I really shouldn't be so amused by essay research

But apparently when I am dopey then delinquents become elephants. The Qur'an does not, in fact, have a verse saying: "Fear God and listen to Him, verily God does not guide the elephant." (not Q4:111, from Tahir Mahmood's Law in the Qur'an--A Draft Code)

Under the heading "Publisher's Note" in Fazlur Rahman's Islam:

"In dating, Muslims naturally used their own era, dating from the Hijra or fight of the Prophet Muhammad to Medina in 622 AD, sometimes called Anno Hegirae."

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As much as I'm enjoying the readings and arguments for my essay, this morning when I woke up I was scared: the prospect of not having enough time to write a satisfying essay can be paralysing. But thank God that He animates people and drives out self-reinforcing fear with His perfect love.

On another note, I need to start cooking interesting food again. I've been having nice food when I eat out with friends -- yesterday was lunch at this cute French restaurant which, in the words of the cousin who treated me, "didn't have posh prices"; then after a talk with Jomo a bunch of us (roughly) ten Malaysians, two Singaporeans and one Brit) had dinner at an Indian place.

But I haven't been bothering to plan my marketing etc, so I've been eating boring stir-frys and other stop-gap meals that don't make me feel particularly happy. And during these last two weeks, amid work and and farewell conversations, I do want happy food. Marinated baked meat, here I come! :D

Let's pretend I decided to update my Facebook status last week

hearts Tom Stoppard.

now owns a hairbrush after a three-year hiatus.

just ran into three different people whom she hadn't seen in a long time!

was really happy about the sun and breeze this afternoon.

loves being in the same city as cousins on both sides of the family.

needs to remember more often that Skype exists! Yay for traversing time zones. :)

realises that she's barely been wearning heels this term.

thinks Sainsbury's cookies > Waitrose cookies.

smells of frying onions.

is unnerved by how much she enjoys writing her public international law essay.

wishes she could be faster at writing her essay.

is slightly jealous that her siblings are all living and working in the same place. But she's an ungrateful brat. :(

!! Roman Tragedies at the Barbican = 6 hours of Dutch amazingness!!

finally reconciled herself to the idea of skipping a lecture to work on an essay for that class, then later realised her essay was going decently so she ran to lecture and was five minutes late.

!! Les Mis !!

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I typed the above into Notepad last week when I was in the throes of an essay and didn't want to properly blog or go on Facebook or anything. O compromises. :)

But now the essay's done, and of course I should be in bed, but I would be sad if I didn't journal about the two !!!! performances while they're still fresh. (So this'll be another long post for documentation rather than readability.)

It's been a good week for friends, by which I mean "for having friends keen on spending time with me" since I am selfish. But I got to see different cousins a bunch of times, skyped with my siblings plus several different groups of Williams people, attended a lovely Christian Union dinner/dialogue, had engaging dinner conversation with a Malaysian bunch here, spent three hours chatting to the boyfriend (whom I had just met) of a Williams friend (currently in Williamstown), and had two good friends (one from eons ago, one quite new) stay over with me from Mon-this afternoon. Yay people. Boo me for being silly and indulging in loneliness once they leave and I'm alone.

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Events log

Thursday afternoon: Went for a lunchtime concert at St Pancras Parish Church. I'd always wanted to go for one since the building's between hall and school, so my cousin and I caught the British Library and British Museum Singers performing excerpts from Mendelssohn. They were really good for an non-professional choir -- there was a duet I particularly liked, and the guy who sang Obadiah had a marvelous voice. After that we ventured into the church's Crypt Gallery, which was marvelous and just like what you'd expect an early-18th century crypt to be like, except that it was full of photos by two artists instead of bodies.

Sunday evening: So earlier in the term when I was stalking websites for student theatre deals, I got two free tickets (instead of 27.50 each) for Roman Tragedies at the Barbican. And then later on I realised it was six hours long. And in Dutch. And that my work was piling up, and that it would be hard to persuade someone to go with me.

But I did -- this very nice fresher from the CU who likes theatre said he'd take the other ticket. So I had no choice but to go. And !!!!

