monoceros blogsI found this video very much by chance. It's been called the dancing-guy video, the where-the-hell-is-matt video. But whatever moniker it has, it leaves the same effect on pretty much everyone who watches it - a huge smile and no small wonder (and envy) at the variety of places he's been to. Someone gave Matt the idea of dancing in every place he traveled to, and here is the result, the first video.
So he may not have danced to any music when it was filmed, but I thought the dancing so wild, unrestrained, and joyful. How many of us get to cut loose and prance around like that? How many of us dare to? Watching Matt's dancing made me happy. It made me want to travel again. It made me want to step out of my cloak of inhibition.
But I'm still just watching. And I want to say I loved the settings he chose, and I loved how several creatures and people joined in, laughed, or scared the daylights out of poor Matt. His nieces, Ellie and Sarah, are very cute too. Of course, the seals and elephants and dogs are tough to beat; and the jellyfish and giant turtle weren't bad either.
Tonight, I played a song I haven't heard in nearly three years. I bought Lisa Thorson's CD, "Out To Sea," in my first semester at grad school. Listening to it brought me back to my Willowtree Apartment, back to the Serta bed where I sat and read each night before falling asleep. I remember reading Wicked and listening to Thorson's soft humming. Three years. A lot has happened since then, and I realize, a little sadly, how I've come to accept many things I never thought I would. Is it defeat, resignation, or just another form of endurance?
Part of me longs for that time three years ago. Oh, if I knew then what I knew now. But I am here now, sitting by my desk editing proofs, half a world away from that tiny apartment with the tree outside my window, that tiny apartment where someone else now reads and sleeps. The more Thorson's songs play here in this room in Singapore; the more it plays as I do different tasks and read different books, the more I will forget the nights I first listened to them in Ann Arbor. As Christina Rossetti wrote once upon a time, "Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad."
I usually leave the food stuff - reviews and pictures - to my 100 Acre Wood pals, dimsumdolly and overacuppa, but I woke up this morning from a dream about Cold Stone Creamery and I knew I had to write about it before the last of that remembered - imagined? - heavenly taste of brownies and caramel and sweet cream disappears from the synapses.
In Ann Arbor, Cold Stone Creamery sits in a low row of shops in Arborland Mall, which in my freshman year at college was quite dull and dreary. By my senior year, Arborland Mall had a facelift - a huge, new Borders; Bed, Bath, and Beyond; Old Navy... . I'm not sure when Cold Stone Creamery moved in, but I'm sure glad they did.
I've only eaten one of their concoctions but what a wonderful one it was. Founder's Favorite is certainly my favorite, though I guess it can't count as a favorite if I've only had one. One of the pleasures of eating a concoction is watching the staff make it. The guy spaded dollops of sweet cream ice-cream, grabbed a hefty chuck of a brownie, added pecans, poured on fudge and caramel and then mashed it all together before us. We - Frank and Joyce and I - asked to have the ice-cream in a waffle cone, which was perfectly crispy and wrapped in chocolate. We finished the Founder's Favorite in no time. And I believe I could've eaten another. Too bad I didn't. That was my only visit to the Creamery.
According to the site, they're opening up branches in Korea and Japan. Now I wish I had the means to get a franchise of my own.
For the Sake of Strangers
by Dorianne Laux
No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another - a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them -
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.
So I was looking for a particular jacket on nikewomen when I heard the stirrings of a song that made me feel like bopping my head to its beat. I usually mute music players that load up when I hit a webpage or visit a blog but I decided to give Nike's workout mix a listen. Not that I really workout or when I do, I don't really work out to music but some of these songs are actually addictive. I particularly like Junior Boys's "In the morning" and Elf Power's "An Old Familiar Scene."
What's nice - if I'm guessing correctly - is that Nike changes the mix every month and you can download about half an hour's worth of funky beats to flex your muscles to.
| You Should Be A Cancer |
 What's bad about you: you can be too moody and impossible to understand In love: you enjoy wining and dining the object of your affection In friendship, you're: likely to depend on other friends for emotional support Your ideal job: historian, marine biologist, or religious figure Your sense of fashion: you dress to match your mood You like to pig out on: classic home cooked meals, like mac and cheese |
I won't say if it's all accurate or not; the quiz is awfully hard to do when there were so many other options I could have made. I put in different combinations and I kept coming up with Cancer, got Pisces a couple of times, and once, Aquarius (the last of which seemed really wrong since it described someone quite unlike me). Not once did I get Virgo, which is strange because I'm all too aware of certain Virgo traits I possess, many of which my friends have pointed out as well. Perhaps there's a bit of each zodiac sign in us, or really, there's a marked difference between what we perceive ourselves to be (and sometimes are), and what we really are (but don't always realize). Ah, contradictions.
| You Are French Food |
 |
A quiz, courtesy of Vantan. It's nice knowing bouncy Tigger from overacuppa.com and I are equally snobby.
