet (drunken for me, anyway, because I have no alcohol tolerance to speak of) the night before.

Room with a view

Minzhi's now in Harvard (I can't say Cambridge - makes me think you're in England) and in a room most felicitously positioned to see naked men going to the bathroom in the morning. Best of luck, darling - with school, I mean. And the naked men.

Word of the Day

My brother found this on dictionary.com:

Grok: To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.

Comes from Robert A. Heinlein's novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", where it is a Martian word meaning literally "to drink" and metaphorically "to be one with".

Was dictionary.com's word of the day on 15 July 1999.

Isn't that fantastic?