Test projection

I'm working on something for Amy and Arthur's wedding...you'll find out.

Superflat Kitty

So last week when I went to Massachusetts to visit my sister in college, I took 1 day to go to Boston to see an old friend. Also to see Boston, since I'd never been there before, and had been told by several people that I'd like it. I did. 24 hours wasn't enough by FAR.

We went to the Museum of Fine Arts and I was very excited to see this: OMGOMGOMGOMG TAKASHI MURAKAMI SUPERFLAT!!!!!
(I had to do the Japanese thing and hold up the "V" sign. This painting is "If the Double Helix Wakes Up..." )

And next to it OMGWTFBBQ CHIHO AOSHIMA I DIE NOW.
(Moral of the story: If your boyfriend says he wants to eat your beloved goldfish, ditch the jerk or lose an eye.)

Long story...back in college I worked in the library part-time during the school year, and full-time during the summer after my freshman year. One of the summer jobs was inventory, going up and down the stacks with a list of call numbers, to make sure that every single book was there. It would have been boring if I wasn't a voracious reader...which on the other hand meant that I was highly inefficient at the task.

I ended up browsing a lot in the art section (the "N"s in the Library of Congress system). Even though I love the visual arts, I'm usually too lazy to seek out artwork to look at, so I got bogged down there. I discovered a Japanese artist called Takashi Murakami who paints really weird surreal, cartoony stuff in bright colours that I can't tear my eyes from, and also some strangely funny/cute but obscene statues.

The statues are just too weird for me but I really like the 2D art. In fact, it's extra 2D because Murakami's labelled his style "Superflat". According to him, Japanese art, including the ukiyo-e prints from the 19th century, tends to have a quality that makes elements at all depths look like they're smushed together. There is perspective but things in the distance are perfectly sharp, they don't fade away.

Anyway, I was browing the net for pictures of his stuff idly one day when I ran across pictures by one of his proteges, Chiho Aoshima. I love her pictures even more - sweet young girls with bewildered eyes in dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, situations, drawn in organic curves, and strange cities of the same dreamworld where buildings with faces blink at each other nestled among giant trees.

So anyway, I'm really happy I got to see Murakami and Aoshima works "for real" (even though Aoshima's prints are drawn on computer, obviously seeing them on a 15-inch monitor is quite different from a full-sized poster).

One of her prints has been my desktop wallpaper for most of the past year. Which one, I ain't sayin' nuthin'. ;)

2008 New Year's Resolution

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions (e.g. "I will not bite my nails" has been a historical failure since age eight or so) but I've come up with what I think is a viable one this year:

• To match any amount I spend aside from regular groceries, household, and toiletry supplies with donations to NGOs doing food aid, health, education, social justice, or women's issues - both secular and Christian.
• To match ALL spending on my cat with donations to animal welfare (not animal rights) and wildlife conservation organizations.

This way I'll probably spend less money this year on silly stuff and waste less time Internet shopping.

Maybe it sounds a bit extreme to some people but I've found since leaving home and starting to earn my own money at age 18, that the less stuff I buy, the less stuff I want. Materialism is a self-perpetuating lust, and most of the hobbies I really enjoy require very little material.

Other things I'd like to do:

• Write at least 2 short fiction stories and submit at least 1 to Writers of the Future or a science fiction magazine.
• Draw more, and spontaneously.
• Reinstall Creatures 3/Docking Station on my computer and start tinkering with the CAOS (Creatures Agent Object Scripting) language.
• Call parents and sisters and "small" boy more often (sometimes I forget my brother has a phone because he never calls me...)
• Clean my bike more often.
• Cook for my boyfriend and make him take his vitamins regularly.
• Watch more movies.

It's gonna be a personally interesting year...my project is going to get into animal studies...I'll have to write a thesis and hopefully graduate...my parents just got transferred to Penang...two of my London cousins are getting married in the summer so I'll finally have a chance to go to England...a couple of Phases kakis are getting married in Malaysia...another couple is having a baby, which makes them the first friends my age to reproduce...my boyfriend is taking 2/3 of a year off school for an internship...his mum wants to show our respective cats in the summer (TICA lets you show household pets)...

