Thoughts on a trip to San Diego

San Diego this time of year is typically colder, the driver says. The driver drives a van that bears me toward the airport, where I’ll take a flight to Los Angeles, then Tokyo, then home. A few turns into what he promises would be a short drive, he notices someone on the pavement – a flustered woman lugging along a check-in bag and a carry-on – and exchanges some short quick gestures with her. Having determined something from this wordless back and forth, he stops the van – he knows her, he says by way of explanation – and leaves his seat to help her with her bags. I do my bit, sliding open the door. She gets on and settles beside me, grateful to the driver, but not overly so – his does not seem to have been a totally unexpected act of kindness. I learn that she had headed out to the airport via public transport, but her train had been delayed, and she had missed a bus, and was looking for a cab when we pulled up.

A couple of hours later, in LA, I have some time to daydream, and I come to wonder if a driver with the same job in Singapore – sending a hotel guest to the airport – would stop to pick up someone like this, as a kindness. My instinct tells me no, because the traffic in Singapore is too dense and hectic, and everyone wishes to get to some place quick, and there isn’t the space for you to safely stop and not obstruct the traffic behind you. Or at least that is what you would tell yourself, in Singapore, I think.

And I come to think, as I have thought a few times on and off since I’ve had the opportunity to travel to other cities around the world over the last couple of years, that space is an essential part of what makes a city liveable.

The tremendously agreeable weather – a blue sky; smears of cloud like white from a minimalist painter’s palette; a crisp coolness that makes sunshine a tangible, almost benedictory thing – that San Diego has had for the past week would help too.

***

A couple of days before my trip to the San Diego airport, I am in Phoenix visiting a friend. We get along well, but are not close, so the visit is slightly awkward the way something not altogether laid down in the bounds of social norms can sometimes be for me. I bring gifts for her, one from a mutual friend, so that lubricates things. She is touched by the mutual friend’s gift: a piece of wood which is shaped not unlike a snow-globe with an elongated base and which opens up to reveal carvings of the buddha.

We talk a lot. She talks about her research into spirituality and materialism and how the two intertwine. She is doing her PhD. For a while, I had thought about academia as a career too, and now I feel a pang of jealousy, but it is distant, buried deep under current comforts and indolence and inertia; I know too much now about my disinclination to withstand discomfort and homesickness to be genuinely envious. I think.

She warns me about the leeching dryness of the desert, tells me that drinking water is important, and that if I have a headache, it is probably caused by dehydration. An image of my brain squelching to a stop from lack of water makes me laugh.

We talk about companionship for the long term. She had recently parted ways with a long-time boyfriend. I mention how I am lazy to do things that I like when I am on vacation because there is no one to share the joy with – as my tongue rolled to form the words, I am a bit surprised; I had not known I thought this – and she says she understands.

***

She says that this process towards a doctorate, including the research into the intertwining of spiritualism and materialism, is part of her self actualisation.

My self actualisation mainly takes the form of satisfying my appetites for food and goods, I say as a glib half-joke, then as a realisation. Compared to my haphazard and aimless daily meanderings, her introspective and purposeful search for who she is, in itself a process of self definition, is a worthy pursuit.

What is self actualisation to you, she asks.

I think about it. How do I actualise me, maximise me, bring out the potential in me, express the desires in me to be… a me I am happy with.

Hm…

***

She brings me around to places she frequents, to supermarkets and food places, to where she works. I meet her advisor, the professor for whom she decided to come to Arizona and who now supervises her work towards a doctorate. I shake the professor’s hand; she holds a chihuahua in her other hand, maternally cradling the dog to her chest with her arm.

***

Days before I go to Phoenix, I am at work meetings and staying in a La Jolla resort alongside a beautiful bay scooped into the side of California, with the calm Pacific waters lapping and mildly frothing at its edge.

The road leading to the resort is lined with palm trees, ridiculously tall and straight, and understandably so, given the abundance of sunshine. Ducks and geese roam the resort, and one of the sights of the trip was a small flock of ducks silently and suddenly bursting into the air, then turning left, becoming a different entity as the rays of light catch their feathers in a different slant, heading off to another part of the resort to enjoy the afternoon.

