Move away from the icing

Spent the night hanging out in Su-Lin's room watching Sex in the City and eating cookies and playing bridge (though not all three at once because men are incapable of multi-tasking) and it was one of the best nights I've had in a while. It's been a while since we spent time just lazing and playing bridge, hasn't it?

home

and laden with duty-free alcohol. I've wine and Hoegaarden and Bombay Sapphire (just for you, Choon). Shall we make martinis?

We are made of such stuff

16 May: Water slides! A 68 degree water slide called the Leap of Faith at the Mayan Temple in the Lost City of Atlantis - this is Disney meets Underwater World, now in salmon pink.

(And there were meetings and stuff, more of that later. The water slides were the important bit. And the sea water pools with star fish and sting rays and baby sharks!)

17 May: woke up at 6 and went down to beach. Gorgeous blue-green waters and white sand, just like the postcards. No living creature in sight but a couple of gulls and a dog at what looked like a cairn of stones. Walked along the shoreline listening to the waves.

17 May, later: There was a bride posing in the lobby of the Venetian. The Venetian looks...well, Venetian. There's a copy of St Mark's Square (and oh, darlings, a MASSIVE Sephora. SMS me if you want anything) and a canal and gondola rides and of course a massive casino with cars atop some of the jackpot machines (so they can just jump up and give you the car if you win, I guess?) and trompe l'oeil on the walls and frescoes on the ceiling - not exactly the Sistine Chapel, but overwhelming nonetheless. Went for a walk on the strip - could see the strip from the airplane, and the beam of light from the pyramid that is the Luxor - the Duke's Palace (is that what it is? the one on the real St Mark's Square) next to a volcanic island (apparently complete with erupting volcano) and ahead there was Caesar's Palace with the Colosseum and Roman Forum and the Pantheon, all brought together for your convenience. And there are the smaller seedier slot machine parlours and all-you-can-eat buffets and Latino men standing on the street handing out soft porn (the Police guy with us collected them solemnly. Appendix A of my report, he said).

Truly fantastic, in the old sense of the word. It transcends kitsch. And terribly addictive - music on the streets the whole time through and everyone in party clothes (though the people are mostly pretty tacky - old retirees with permed hair (men and women) sitting rather grimly at the slot machines and lots of cute young couples holding beer bottles and more fat Americans in strangely Hawaiian gear) and all the lights from the casino and of course the single beam from the Luxor. This is the American candy-floss version of the world.

All the same, I think I'd rather create my own fantasy.

What time is it now?

15 May, 4 pm: flight from Singapore to LAX (16 hours)
Transit at LAX (5ish hours)
Flight from LAX to Miami (4 - 5 hours)
Transit at Miami (3 - 4 hours)
Wait in Miami because have missed flight (1/2 hour)
Flight from Miami to Nassau, the Bahamas (1ish hour)
Wait in Nassau for luggage (2 hours)
Drive from Nassau to Atlantis Resort, Paradise Island (1/2 hour)
Reach Atlantis at on 16 May, 12 pm, local time.

Leave Atlantis on 17 May, 3 pm.
Drive from Atlantis to Nassau (1/2 hour)
Flight from Nassau to Miami, fortunately taking right flight (1ish hour)
Transit in Miami (2 - 3 hours)
Flight from Miami to Las Vegas (5ish hours)
Time spent talking to random Argentinian man on flight (1/6 hour (You live in Las Vegas? - No, Singapore. - Oh you are here on vacation? - Er sort of. - You come from Miami? - No, the Bahamas. - I am in Miami two days, on vacation. It is very nice. - I wasn't actually there but, er, yes?)
Drive from Las Vegas airport to the Venetian (1/2 hour)
Time spent gawking in Venetian lobby (1/2 hour)
Reach the Venetian on 17 May, 11 pm, local time.

Time left to sleep until breakfast/meeting tomorrow (about 2 hours).

Possessions

I have: a ticket, laptop, credit card, passport, and a suit in my, uh, suitcase. That's it, right? Do I need anything else? Anybody want anything from Vegas?

boo

Alright my loves; I am finally going; whatever I've forgotten will just have to stay forgotten. I'll have my laptop along (of course), so write to me and I'll, um, tell you about all the meetings I had to take notes for. See you in a week.

Still not packed

But oh I got the sweetest email from Tomoko saying, yes Tokyo may legalise gambling soon, so you might come to Tokyo more often?

Heh.

[Though there is a limit to the number of gambling study trips I can possibly take. Yes really.]

HELP

I just locked myself out of my room! And it's 1.30 a.m. and I HAVEN'T packed for tomorrow's flight (well of course I haven't packed) and I don't even know what to pack. God I'm so intelligent aren't I? Can't find the keys to the room - should I wake my parents up - or just wait till the morning?

Another belated reply

From Julian:

Remember this bit in History of the World?

