Nourishment

On a Hay Dairies ad at a bus-stop: Goats' milk is more nutritious than cows' milk because what matters "is not what you swallow, but what you digest".

The thing about Singapore Idol

and the ones who can't sing:

(1) Why don't their friends stop them? and

(2) Especially the ones who go away sweetly and sadly - at least they're out there, and they're trying, and on national television. From where I stand, that must count for something.

Farm visits today!

First to Farmart, which is a kind of permanent farmers' market. Some of us bought quails' eggs; WN bought a pack (brace?) of quails. We weren't there at the right time, but on Sundays at about 1 pm the shop sells fried quail. Cab to Hay Dairies, a goat farm - the signboards at the farm said it used to be a pig farm, but converted to a goat farm with the help of the AVA (then PPD) when pig farms were phased out. Back in its pig farm days, it kept chickens and "a crocodile to dispose of chickens". Some very sweet baby goats, and some distinctly less sweet adult goats. The farm keeps different breeds of goats and has helpful signboards to elucidate on the distinctive characteristics of each breed: one tended to be high-strung, another tended to emit a distinctive complaining sound. There was one huge, hairy brute whose horn stumps glowed purple. Full of kids (of the human variety) offering the goats little plastic bags of hay. Then a trek to Bollywood Veggies (Ivy Singh-Lim's farm) and a wander into Green Circle, quite by accident. Green Circle is an organic vegetable farm, and would appeal to all the hippie yoghurt-loving tree-hugging East-Village-health-food people. We only stopped at Bollywood Veggies for lunch. Very yuppie - think of what a farm-themed restaurant would look like, and there you have it.

birthday greetings

Thank you, loves. Hot Russian sailors to you too, Fay. Mid twenties, late twenties; as JY said, at some point (quite soon), this will be a moot point and we will be indisputably in our late twenties.

My parents got me a fountain pen; my mother said that they figured that since I liked banging away on the old typewriter, I'd like a fountain pen. I am progressing backwards in technology.

flowers

To say that the orchids are opening up and my mom plucked away all the pollen - sacs? - from the lilies and I've converted my hookah into a vase for the ones which look like sunflowers but are not.

(To say, thank you.)

how Singapore prepares you for China

Daniel Bell on teaching political philosophy in Beijing. I didn't know he taught in NUS in the 1990s.

so

Steve is doing a visual arts/poem thing at the central library basement Thursday evening (7pm to 8.30 pm). There'll be words, and moving pictures, and music with rocks in it (probably). (This is the subtext time slot, but obviously something else and more fun.) Come by if you're in the neighbourhood.

I like this Edna St Vincent Millay

Since we were talking about sonnets. I'm sorry darling; I've got it straight now: Milton - epics; Shakespeare - sonnets (and never mind the plays?).


Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

In vaguely chronological but really no particular order

(1) Paul Theroux (at the NLB last Thursday) said that to be a writer, one must do two things: (i) leave home, and (ii) tell the truth.

You don't find it gets harder to tell truth to power in this line of work?

(2) Steve gave me a bar of green soap to carve.

(3) Wonderful dinner at J's place on Saturnight - we had roast lamb and poulet con leche and roast potatoes with onions and garlic and chipolatas and potato pancakes and corn muffins and spaghetti coated with butter and cheese and cream and a hint of lemon, and then molten chocolate babycakes (molten baby chocolate cakes? which is it which is tiny?) and pumpkin pie for dessert. All the major food groups: potato, meat and chocolate.

(4) My dad tells me that Low Thia Khiang spoke the purest teochew at the Hougang rally last night. Political rallies: does one vote as if for a local election (and may the best man win) or a national election (where - presumably - other considerations come in)?

(5) I appear to have been cross and out of joint for some two and a half years now.

(6) J lent me Richard Powers' Time of our Singing, which I really will read. Everyone seems to love Richard Powers (with the exception of jy, who doesn't read things that other people read on principle) and I have tried to read Galatea (can't spell it) but couldn't get past the first few chapters.

(7) I'm really not made for this job. Every time we're at the negotiating table I feel I'd rather be on the other side - rather be on the side of advocacy and passion than common sense and fiscal prudence. Better to sell a dream than to cut it down to size.

Nonetheless. The job that's in front of you, right?

(8) So was it Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or Jane Eyre?