By which I mean, the first thing I noticed when I got into the theatre were the two huge percussion stations on either side of the stage, right at the front -- not the pit. And then I got confused because I looked up to the set and saw a lot of different tableaus of couches and platforms and TV screens, but since the furniture and platforms were all the same boxy grey, for a second I thought there was a huge mirror across the back of the stage (partly because I'd just just finished reading this dizzying superb Stoppard).

So the way it worked is that the actors staged different scenes on different parts of the stage, and a video feed of the speakers would show up on the screens with subtitles across it. The insane part was that the audience was also invited to sit on the couches on the stage. During the few-minute scene changes every 45 minutes or so, we could also use the internet, read the paper, or buy food or drinks from the tables set up at one side of the stage. The tables on the other side had the video control, hair and makeup stations -- they were prepping Cleopatra while Portia was soliloquizing in the centre. It was bizarre. It was brilliant.

So the deal was that either you could choose to sit in the audience and get a good generic view in the traditional proscenium arch fashion. Or you could sit onstage, and cluster around a TV with some people, trying to read subtitles while: craning your neck around to see whether you could get a view of Anthony's expressions and not just his back, or wishing that that plant or tall dude weren't blocking your view of the live action, or trying not to grin because the tribunes were sitting right next to you and you were probably showing up on screen too.

It was an flat-out stunning representation of modern media schizophrenia (whoa I actually spelled that right, or Blogger is spoilt) and the thrill and risk of picking your own vantage point and everything. In addition to very visible (and amazing!) percussionists and hair/make-up folk, they put one videographer at the front and at some points had her be annoying paparazzi(o? I don't know how to conjugate for the feminine); at another point she had to chase the repentant Enobarbus who ran out of the theatre complex to the road, where he fell to his knees in despair and began denouncing himself in Dutch in front of innocent pedestrians. And at every death they had the actor sprawl in the centre of the stage between two glass walls, and they projected huge images of the body on the screens: which jolted me the first time, because of the resemblance between Coriolanus' pose and Malaysiakini's image of Teoh Beng Hock.

And the acting! The acting. I've seen each of these plays at least once (Coriolanus: Shakespeare's Globe, London; Caesar: Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, and visiting company at Williams; A&C: RSC also; whyy am I so unnervingly lucky (and whiny) (gah)) and the magnificent interpretation and actors at the Barbican trumped all of those. Really. It didn't feel like six hours -- it could've gone on for six more and I'd still have been happy. And devastated and elated. Shakespeare <3.

NB: A few observations about Julius Caesar, since it's the one that I read a million times for S Paper way back when. So sometimes I just forgot about the subtitles and watched the actors.

1. The director spliced the Brutus/Portia and Caesar/Calphurnia confrontations as well as the war pow-wows of opposing sides, so they ran concurrently on stage and ahh were so good!

2. They didn't have a Lucius -- Brutus (and Portia, briefly) just said both his lines and his servant's alternately, in a wonderful Golum-like embodiment of Brutus the 'liberator' being a slave in his own head too. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

3. Cassius was played by a woman -- loved that so much (although I kept remembering the insinuations that my friends in RJ used to make about Brutus/Cassius hurhur)! Octavius was also a woman, young and reserved and with very pale blonde hair = this spectacular sense of power/weakness/distance/promise.

4. Anthony had a broken foot and was in sweatpants plus wheelchair/crutches throughout, which must have sucked for him but fit so amazingly with the diminishing runner/playboy idea.

Ahh there were more elements that I wanted to keep thinking about, but I've already forgotten, partly because of ...

Tuesday night: Les Mis!! For 20 quid apiece the five of us were in the second row from the back, but it was still glorious (and from our angle we could see all the "bodies" slinking offstage once they were hidden from most peoples' view). The songs were incredible, whether in terms of composition or delivery -- I was most blown away by Eponine, whose voice was so rich and whose presentation so compelling that I teared (ie became teary, not torn, but that too) (it was rare because I almost never cry for fiction/art, although the tear ducts can be randomly generous at other times, like during the Remembrance Sunday service in Cambridge while I was thinking about my US Marines cousin, deployed to God knows where).