On the last day of the meetings, I am told that “La Jolla” means “the jewel”. Quite right.

Later in the trip, the flight to Phoenix brings me out over the waters off La Jolla. At that height, the deep blue is stippled by waves and the glint of sunlight, and looks like a luxuriant swathe of leather.

Happiness and other musings

I was quite early at a colleague’s wedding last month, and picked a good spot, directly looking at the live band.  And so I got to see the live band play, and it was a good band, versatile, could sing in a few languages (appropriate since my Malay colleague was marrying a Chinese), enjoyable to watch. 

About two thirds into the night, the band began to ask for guests to join them on stage to sing.  One guest did, performed ok for an amateur; and then another went on stage, and really just stole the show.  It was clear that this middle-aged chap was used to performing with a band, and this band all strangers were just another group to jive and make music with.  And so he did, improvising a jazzy up-tempo version of some song I’ll remember later, and he did it so joyously, he was so into it, that the band, bland and professional earlier in the night, began to flex and stretch themselves too, and put their energy into it, so that, when the second and last song ended with a flourish and the chap departed the stage to rapturous applause from the band and an audience roused from its postprandial doze, I couldn’t help but think that, if the bride and groom find the sort of happiness this mat rocker did making music with his newfound friends, they would be together for a long time indeed.

*****

I was in Solo, Indonesia last November for work.  And was disproportionately joyous when I saw bolsters on my hotel bed.

*****

My pal got me a CD of instrumental renditions of some of 梁文福’s most memorable songs and I love it to bits.  My pal got the same CD from her pal, and found that she didn’t like it much.  Darned.

Important things

About 10 days ago, I was having a very enjoyable meal at Sushi Tei (try the ikura (salmon roe) chawanmushi) with a long-legged friend and we were talking about ambition and priorities.  And she had me do this interesting exercise.  She tore up the folded piece of paper that the wooden chopsticks came in into eight bits and told me to write down the eight things most important to me, one on each bit of paper.

I wrote:

• Comfort
• Family
• Doing well at work
• Being knowledgeable
• Writing well
• My bolster
• Reading good books
• Food

And then she asked me, if you had to take away two of these important things, which would they be?  Not too difficult.  I took away my bolster and reading good books.  So six were left.

• Comfort
• Family
• Doing well at work
• Writing well
• Being knowledgeable
• Food

And then she told me, take away two more.  And I took away food and writing well.  (This is as best as I remember it.  I could have removed comfort… but anyway, here’s what I think I took away.)  And so, four were left.

• Comfort
• Family
• Doing well at work
• Being knowledgeable

And then my long-legged friend told me to remove two more.  And I took away comfort and being knowledgeable.  And two were left.

• Family
• Doing well at work

And so it seemed, to me, the most important things in the world are my family and doing well at work.  And then my friend asked, are you spending enough time on the most important thing in the world to you?  And my answer had to be that I was, at work, and I was not sure I was, with my family.

And I thought, it was good to be made to think in this way.  I shall do this exercise again, but seriously, and by seriously I mean in a state of mind that would not involve my bolster – significant part of my life though it is – as one of the eight most important things in my life :)

P/S.  Today at about 3.45pm I was on a high after doing a presentation to an important person who was very enthused about her work.  Then at 4.00pm I reminded someone to do a very important thing.  And at about 5.55pm I thought I saw someone dab at tears on his/her face, because of a very important thing, of course, for otherwise why would he/she shed tears?

Oomphalicious

When a colleague first introduced me to Oomphatico’s a couple of months back, she called it “Oomphalicious”.  I dined there for the first time with my pal last Wednesday, and I think “oomphalicious” wouldn’t be an unsuitable way to describe some of the food we had :)

We started with pan-fried chilli garlic calamari with lemon mayo and rocket salad.  The calamari came in four broad, lightly scored rolls – two of them with a tinge of orange-pink, two of them a pleasing white – with a small bunch of rocket salad on the side.  Drizzled with lemon juice, the orange-pink calamari (cuttlefish?) turned out to be a tiny tiny bit chewy, with an understated squid taste set off nicely with the lemon and the peppery salad dressing; the rolls of white calamari were just ultra-yummy, tender and tasty with a slight sear of pan-fry.