Et cetera. 'Tis life. =)

Harriet Beecher Stowe Is A Bitch

The cast: Eight graduate students in various stages of education.
KRISTA, our hostess, a Spanish major who's a total Harry Potter fanatic
DAVE, her fiance, a mathematician
KATRINA, her housemate, a speech pathologist
BEN, a student of 19th-century German
LIS, a petite, chirpy pianist
CHRISTOPHER, a mediaevalist who looks the part
LEE - I think he studies Russian
me

The scene: Krista and Katrina's apartment, crouched over a guys-versus-girls game of It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. This is a relatively new board game which involves guessing either the title or the author of a book whose first lines are read from a randomly drawn card.

So far the girls are well ahead (gender stereotypes, anyone?). We've landed more often on Novels: 1900-1950 more often than we would have liked and on Children's Books and Science Fiction not enough, but Krista and I have saved two turns in a row by guessing "Hemingway" and "Fitzgerald" semi-facetiously and turning out right.

The guys roll and land on Novels: before 1900. Krista draws and reads

"In Which the Reader Is Introduced to a Man of Humanity. Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P----, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness."

resulting in a moment of bafflement before the argument breaks out.

"It sounds like Tolstoy. He does that letter-followed-by-dash naming."
"But it's in Kentucky!"
"What year?" someone asks.
"1852," Krista reads.
"Mark Twain with the 'man of humanity'? [Twain is the universal answer to any American novel before 1900, apparently] He was kinda preachy in some of his short stories."
"Yeah, but this is a novel."
"Wait...could it be Uncle Tom's Cabin, you know, by Harriet Beecher Stowe? Kentucky is a border state," Ben suggests.

The girls, who have all glanced at the card, exchange a look of brief panic which changes to glee when Christopher, head in hands, mutters, "No, no, that's too late for Uncle Tom."
There's more back-and-forth for several minutes until Christopher yelps at Lee "You saved us with Dante, what's this one?"
Lee shakes his head. (The guys got a poem earlier that sounded awfully like "The Road Less Travelled" but turned out to be "The Divine Comedy" or something.)
"Twain, then?"
"I guess so."
"Twain."
Shrugs. "Twain."

"Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe," Krista announces, smug as a cat in the cream.
"YOU WERE FREAKING KIDDING ME!" Ben yells at Christopher.
"I'm gonna go hide in the kitchen." As he retreats behind the fridge, the rest of us are treated to a frustrated screech of "HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, YOU BITCH!"
"Now that would make a great first line," says Dave.

Lepaking

"Lepak" is a Malay verb that has roughly the same meaning as the American expression "hanging out". It took on some negative connotations in the 90s when the government started a campaign to stop youths loitering around public places, but what-evah.

---

I went out with some new friends, M. and T., after church yesterday. I've only known them for a few weeks but they're great. It turned out that Mag (who's from Jakarta) was my college friend AT's classmate in boarding school in Singapore...small world indeed.

Lunch at International Club in the church basement was fun because Steve B. and his Korean girl SJ also came...so with the six of us in a corner it was like the Club of Asian Girls Who Date White Computer Geeks. Steve had to leave early for lab stuff, but M. and T. invited me to go for a hike so we ended up strolling around Governor Nelson State Park for a couple of hours in the golden fall sunshine.

M. and T. are newlyweds and it's so cute watching them together (and watching T. get all excited over M's pregnancy) that it doesn't feel annoying as public displays of affection normally do (no "GET A ROOM!"). She still wants to go to graduate school for maths next year. That baby's going to be amazingly intelligent and will probably rebel and become a guitarist or something. Nevertheless, we bought them this maternity shirt, too bad M's not showing enough for the joke to be good yet:

---

Today I also had dinner with my former roommate Bunnylady. Bunnylady was a playwright and stage manager in New York who's switching careers in midlife, having decided that despite what she was told in her youth, she really does want to be a veterinarian. Her first year of vet school when we were living together with my undergrad classmate SN were pretty bad and she was a nervous wreck...not to mention that SN was going through a horrible breakup and I felt guilty because I was the only one enjoying myself. How do you deal with a woman who's old enough to be your mother who's falling to pieces over exams?

So it's good to see her on her feet and doing all right in her second year. She still has her older black-and-white rabbit Seneca, although the nameless Little Brown Bunny who was the bane of SN's and my electronic equipment died. Her replacement is snowy white, named Thumper, also female, but large enough to eat my cat alive.

---

I'm also in a Grad Christian Fellowship Bible study group. It's a manuscript study, which means that we dissect scripture line...by...line. At times it seems tedious, but it's a good way of getting insight/analysis/inspiration from other people that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. Especially if you're like me and have grown up with the Bible so it sounds like "same old, same old."