“’We must love one another or die,’ wrote W.H. Auden, bringing from E.M. Forster the declaration: ‘Because he once wrote “We must love one another or die,” he can command me to follow him’. Auden, however, was dissatisfied with this famous line from ‘September 1, 1939’. That’s a damned lie!” he commented. ‘We must die anyway.’ So when reprinting the poem he altered the line to the more logical ‘We must love one another and die.’ Later he suppressed it altogether.

I'm sure Julian Barnes is right, but I always thought it was the other way round, that Auden originally wrote, "We must love one another and die", and then changed it to "We must love one another or die" because that's more conventional. There's a strange comfort in "We must love one another and die" - well yes of course everyone dies (there's a scene in one of the Pratchetts, isn't there, where someone asks the History Monks if they've ever seen a dying man and there's a short pause and then they say, umm yes isn't everyone?) - but the necessity of death is matched by the necessity of love - at least we do have to love one another as well. And because Auden once wrote "We must love one another and die" he can command me.

[I don't know if I should link the original blog entry - guess I'll leave it as is? if you know Julian, and you probably do, then you know the link.]

Geland

Congratulations on your graduation! (Belatedly.)

Er do you read this? Someone tell him. :)

I'd have said it on your blog, but it wasn't the right entry for exclamation marks and smiley faces.

by the light of all my burning bridges

The trip dates are: 15 - 22 May (we leave 20 May, reach Singapore 22 May. Bloody time zones). The official dates and my dates as well, since I will tamely return home with the rest of the delegation and not attempt to remain illegitimately in the States.

Feels like I haven't been out for ages. Can we go out when I come back?

(This is, I'm pretty sure, absolutely the wrong thing to do, but for the right reasons. Shouldn't I be feeling good about it, then?)

Salad days

Oh! It's "Eternal Love" on the radio - by PJ and Duncan!

I'm gonna go look for my old Smash Hits. And the CD (ah well). And their autograph!

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- Elizabeth Bishop


Oh for godssake. Exactly what am I doing this for? Two hours offered grudgingly from a weekend? Bugger this for a game of soldiers. (The irritable self asserts itself (sorry), which in some lights may pass for intelligence.)

Like Carrot always says

personal isn't the same as important.

Gambling

It's been a while since I went back to Jeanette Winterson, but isn't there a line (think it's in The Passion) that says what you risk reveals what you value?

Was just going to say that I'm absolutely the wrong person to do this because I don't gamble, but that's not true is it; I will hazard all for some things, just not horses or cards or little shiny pictures on a machine.

So what do you gamble on?

When this is all over

I won't be able to run a casino but I will be able to run Gamblers Anonymous. I'm building up my resume, I am. (MTI gets the glam bits; we get to do research on the no. of people who've killed themselves cos they couldn't find enough money to gamble with. Ah, public service.)

National Gambling Impact Study Commission Report: In Louisiana, one man confessed to robbing and murdering six elderly individuals to feed his problem with gambling on electronic gaming devices [think jackpot machines].

Credit card crime, employee theft, that's all fairly easy to understand, but murder - it seems that something else, something crucial, must have broken down in the man to drive him to actual murder, doesn't it? Besides a gambling addiction, I mean. Or possibly we're all closer to murder than we realise.

Stolen

from Minz (april 13) -

in the new mulisch novel there is a guest conductor who tells of having an off day with the orchestra he is rehearsing, the playing lacklustre and uninspired, but all of a sudden a magical change comes over the orchestra and his musicians begin to play like never before he could hardly believe his ears for the marvellous sound. after a while he senses they are responding to something or some presence other than himself. he turns around, and sees that herbert von karajan had come into the auditorium and was standing in the doorway listening.

the question that mulisch extends to us is: who stands on your threshold?

my trouble, i suppose, is that no one leans in my doorway any longer, but i haven't learnt to perform for myself, and that is not at all a comfortable thing to have to admit.

My trouble is that I still look for for your presence in my doorway.

Talking to WN on the phone yesterday:

Me: Um. So I'm going to be in LA for a few days, maybe. Should I try to - ?
WN: No.
Me: How did you know what I was going to ask?
WN: Do you know how many dimensions you have?
Me: 2? Half?
WN: Fewer.

Bugger.

Observations

1. People are lumpy and misshapen. When you cut out their photos in Photoshop? And you try to capture each strand of hair and follow the line of their sleeve? It takes a good deal of judicious airbrushing before they look like how I fondly imagine real people to look, i.e. non-lumpy and quite shapen.

2. I know the steering wheel tends towards the straight and narrow, if left to itself, but roads don't; they curve just for me.

3. Can we start a campaign against jaywalkers? And a traffic light awareness campaign?

Mother's Day

My brother is on the floor drawing the parts of a heart on a shiny blue heart he cut out himself, because my mom's a biology teacher and my brother...is a boy.

Still. Isn't he sweet?

13 - Mission statement

Let us honour if we can
The vertical man,
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

- Auden

Incidentally, the James Fenton lecture on Auden from which most of this is taken can be found here.