STUFF WE DID

A thing that I'm getting used to while I'm here, is how comfortable some people can be about themselves, by themselves. They text when they want to text, they don't text if they don't want to text. They say what they really mean, and mean what they say. I think it's a little bit of a culture shock. I don't know if it's particularly my gender or Malay-Muslim community or the fact that I was in fact a woman and grew up in the Malay-Muslim community, but I suppose a lot of my identity in Singapore had to do with how I relate to others, how good of a friend I am, how much of a big sister I can be to my younger peers at work, how I interact with my family members. A lot of who I am hinges upon what I can be or do in service of other people. It is the first time I am living on my own, properly and for the long-term, and I have all the freedom in the world, within reasonable boundaries. I would like to explore the sliding-scale of my personality, and find out who I am, and how much of who I am is what I thought other people wanted me to be. I have spoken to Joey more and more, and I think he is trying to make me have some sense of the person he really is, so I don't live in my head or portray an ideal of him in my head. In a way, I've always known the person he really is, of course, I just didn't want to contend with it. However, I find that this might work just as well, if I'm to really find peace and move along. I've been playing catch-up on my schoolwork, I think it's going as well as can be hoped for. I don't have much to say about school, I feel like it takes up a lot of my brain juice so I don't have much energy to think about anything else. DnD has been fun, I am at the babiest of steps of creating my character, and I have about 99% more information to absorb about the entire realm, so that's yet another information overload I'm constantly engaging in. MJ gave me some very significant advice yesterday, and I do hope that if a romance unfolds here, it will be like the one I had with him at work (not that it was a romance), but I hope it's a dynamic in which I make a friend, and we grow to know and trust each other, and I hope if I fall for the person here, they fall back for me. I miss MJ, he's so much more mature than he portrays himself to be. 

RAVEN

In Love and Friendship this morning, we further discussed Plato’s Symposium. Diotima says love should be a love in the abstract, a general love for the general, whereas Alcibiades makes it very, very personal and asserts that for love to be love, there must be one particular object to direct your love to. In it, there is a speech made by Alcibiades, he proclaims his love for Socrates and it is a speech I very much identify with. There is a kind of desperation to his tangent, I like the speech very much, as I can be relied on to admire most ideals of love. I think the kind of love I know how to do is the kind that feels both possible and impossible at the same time, the kind that makes you feel there’s no love that’s not laced with hate. Contrary to what people may believe or want to believe about me, there are far fewer people I love and care for, than the ones that I do. It takes me a lot to actually love someone, I think, of course there are prerequisites that must be fulfilled, the foundational level has to be ticked, before you go up another level, and then another, and then eventually, you reach the point of love. I find that I have been compartmentalising much more than I thought I was, there is an entire box of things, in my brain, that exists without my contributing to it. It’s a box with wardrobes and shelves, it knows without ever expressing: the RX8 is his car, this is the model of bike he rides, that’s the truck, these are the Vans he wore, that’s what he drinks as a meal replacement, what series did we watch together way back when, what school did they do their Master’s at, what colors does he mix up from color blindness, this is how he laughs, that’s the kind of joke I already expect him to make, he likes dulce de leche ice cream, this is what he can benchpress, what time and what day will he respond, what product does he use in his hair, how do I make his bed because I’ve never had a flat sheet for mine, who am I thinking about when it comes right down to it? Who is it? It infuriates me because I keep this box pretty well-sealed but somehow it seeps through and the feelings I get from it are stronger, they are more vivid by the time they reach my senses, they make me question everything and nothing — and I, I am currently a scholar of at least one philosophy module but the more I learn, the more I learn that I don’t know anything.

VETTEL TAKES A STROLL

I feel like this week is the week that has made me feel like this is now my real life. It has been such a week, and it’s only Thursday. I wore the wrong top to school yesterday, and it was suddenly windy when I walked home, so I was pretty sure I was going to get hypothermia. I’ve begun to feel the little inklings of stress that comes with being in school. The worry from the night before an assignment is due: should I stay up now to complete it or will I be able to work better if I sleep and do it early in the morning? Will I wake up in time to do my assignment or will I miss my alarm? Yesterday when I got home I was completely out of energy from the cold (and from my nine hours in school) and I was too lazy to cook, so I heated up a can of soup, soup that probably had minimal amounts of nutrition and also tasted terrible. My only respite was Money Heist. When I watch Money Heist I feel like the Spanish in my brain that I learned from Duolingo, it comes alive, but then I go out into real life, and I forget everything. Yesterday I was outside a classroom where I could hear a level 100 class of Spanish being held. It was cute. Two years from now a handful of them will only be able to order off a Spanish menu and that will be pretty much it. That’s as conversational as it gets.

IN MY HEADI DO EVERYTHING RIGHT

I found out why I was having such fever dreams and almost texted Joey. Almost, but I did not. Sarah 1 - 0 hormones. I got my period, obviously. I wonder if other girls get this damn horny in the build-up to their periods. Why doesn't anyone ever talk about such things? I find it strange. I find a lot of things strange, but I do find this strange as well. Like, it's a natural mechanism for the human body to feel hungry, and it's okay for me to say I'm hungry three times a day, and say I'm craving Mexican food. And then my body tells me to jump someone's bones, because it's in heat, and suddenly it's taboo to say. Why? Who set the damn rules? The Bible? The Quran? HAHAHA. 

I had my first day of school yesterday. It was so long, both my 3-hour classes actually went on for 3 hours each, so I had six straight hours of classes. I do not understand why my schedule is so heavy on only one day, but I think when I accepted it it was because I'd planned to work on my free days, which is still supposed to happen. I had my first lecture for a liberal studies mod, it's called Love and Friendship, which sounds like ridiculous bullshit, but I enjoyed it so very much.