I think that digression was partly because I know that anything I say about Les Mis has been said far better by tonnes of other people, but darn that was another digression. Yes. The revolving stage has got to be one of the most astute devices I've ever seen (although I confess I almost got dizzy at one point I am a wimp), both for set changes or showing the passage of time. Adored the lighting too (except for the slightly overdone spotlight when women died). And that cast covered such a range of registers, whether in pitch or emotion or humour or whatever, and did it so naturally.

I'm not particularly inclined to musicals -- I find the pace jarring because of how the "crowding and leaping"* centres on songs rather than developments, and musicals are a genre given to spectacle rather than subtlety -- but last night I was entranced. Even with Marius' stricken-heart-at-first-sight resemblance to that terrible James Blunt "You're Beautiful" song, the gorgeously dense storyline reeled me right in. I loved how melodies would appear and disappear and reemerge with so much fresh dimension layered on each time. I loved the moments where different players interweave different songs. I loved the bleak hope.

And I don't know how to end this, since I can't convey even a shadow of how good Roman Tragedies and Les Mis were, but it is most definitely bedtime, so I will say thank You (and you, ie whichever weirdo who may actually be reading this :D) and good night.

*Ursula LeGuin's phrase, from Steering the Craft

Dead language

aka Facebook does a Malaysian education system impression: nasty Malay transliterations and bad English grammar. :(

[First Google Translate tab was Arabic-->English; second Google Translate tab was English-->Arabic (took you by surprise, didn't that). (Talk like Yoda, why do I.) And I had Merriam-Webster open becase after all these years it suddenly occurred to me that maybe "benighted" wasn't a snarky comment about the peerage after all.]

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Since I'm already on the topic -- and since I'm in the middle of research for my public international law essay -- I think one thing that expedited my no-law-school decision was an immersion in how lawyers treat language. Scientific jargon flattens connotations (cleavage plane hurhur) (I must have said that on this blog before, but sounding like a fourteen-year-old boy is bad enough so I shall not self-stalk as well); legalese steamrollers words and then fights over the bones. Of course, cases animate the laws and some jurists are truly gorgeous writers, but still.

And today during Islamic law the Nigerian lecturer was talking about a scholar named Imber and I kept having PWNAGE GODLIKE ALL YOUR BASE et al running through my head while we learnt about the closing of the gate of ijtihad and the scope of fatwas. Which was actually not inappropriate since we were talking about inexorable divine law. :)

Ramblings

It's probably not healthy to blog three days in a row, but there've just been so many thoughts that I want to remember. Also, I haven't had long face-to-face conversations since I got back from Sweden -- it's been kitchen chats with my flatmates, intense Skype calls planning for next semester and catching up with some relatives after church (funny how I reserve "family" for the nuclear one) (except Pa went into pastoring and not physics).

Apart from that I've done a lot of walking and picture-taking, which really has been the essence of "reading" week for me. I did get a satisfying amount of work done each of the two days I was in London -- not a substantial amount, but enough to keep discontentment at bay. And more studying will happen this evening.

Today's and yesterday's wanderings covered places that I was supposed to visit with various different people, but the stillness of solitary walks in cities has singular beauty. Also, when I'm with other people then I don't try to take nearly as many photos as I do otherwise, but that's neither a good or bad thing because shutterbug-ness, despite its aesthetic and preservative value, is incredibly self-indulgent.

But if I'd been with someone else as I set out to the Lord Mayor's Show fireworks yesterday, there is no way I'd have dared to wear the only dress that I have with me in London. It was a whim -- why not, you've only worn it at your cousin's wedding here -- and a very satisfying one. Not aesthetically, since I had my coat on all the time anyway, but I always forget how wonderfully comfy dresses can be, and how fun swishy skirts are.

I walked through unfamiliar gorgeous old streets in an exhilarating wind, then when I got to Victoria Embankment it turned out that my suspicions about said exhilarating wind were true: it was making conditions too dangerous for fireworks. But I was happy anyway, because it gave me an excuse to shamble through London after dark -- I adore walking at night but usually people get worried when I do it alone; central London at 5pm was too good to pass up.

So: across Waterloo Bridge, past the National Theatre, through some quaint shops that had some special sale but still were not forthcoming with presents for my family, and then to the majestic smokestack of the Tate Modern. And almost past the Tate, since it was almost 6pm, except that another whim sent me inside to check the closing time: 10pm, unlike the normal museum's 5!