We spend about an hour doing said textual dissection then have dessert and hang out and pray a bit at the end...I think people are trying to outdo each other with the desserts. I made an awesome banana custard pie a couple weeks ago ;-)

One of the new girls, who just started grad school and moved to Madison with her boyfriend at the beginning of the fall, mentioned that she's been mostly either studying or hanging out with him because she doesn't have any good friends in town yet - "you know, someone you can just call and be like 'Hey, wanna watch some TV?' 'cause you're too tired to do anything else."

I think I'll email her about watching some TV, because I know what she means, and what M. means, and what K.J. means when they say it's great to be with someone but you don't wanna see them all the time. I feel like I've gotten more fresh air these past few days.

It's okay sweetie, I still like you! =)

Warp 10...engage!

Speaking of English characters...my London cousin Grace (half Malaysian Chinese half English) just changed her relationship status to "engaged" on Facebook. I haven't seen Grace for ages and ages (probably about eight years) and I've always wanted to go to England so I'm already looking forward to next September.

The previously mentioned Harry Potter fan friend also got engaged a couple weeks ago. She and Grace are both the same age as me. I also have a male age-mate cousin on the other side, but somehow I don't see him marrying any soon.

Me, well, I'll just quote my colleague Angela's response to my question about what age people usually marry at in Colombia:

"Some people marry after high school, some people marry after they finish university, and some people, like me, marry...I don't know when."

Obviously I'm writing about this because it's something I desire, but I'm not too fussed about the "Christmas cake" idea (in Japan, women are like Christmas cakes because they're stale after the 25th). I've known a couple of lady professors who got married in their mid-thirties, like my friend Karen - so I just tend to count it as a cost of being a professional. It's not like that's abnormal for men anyway.

My dad got married at 34 to his former high school physics student...now THAT's a great role model =D

Apples to Apples

A bunch of friends had a game night and we were playing Apples to Apples:

Matt: "Shocking".
me: Ooh! [slap card down]
A few minutes later...
Matt: I'd have to say "Electric eels" wins.
Julie [to me]: Four cards! Good job!
Steve: Girl, you like green cards a lot.
me: I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!

Dinks

Tonight at bible study:

Bern: Now we're DINKs, Double Incomes No Kids. Before she got this job we were HINKs, Half an Income, No Kids.
Kelly: So now we're really SHINKs, Single-and-a-Half Incomes, No Kids.

I'm a SIOC: Single Income One Cat. ^_^

The road less travelled

Talked to Koidy Koid on Gmail chat this afternoon. She'd sent me an email with a link to this entry on the Education In Malaysia blog and the following in the comment thread:

Anonymous (Wed Nov 29, 02:40:32 AM): PhD + 3 years postdoc experience, optimistically you may get between RM5K to 7K per month salary in IPTA (public uni) or IPTS (private uni) in Malaysia.

You are on probation and most likely you will work in a department whose head has not heard of Nature Cell Biology and Cancer Cell; neither the dean knows Nature Cell Biology and Cancer Cell. They know how to answer to the call of nature.

If you are in IPTA, your first priority is not getting your research gear up and ready. You have to sign 'Aku Janji' form and attend induction courses and other silly civil-service based classes to be educated about stuff totally unrelated to your scientific career, so that you are well prepared to take exams that you must pass for your confirmation and promotion later^* .

Then you have to cope with grant applications from various sources like IRPA, SAGA, etc.

When you are finally ready to carry out your world-shattering frontier experiments, you have to cope with unexpected power cut and zero water supply, which happen a bit annoyingly too frequent.

Meanwhile, the clock goes tick tock, tick tock and you discover that your brilliant virgin scientific ideas got published by your competitors in Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, EMBO Journal, etc.

After one or two years, you may make a bold decision - cut loss, give up science, and go into politics (the best exponential rising path is to join Umno Youth or Puteri or Putera, if you qualify) to salvage your bright future.

On the other hand, if you are as smart as you claimed and have guts to face rewarding challenges, then, my boy or girl, go south - the little red dot (which most likely will give you a starting salary in S$ more than the equivalent RM of a professor in IPTA in Malaysia, and you pay less tax, and no 'Aku Janji' to sign, and no civil-service based classes to take, and ....!) - or other leading nations in the world!

Smart people must know how to make smart choices. Good luck to you.