I'm finally putting up a few photos from my travels. I've still got my Jiuzhaigou and Hawaii pictures stashed away in one of the memory cards so the pictures will make their way here eventually.
Big brother and I at the big silver bean - officially known as the Cloud Gate - in Chicago's Millenium Park.
The bean was half covered for cleaning/restoration the last time I visited the city so it was a joy to see it shining in all its glory under the summer sun this year.
Since I didn't bring my camera with me two years ago, I didn't get a chance to take pictures of the grand hotel - the Palmer House Hilton - where the AWP conference took place. We attended talks and seminars, and also danced in a dark red ballroom. Imagine a bunch of writers - some very introverted - shuffling in time under the eyes of cherubs on the ceiling.
Within walking distance of the Hilton is the Harold Washington Library Center, one of Chicago's public libraries. It's a beautiful neo-classical building of red brick, stone, and granite, and a green aluminium roof with large ornamental sculptures. You can't quite miss it, walking along State Street, and yet it also fits perfectly with the rest of the industrial and Beaux-Arts architecture of the city. When I first saw it two years back, the sight of the massive building stopped me in my tracks. I did what I could with my camera phone but I knew I had to return one day with the Canon. This was the first stop my brother and I made upon entering the city. I rather wished Singapore could have buildings like these, but no, our new national library looks more like a white, sprawling space station.
I'd live there if I could. Farewell for a while, Chicago; I believe I'll return one day.
I've been hawking Keith Donahue's The Stolen Child to my friends. Not that it hasn't been getting sufficient publicity; it's one of this summer's well-received titles. In truth, I came across it so often in booklists and reviews that I was almost turned off. I was quite prepared to ignore the book. That was until I read its blurb, decided I liked what it was about - changelings - and picked it up when I was in the US.
It certainly bears the markings of a successful novel. Fantasy element; check. But grounded in the world, check. Same events seen via two perspectives (aka The Time-Traveler's Wife), check. Insertion of a cultural motif like painting or music, check. One or several characters with a sad history and intense yearning as a result, check. Beautiful writing, check check check.
The title comes from WB Yeats' famed poem, "The Stolen Child." Changelings will often lure a child away from the real world into the faery one, and put in its place a changeling disguised as the stolen child. In Donahue's novel, a child is taken and, bereft of his true name and longed-for home and family, becomes a changeling himself, one who waits for the day he can return to the human world, but only as an imposter, and not before the rest of the changeling crew get their turns.
The novel speaks eloquently and often quite hauntingly of the loss of identity, love, family, and the great desire to belong. There were nights when I read certain passages and ached for the changeling who dreamed of the people and things he'd lost; surely we too - whether we did once upon a time or still do - dream of the people and things gone from our lives.
"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
~ from "The Stolen Child" by WB Yeats
So Chicken Little wasn't so hot for me (though I did like one particular song on the OST) but never mind that because Zach Braff is in a new movie with an excellent accompanying soundtrack, which he helped put together. Apart from the fact that the soundtrack for The Last Kiss is a generous collection of 15 songs, it also happens that the 15 songs sound even better than the selection on the Garden State soundtrack. Until I get my hands on it, I guess I'll have to stick to my Scrubs playlist on iTunes for a while.
As for the movie itself, it's about growing up at 30, at 60; welling up with doubt; letting that doubt influence what we do to the ones we love, whether it's making the right choices or making them cry. I hope it'll reach Singapore someday soon. Here's the trailer.
One of my summer book purchases includes a poetry collection by Linda Pastan. A few months ago, I realized I'd saved a number of Linda Pastan's poems from the Writer's Almanac, so many that I thought I ought to purchase a collection. I picked Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998.
Here's one that I liked very much.
The Bookstall
Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were
freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open - that one
and that - and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.
For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read - these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to the earth.