I don't know -- I'm still ambivalent about contemporary art. Some of it I find stunning in different ways: some pieces are achingly beautiful, some pieces have no definable form yet shock me with how compelling they can be, some are stunning because of sheer scale or the controversies they distill, some chilling -- like this installation of four bronze mops with tall, tall handles pointing skyward, heads frozen in a perpetually frenetic swirl, titled "To an unknown god".

Then there is some contemporary art that is grotesque for the sake of being grotesque, a motivation that I have trouble appreciating. And then you also have drivel like this "piece" yesterday that was a mirror on a wall. Just a normal rectangular mirror hung at head height -- no interesting shapes, no distorted reflections -- simply a "daring" piece that upends the idea of "paintings being windows on the world". I wanted to snort and laugh at the same time, which never has good results, especially not in public.

But over all my recent museum visits I've been thinking about my encounters with art. Among a host of other things: I like complexity, I like quietness, I like rawness, I like light meeting darkness, I like colours that do interesting things, I like certain sorts of proportions and balances and not others -- the last being why a lot of modern art doesn't appeal to me, I think. I've also been contemplating the weirdness of how much access I've had to art, whether through glorious secondhand books as a kid, or free classical concerts on campus, or museums that I really shouldn't be able to afford to travel to. (I regard the last five words of that sentence with horrified fascination. o_O) I both resent and relish how bourgeois my aesthetic is becoming.

Moving on, I left the Tate after thoroughly enjoying it (which included, of course, mentally criticizing chunks of it) and decided that I might as well head to Tower Bridge to try to take pretty pictures of it. And so I did -- try, that is. I have no idea how the pictures turned out. But regardless, yay for Tower Bridge at night.

Today after church I'd planned to go to the Barbican to pick up tickets for a play that I'm seeing next week, so I made another might-as-well decision to trawl the East End markets for gifts for my family. And embarrassingly I didn't buy gifts for my family and did pick up a couple things for myself, but it was such a fun romp. I started at the Old Petticoat Lane market, which seems to be the London equivalent of the Factory Outlet Store, but in the guise of Petaling Street.

And then it was the Old Spitalfields Market, which was housed in a surprisingly new and large airy courtyard and which had a tonne of well-crafted (and out of price range) merchandise, including this wonderful foldable and convertible hat (cloche bowler fedora) which a East Malaysian guy tried to sell me for 25 quid. *sigh* and which I thought might be original designs till I saw a handful of them replicated somewhere in the fabulous tangle of Brick Lane markets, which were kindof like Bugis Village (Sg) meets Central Market (KL), but not really. There was a massive indoor market and some back lane markets and some wonderful antique and craft stalls tucked into the corner of a building and people just selling stuff along the road. One seller: "Come buy today before the officials come and confiscate my merchandise." Or something.

After that I took a nice slow dusk walk to the Barbican Centre, and I confess I got a bit nervous on some of the big deserted streets, but I got to the box office without any mishap, only to be told that I could only collect my tickets on the day itself. So that made two days of long walks precipitated by false events, but they were so worth it.

Since the Barbican was on Aldersgate Street, I tried to be a good Methodist and walked down the street trying to find a memorial plaque to John Wesley, but instead found myself unable to resist the Museum of London. Most of it is being renovated for the Olympics, but London up to 1600 is still a brilliant exhibit; I particularly enjoyed the model houses and cities, and there was this striking video of the Black Death which uses several voices and two different sets of images on adjacent screens simultaneously. Then I navigated the area's fantastic network of highwalks, ie almost-streets that are above ground level, till I got to the underground station, and finally took the tube home.

Such stuff

So one of my last thoughts before falling asleep last night was, darn, I meant "disclaimer" and not "caveat" in that blog post. Ugh. During my A Level days in Singapore I'd learnt the perils of going to bed right after concentrated activity, but it's one of the many lessons that I often forget.

Another lesson that I often forget is: saying "I'm not going to blog for [x amount of time] often makes me a liar. Ah well.