It's basically a course where we parse texts ranging from thousands of years to decades ago, we're reading the likes of Plato and Goethe and Sophocles, and we're taking everything that was said in those texts, about love and friendship. We do also discuss some rather more contemporary influences, like Virginia Woolf and MLK, Jr. Both the co-lecturers are so, so engaging and funny and entertaining (one of them broke out into song and dance, and I swear I fell in love with her, but no, I can't - because power dynamics in a school). 

We were talking about love in two of its Greek forms, erōs and philia. Plato describes each human as having been a full four-legged creature and so when we were split into two, we all have a yearning for our other half, through ages and ages, looking for them. I'm going to tell you exactly what went through my head as this was being said in the lecture. I thought of Joey. Listen, I don't know how my brain works, I don't know how anything works, but Joey was the person who scratched Taylor's Love Story for me when we first met five years ago, and in case you just met me, Taylor Swift is my favorite artist of all time. My only frame of reference is my entire life of experiences, so yeah. I don't quite have a fair chance of asking my brain to jump to anyone or anything else, immediately, when such incidents are discussed. 

Anyhow, I also had my first Feminisms and Genders (they are two different modules) seminars yesterday, those are the classes that stretched across six hours. My professor is the head of the department and she's rad. I love her too, she's head (and creator) of the committee to deconstruct the syllabus and make everything anti-racist. She's very respectful of the lands we live on, and she taught us to say the Native names of the territory and its people. I said when I started school I wanted to go by Sarah Mei, and true enough, in my Feminisms seminar, we have three Sarahs (fuck me I TOLD YOU it's the most common name), so she immediately picked me out as Sarah Mei. 

This semester's going to be super great. I can tell I'm going to enjoy my classes phenomenally. I definitely need to have a coffee to start off every Wednesday though.  

CHRISTA MCAULIFFE

Okay so, tomorrow is my first official day of school. It’s a Wednesday and Wednesdays are my longest days. I have three classes from 8.30am all the way to 5.30pm. The good thing is there’s a Starbucks in the building of my first class, and as a planner, I’ve planned my day to include a Starbucks drink, if I’m feeling a little decadent. Otherwise, I’ll just drink whatever I have at home. As a planner, I’ve also planned many other ridiculous things in life. I’ve planned what to go as for Halloween (that’s like seven weeks away). Here is what’s ridiculous about it: it’s a couples outfit, and I have no romantic partner. I’m nailing this planning thing. I’ve also planned a trip to Mérida, Mexico! That’s where Samin Nosrat went to in the Netflix episode so I figure I can find really good food there. I already found out how much the return tickets will be. Not quite dirt cheap, but not exactly expensive. It’s not gonna be out of my pocket, anyhow, so I might as well travel while it’s still valid. I’m just gonna settle in to school, get used to my workload, and then I’ll book it. Perhaps in November or December, when it’s cold here and I want a week of sun. Perhaps, if my schoolwork allows it. Can you tell I’m nervous about school? Because I am. My schoolmates are all a literal decade younger than I am, what are they going to talk about??? Animal Crossing? TikTok? Oh my God I’m ancient.

MELIPONA

I applied to join two different student clubs in school. I'm not sure if I'll be accepted, I don't know how they work here, but both are activities I've never really dabbled in, so I'll be in the deep end of the pool. I do know I'd love to learn all about how each different aspect of life works, it would be cool to grow in territories I've never stepped on, so we'll see. I just finished watching an episode of Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat, I have one more episode left (the Heat episode). The Netflix series basically explains how each of the four factors plays a part in cooking, and so I've bought the cookbook to use in my future kitchen adventures. I've been cooking a lot since I got here. Mostly because it's cheaper to cook, but also because I enjoy cooking. I didn't used to cook as much because it was my grandma's domain, she shows her love for us through her cooking and her food is really good, anyhow, so there was no need for me to step into the kitchen. I did enjoy it, though, there were a few recipes I would always make that my friends loved to eat, and my mom knew I liked to cook, so she got me an apron that I brought along to wear when I cook here. I'm looking forward to using the Salt Fat Acid Heat cookbook because I've really liked how she's approached it almost as a science, I've never seen a cooking show that worked like hers. The reviews for the cookbook are stellar too. In the Acid episode on Netflix, she went to a village in Mexico where the residents bring their little cornflour/masa to the community mill to make their tortillas, and it's so adorable. I love the idea of communal living and facilities. Everything they made in the Acid episode looked amazing, from the tikin xic to all the different salsas with habanero and without, to the pavlova (looked! stunning!). There's a little Mexican restaurant a block away from our place, that looks super good, it's always packed, and I think the owners/chefs might be actually Mexican. They have horchata! I saw the menu but I haven't eaten there yet. I love Mexican food, but in Singapore, we don't have Mexican food like they do in this part of the world. Don't get me wrong, the Mexican restaurants in Singapore serve great food, but it's not like when I was in LA where I got to visit small shops making their own tortillas instead of using machine-made ones. Plus, you can't find horchata in Singapore. I wanna see Mexico sometime. Y'all know I won that flight credit from the TripAdvisor writing contest thing (I must have mentioned when I won it), and I used some of it on the way here, so I've got like $10k left to use. I'm guessing flying to Mexico from here wouldn't take up too much money. The only thing I need is for the pandemic thing to settle, I think I can travel out of and back into Canada, if I test negative for the virus, I know I was exempt from quarantine because of my vaccination status, but I don't know. I don't wanna take my chances, and the damn PCR test is invasive as heck. It feels like when you accidentally swallow a gulp of water when you're swimming, but instead of water, it's.... a solid stick. Bluergh.