Film Festival

Hello chicos and chicas,

if you have a lot of time from March 28th onwards till about 14th April, do check out the Singapore International Film Festival which your Ms Wong here is currently volunteering for. The film festival offers films that you won't be able to catch in your usual cinemas -- so you are guaranteed edgier and more interesting stuff. For those with time and without money, there are free programmes screening at the Goethe Institut and Republic Polytechnic.

Drumroll please...

Friday, it seems.

All the best for the results. Whatever the outcome, this all won't matter the way you think it does a few years down the road. What matters is what you make out of it after you've gotten your results and how you move on.

At the end of it, life is really about lots of other things as well.

Mid-February Update

It's amazing what an accidental phonecall can do...hello! For all of you out there, I am contactable and I would love to hear what you all are doing, so email to Mayee.W@gmail.com, if you like. I do miss you guys.

Yes, being a graduate student is quite different from being an undergrad. I have classes at night, and only for two days a week, and I don't hang around campus like I used to do when I was young and reckless. It's kind of like working, except you do it in your own time and you earn a lot less money. But it's been quite satisfying so far, as I am taking a class under my favourite professor who is my projected supervisor. So here's what I'm doing right now -- I've got a presentation due next week which is an analysis of the MDA senior management rap and the response to it (go look on google if you haven't seen it already) with reference to the politics of hiphop. I've also got another presentation next week for a graduate reading group on the Israel Defense Forces using the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (two French dudes whose thought is quite popular with the architects apparently, and a lot of modern artists) in their planning of urban warfare, with the intention of viewing urban warfare as an architectural problem to find new ways of defeating the enemy. In order to flush out the enemy, the army blasts holes in the walls and ceilings of homes in Nablus, a district of Israel, to "infest" the place and they end up locking out homeowners, often without any food or water, for days. There are plenty of implications to this: 1) should philosophy be used to wage war? 2) what does it mean for the soldiers to conceive of war as an 'architectural problem' and related to that, 3) where does the civilian stand in all this?

It's a crazy world out there...

There's a lovely movie out in Picturehouse now called Away from Her, a film about an elderly woman realising she has Alzheimer's disease and how her husband tries to cope with it. We see the husband struggle through loneliness and sacrifice with great love when she admits herself into a home and ends up almost forgetting him. It's a very lovely, bittersweet film. Quite sad, but I think it definitely deserves a watch if you're up for something different from the usual fare in the cinemas.

Atonement

I watched Atonement yesterday, and the sets were fantastic, the cinematography wasn't too bad and the actors were strong, however, the script was disappointing, with the characters coming across as quite two-dimensional, particularly the character of Briony Tallis. The film fell short of the novel's potential; the high point of the film must be the gorgeous green dress Keira Knightly wears in the first third.

About the news...

What did you guys think of the IB results? (It was in the news just yesterday...)

Lit Class party 271207

Those who weren't there, we missed you!

For more photos, go here.

Packing Up

I'm in the process of clearing my desk right now. Someone asked me how I was feeling -- am I sad? Well, yes and no. Certain things make me sad, like reading Russell's request letter to take literature and knowing how he left (he wrote something like, "I don't believe you can really study literature, because literature studies you", or something to that effect, along those lines) and that got me briefly angry, because if he could write that letter, he could have jolly well done better, but, ah... such is life. Some things make me laugh, like the (I think it's Annabel's) Spider essay that I saw somewhere in my file. Some things touched me in the strangest, most unexpected ways... But all in all, as you guys understand now that your A' levels are done, I have stuff to clear, so I have to throw away a lot of what was accumulated. And while I have certain regrets and certain memories of happiness that I wish to keep for myself, I have to move on to face new challenges and conquer new fears.

I'm happy with what I've done in the past few years. I had an inkling that I was going to do my Masters again in the future, so I knew at some point of time I had to leave. It was just deciding when. As I told someone, part of my decision to stay (yes, I think you all know that it must have crossed my mind when the Exodus happened) was because of you all. I hope I did a decent job because I'm sure that many times, I must have been running round like a headless paranoid chicken (yes, another person did mention that my blog sounded like a stress-relief outlet). I enjoyed teaching my current IP 3s as well and I guess I would have continued teaching them, if I hadn't decided to leave. Perhaps the H3 experience with some of you sealed my grad school convictions further, because I'm reminded of the kind of intense but rewarding experience that writing a thesis-like paper on your own can be like (ok, but last-minute work does NOT always yield sufficient results, contrary to popular belief). Now that my main job is done, I'm quite satisfied.

Yes, it occurred to me that I might see some of you in NUS. (Perhaps a coffee/tea sometime? What are you all doing now?)

I read somewhere in the preface of the commemorative IP book that if there was one thing that you all should remember was that you were loved. And that was true. At least, in my case anyway.

So now, all that's left is for you to go out there and make something out of your hopes and dreams and your lives.