But last night I also dreamed that, for some reason, an institution revisited my A Level results and particular secondary school cocurricular activities which I hadn't thought about in eons, and decided to give me a scholarship for grad school. In my dream, the scholarship money was enough to cover fees and expenses for a grad school programme that I would really like to get into. I was happy.

It was somewhat unsettling because I rarely dream about things I'm yearning for, and I rarely feel intense emotion in a dream. Both anomalies had also manifested -- in a more extreme form --- in the dream at the end of my second blog post ever, which I still find acutely embarrassing but which, with the distance of four years (four years!), is more amusing than ever.

Along the lines of nostalgia/dreams/Singapore days/writing, I was recently reread a few of my posts to Phases, an email collective of writers, to whom at least one of the following adjectives could apply: young, Malaysian, Christian. I was active in it from maybe late 2001 till the time it died down around late 2005, and it was far more formative of my confidence about writing publicly than I realised at the time.

When I reread my posts I saw certain turns of phrase and diffident disclaimers that were annoyingly familiar, but what surprised me was how brash I was about posting and requesting C&C ("comments and criticism") at an age where I still got incredibly awkward in certain social situations.

This juncture offers excuse to indulge in whoamIwhathasmadememewhatwillIbeoneday silliness, but I still do want to work hard on Arabic today, so I will instead thank God sincerely for the ridiculous blessings He's given me along the way, and repost one of my Phases pieces about a dream, circa A Levels. I've taken out the names but otherwise left it unedited, so you grammar sheriffs out there can have fun looking for juvenile typos (there's at least one spelling mistake).

I leave the school compound and hurry next door. I don't quite know why I'm rushing, but I press forward anyway, backpack swinging. The long, low emporium houses restaurants, mostly. All the restaurants that I pass are sit-down establishments, so I ignore them. Allowance never goes far, does it?

[Friend A] materializes somewhere in ahead of me. I call her; she heads away; I give chase. There is a large menu displayed on an easel to my left. In my split second glance at it I inexplicably register the price of the fish and chips ($10.12). I wonder why but lose my train of thought when I reach a dead end. Shops surround me. [Friend A] is gone.

I turn around to leave. I cannot remember why I'm here.

When I get back to my room in the hostel I deposit my bag on the floor then go out through the back door. It opens to a common balcony that would be called circular but for a large hole at its centre. No railings either. I turn right and open the door to [Friend B]'s room. A few of my schoolmates are there, but no one seems particularly interested in talking to me. I return to my own room, my unwelcoming room.

Later I leave the hostel for some mundane event at a government building. The toilet there is a large freestanding structure with wooden ceiling beams and a floor of rough, earth-coloured tiles. I enter a stall and am impressed by its size and air circulation; the high roof must do wonders for that.

Outside the toilet I meet two of my friends. They avoid my eyes. I try to feign normality but soon succumb to my intense loneliness. Why, I beg, is everyone so ashamed of me?

They fidget, and exchange several rounds of pained looks. Then one of them proffers a book.

I open it. It is unique, two separate codices bound in one cover. The pages in front are long and narrow sheets of unbleached paper. I flip to the set of smaller glossy pages at the back. My friends try to disappear.

The pages are blue. I like blue. I begin reading the text of the first page: `On Tuesday, 21 October 2003, [flowermoonfish] commited a terrible sin. She…'

I cannot continue. My suddenly unfocussed eyes settle on the word `corrupted' for a moment then resume their vague wandering. Desperately I flip to the last page of the book. It is a drawing—a girl on top of a high, high green hill. A pack of wolves chase her; soon they will force her down, down the treacherous smooth steep slope. The girl's face is turned towards the moon, pleading; the moon is making the wolves mad. Somehow I am the wolves.

I bolt. Back to the toilet. It is vast, it is safe. I go back into the stall I had used earlier. I latch the door and lean against it, hyperventilating. Abruptly the peaceful tinny sounds that come from the discreet speaker in the corner are replaced by a newsreader. "The extent of the hurt that [flowermoonfish] has caused to an innocent life will never be forgotten. Among her crimes are…"

This time it is my ears that reject the information. The cool, professional voice becomes unintelligible. I turn away from the loudspeaker. There is a door in the side of the toilet. Through it I see a man in a janitor's uniform. He mocks me. I bow my head.