Koidy: Hi taikach.
me: hi koidy
Koidy: i'm thoroughly depressed.
me: just got your email
Koidy: yeah.
me: Unfortunately it's what I heard when I was doing a bit of career path research back home. (calling people up, talking to Emily Tan's dad, etc.)
Koidy: that plus the essay... can go bang head.
me: how buys are you this week? would like to talk on the phone. it occurs to me that i don't call friends much, but would like to.
Koidy: sorta busy, because Tar coming back tomorrow, then got this essay, also making him pressie. but i can make time :)
me: ahh okay
wanna chat tonight? just for a short time if you're working on the essay
Koidy: sounds wonderful :)
thanks.
need your pragmatic grounding on issue at hand.
but dang, future so bleak.
me: hehehe ME? pragmatic??
maybe we shoudl form a Malaysian Scientists Support Group on facebook.
Sent at 1:27 PM on Wednesday
Koidy: we should...
sighness.
me: /me sighs too
Koidy: maybe could have found rich boyfriend.
pulak-pulak Tar is also completely into low-income jobs and serving the poor.
me: i was just about to type "engineering pays well" and then hit Del.
Koidy: :P
sorry.
me: I'm seriously thinking about moving to Singapore.
don't want it to be permanent though
Koidy: really??
yan is there?
i mean, yan is there.
me: the impression i got from the people i talked to is that there is some hope that M'sia will improve over thnext decade or two but it will be SLOW.
Koidy: and how will it improve if people like you run to sing??
me: yeah, she's on a 3-year bond after uni =P
Koidy: i wonder how she's doing with the to boys.
me: HAH
i think it's one of those quantum statesthat's neither here nor there but the waveform will eventually col.lapse.
Sent at 1:32 PM on Wednesday
Koidy: are you referring to yan or to malaysia?
me: clarification: what i'm afraid of is getting stuck as a junior
lecturer with no power in an IPTA.
Yan =)
Koidy: haha. kenapa?
oh yeah. i know what you mean--all my hopes of research dashed.
me: my hope is that it might be possible to build up my career for a few years in Sg, and then move to Malaysia and start a new job with more seniority.
Koidy: makes sense.
but what about steve?
me: yeah. there's literally nothing for him in M'sia.
we saw the list of MS projects in the Biomed Engineering UM website, and he said they were undergrad caliber.
some of them were totally ridiculous, like "Changes in Body
Composition Before and After Prayer in Muslim Women."
Koidy: aahhhh! stop stop!
enough bleak news about tanahair.
beh tahan.
wanna bang head on mass spec and cry.
but arthur keeps holding me up and exhorting that no matter what, we
need to go where God calls us.
frustration and poverty are not things to run away from.
me: s'truth
Koidy: i agree with him about poverty (not that either of us will ever
be impoverished)
me: was reading an article in The Scientist about sicence in Africa
Koidy: but dunno about the frustration part. that's harder to deal with.
me: scientists in dev countries all over the world are fighting this
kind of thing. at least we've got company in misery, it' not unique to
M'sia.
Koidy: mm.
that's hopeful.
bleh :P
sorry... being petulant.
but taikach, what about your vet dreams?
me: shrug you know what's funny? after i figured out that vet school was going to be too expensive and applied to grad school as a backup, i really wasn't upset at all.
learned from my internship that i liked research. and weirder...ever since i could read^** (literally!) i've had this morbid interest in infectious diseases anyway
i think this is the right field for me. anyway, it still involves work with animals - zoonotic disesase, veterinary vaccines, just on the research side instead of clinical.
i think God wants me here, 's what i'm trying to say.
Sent at 1:40 PM on Wednesday
Koidy: sounds wonderful.
i really think there is a place for God's people in the sciences. as much as there is anywhere else, but there is definitely a dearth of Christians in the sciences.
for me, i'll go to grad school, then see how loh.
i think i'm committed to going home.
and if that's where God wants me, hopefully, i'll find in that (my
calling), the staying power to do what's necessary.
me: meetoo.
bah, i should remember to pray for you more often. i usually forget to pray for frineds unless they email me about their grad school apps.
Sent at 1:46 PM on Wednesday
Koidy: grin
it's okay.
i'm only currently trying to up my prayer life.
gtg liao.
to my other, more relaxing job at the library.
ta... and thanks!
call me after dinner?
around 8-ish or something liddat?

^*Werner's Where There Is No Doctor was one of my favourite books from about age seven. I still can't explain why, but it's laid the foundation for a lot of the things I think about now. It's the manual for rural healthcare workers.
^**This isn't just the one guy's opinion, according to the UM professor emeritus and new PhDs I talked to back home, funding depends a LOT on seniority, and a lot of the tenured profs are deadwood.