(Preramble, then) mixed metaphors

Last night around midnight I got back from visiting a really good friend (and her good friend who is also now my friend) in Sweden, and the plan was that today I buckle down to serious work, since it's called reading week, after all.

But then after I woke up at 11 (as planned, I'd stayed up on Wednesday night to read Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, which my friend had borrowed from her other friend) (so worth it), I pottered around a bit, then cooked lunch, then went grocery shopping, then went back to buy a half-price bottle of mint chocolate Baileys which they hadn't let me do the first time without ID, then cooked, then replied emails and made some important phone calls, then gone through Gothenburg photos and put some up on Facebook, and it's now. I.e. the time when I always want myself to go to bed but always find myself still doing stuff. So I thought I might as well get some blogging out of the way and *really* focus tomorrow. Heh. Fingers be the crossing.

I've now been in four countries (Msia, Sg, England, Sweden) with this close friend of mine, which is possibly more than I've been in with anyone else apart from my immediate family (Msia, Sg, the US when Pa went back to seminary, and I am told that there was a trip to Thailand but that was when we lived in Alor Setar and I was an infant). It's still very strange to me that although I haven't yet been to East Malaysia because that would be an unjustifiable expense at home, I was brought up with an academic mobility that is giving me this oddly privileged other life abroad.

Gothenburg was wonderful. Roundtrip Ryanair tickets were GBP26 all in, which is probably what I spend on public transport each month here. Apart from the amazingness of seeing my friend again, it was really interesting to basically spend two days sight-seeing, not least because it isn't much of a tourist destination so I got to see snippets of normal life, especially student life. It was also probably my first time in a place where I didn't understand the dominant language, excepting airports. The art museum was also really cool -- I absolutely loved a lot of the late 19th century stuff in there (not so much the early 20th), and thought a fair amount about what makes me like a particular piece of art.

Oh dear. I sense that my syntax is getting tired and my thoughts unconnected. But I do want to get some other thoughts out so to make room for Arabic and public international law tomorrow.

So I've been wanting to note down a bunch of Biblical metaphors that I've been thinking about. Caveat: I draw links in here solely because they help me apprehend a tiny bit more of an infinite God, so some things here might seem spurious or worse. Do let me know.

1. Being an ambassador commissioned by the God who sends you into a territory over which He is sovereign

On one hand, you have diplomatic immunity from the law. On the other, you best fulfill your duty by honouring the sensibilities of those with whom you interact (unless those sensibilities are trumped by a higher purpose).

2. Christ is the head of the church, which is simultaneously His body and His wife

Which makes a whole lot of sense once you think about the two-becoming-one-flesh thing -- I don't know why I hadn't thought explicitly about this connection earlier. But then I recently read both Tolkein's translation of Pearl and Lewis' masterful retelling of the Psyche myth in Till We Have Faces, both of which discuss the incomprehensible beauty of being married to divinity. It almost sounds perverse, but then so does the idea of a deity dying for His minions.

(Tangent: I used to get really annoyed when I encountered people who thought Christians were puerile -- prudes maybe, but we're not naive.) (I also used to confuse the meanings of "puerile" and "prurient". o_O)

3. Christ is the light of the world = the radiance of God's glory

Human beings are incapable of looking at God in His full glory. It's like letting a diabetic kid loose in a sweetshop: we are incapable of processing that much goodness at once. One connection I've always liked is that the Light sustaining all things // plants (--> all earthly life) drawing energy from the sun. But during a talk at the CU weekend away I found myself thinking about how the constant, infinite God incarnated on earth by placing space-time limitations on Himself, thus enabling us to interact with Him in a conventionally human way. Similarly, the solar radiation that we get within our atmosphere is a diminished, exploitable form of light and heat from the untouchable, searing energy of the sun. One day we will be able to look steadily at his bright glory. Till then, we enjoy His radiance.

Flying time

It's been three years since I took my A Levels. I was thinking about this because last week I had dinner with some RJ friends, and we had such a lovely time swapping updates about former schoolmates.

I was also reminded about that crazy flurry of exams because the psalm I'm reading this week is Psalm 27, which helped anchor me to an undulating peace during the prelims. (It's also sort of crazy that I've been reading a psalm a week for 150+27 weeks now. Man.)

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It's been three months since I last mentioned law school on this blog. Yes I was vain enough to check. And over the course of those three months I've become quite certain that God doesn't want me in law school after college. It's a blessing to be taking two law classes at SOAS -- like taking Comedy and Tragedy and modern physics during my freshman year at Williams -- and as fascinated as I am by their philosophical and historical dimensions, these classes have helped me realise that I don't have the patience that legal analysis demands.

Currently, the books I've checked out from the SOAS library comprise one Arabic grammar reference, two law books, three books on education and language, and five about economic development in Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa. We'll see.

I have to get that ego out of the way and trust that people better than me will fight those excruciatingly crucial legal battles at home. And I have to get that fear out of the way and trust that God has some purpose for the time I have invested and will invest in learning Arabic, even if it turns out to be just for conversation starters and sheer linguistic beauty rather than for intensely practical usage in sharia courts.

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It's been 1.5 months since I got to London: we're well into autumn now. I've actually been feeling cold over the last few days, even in my wool coat. Which is odd because last year in Williamstown at this temperature range (>5C, >40F) I was perfectly comfortable in a denim skirt sans tights, and I was going around in flip flips.

Time with good friends in Cambridge this weekend and a Skype call with a cousin last week made me realise that I miss being with people who know me well enough to insult me. Among all the vibrant people I've met in London, there are a few whom I joke with but hardly any who tease me -- most are too sweet or too distant. It's truly been a stellar time -- I'm just too ungrateful.

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It's been a week since I got a haircut at the Vidal Sassoon Advanced Academy. It's a spin on the student cut concept: I paid just 5 quid but the hairdresser wasn't a greenhorn, but someone who'd been cutting hair for years and was at the academy to learn "creative techniques". Which apparently sound like postmodern poetry: there is now controlled misdirection, concealed layers and disconnections on my head. The teacher really liked what the hairdresser was doing to my hair and kept calling it "brilliant, brilliant work". And although my haircut and me are distinct entities, having a "beautiful shape" is a pleasant compliment. According to the same teacher, there're supposed to be some squares and a triangle back there, but from my point of view I see a fringe and half a foot less of length, both of which are good changes that I'm still getting used to.

It's also been a few days since I decided that as much as I love my hooded black wool coat, it was boring. So eventually I cut up a spare (new) red-and-white-striped dish cloth and used dental floss to fasten it round half the buttons on my coat. No one's made any comments so far, but so long as no one approaches me in the street to say, "Pardon me, but why do you have a tea towel on your winter coat?" I will be content with my colourful buttons.

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It's a few hours till I set out for Sweden to visit a really good friend. I'm still weirded out by the combination of generous educational institution/weird economics of budget airlines/luck/grace that is making this possible. And I'm so, so excited.

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Events log

Turn of the month: Christian Union weekend away in Marlow. Didn't find any horror, just scores of rich conversations, lovely food, a wildly fun water gun fight, and lots of nostalgia for camp days of yore.

Thursday: Had a major "Whoa I'm in London!!" moment when I was walking from campus to Victoria and got help up outside Buckingham Palace along the way because they were changing the guard!! (Which I think totally warrants tacky punctuation.) Once at Victoria, I met up with a Williams friend who was visiting London, and we moseyed past Hyde Park to Knightsbridge, where we ate Cornish pasties from the Harrod's food halls (i.e. the only buy-able department) and later drifted through the V&A, talking about life and art and home ownership.

Later in the evening, I went to my aunt's house for the Bonfire Night (= Nov 5 = Guy Fawkes) gathering that a cousin had pulled together. Yay bonfire! And double yay talking to all four cousins and all three of their spouses! Uhh. By which I mean the cousin who is my age isn't married yet. But yes, it was such a great time and I felt so happy.

Friday: LPO concert with my cousin -- really really liked the tension in the Verdi, got slightly drowsy during the charmingly exuberant Tchaikovsky, and was completely taken with the tempestuous majestic Dvorak.

Weekend: Cambridge. Gorgeous old town, venerable halls of learning &c, wonderful friends, marvelous concert, amazing walks. Am thankful. :)