We shared two mains: the Kurobuta pork belly, slow-roasted and with a vindaloo emulsion on the side, and linguine with fresh clams and mussels in a white wine sauce.  My pal and I agreed that the Kurobuta was over-roasted – or at least the crisped skin was; we couldn’t cut through it with a steak knife – but the pork went very well with the tangy vindaloo.  The linguine was good, not too rich, with generous helpings of clam and mussels.  The white wine complemented the taste of sea in the sauce just right, so one could taste both the wine and the seafood.  My pal finished the sauce’s last dregs.

And then, for dessert, we shared “that expensive chocolate dish”.  (Yup, that’s what it’s called on the menu.)  This was really four miniature desserts: ice-cream stuffed with chocolate chips on a tiny slice of spongy cheesecake; a nutty (too hard) chocolate truffle on a really tasty chocolate chip cookie; chocolate mousse; and lava cake.

The chocolate mousse came in a tall espresso glass, and upon first tasting it my pal exclaimed that they’d put olive oil in it!  Later she remarked that this was an interesting chocolate mousse, which was usually among the most boring of desserts.  The mousse literally engrossed me – I’d scoop some in my mouth, flatten it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth and then lave, lave, lave at the particles of mousse, at the oil, turning the taste over and over in my brain as I circulated it in my mouth, figuring it out.  One of the chefs (the restaurant was a little understaffed, but provided excellent service) later explained that the mousse was topped off with olive oil, limoncello and coffee liqueur, and that a more liquid version of this dessert was used as a churro dip at breakfast in Spain.  It was a really fun dish, not least because while we were trying to figure out the strange taste of the mousse my pal thought she tasted soy sauce and sesame seed oil :p

The lava cake was simply delicious!  It was just on the right side of warm, and the substantial but not too thick layer of cake was just crisped enough on the edge, the chocolate liquid and rich and not too sweet, the sprinkling of flakes of salt an absolutely inspired touch.  My pal thought it made the cake taste like peanut butter :)  I’d scoop some of the cake into my mouth, making sure to get a flake or two of salt, and chew, and when a flake of salt – I think using flakes instead of grains was absolute genius, by the way – was encountered and detonated, flavouring the rest of the gooey cake… that was a little bit of pure yummy-ness right there! :)

We talked throughout dinner and after that, on a bench in the shopping centre, and after realising it was late and finding our way out, on the way to her home.  About how motivated we were at work, about how her mum had just undergone an eye operation and was worried she wouldn’t be able to read words on a computer screen, about how weird the idea of olive oil in chocolate mousse was, about what the future could hold and whether or not to seize an opportunity that had presented itself, about a couple of toxic colleagues, about a new boss, about being a new boss, about how chocolate bars were better than smaller packages of chocolate, about a mutual acquaintance’s wedding, about when we last met, about whether she had her shoulder-length hair when we last met.

As usual, when we parted, I felt a sense of loss – there was so much more to talk about – but also a sort of weary joy.

Till next time, dear pal :)

Christmas

I’ve talked about how I always enjoy Christmas – it brings back fond memories.  This last Christmas evening was no exception. I found out a dear friend was pregnant; 12 of us got together and ate hor fun, fried rice, fried bee hoon, sushi, ham, sausages, salad, sotong balls, fish fingers and assorted drinks, and we shared a log cake from Awfully Chocolate, which was left in the open in a hotel room i.e. unchilled for a few hours and turned out to be yummy but a tad dry; and we talked and joked and goggled at Open Season, Transformers and part of the hilarious Hot Fuzz – it was amazing how silent we were at some portions of the spectacular Transformers.

Also, earlier in the day, when I picked up the log cake from the Awfully Chocolate branch at Sembawang Hills Estate, I also tried some hei ice-cream, the dark chocolate ice-cream that Awfully Chocolate sells.  It was absolutely delicious – like premium dark chocolate made cloyingly smooth, almost liquid, the rich creaminess of the ice-cream superbly offsetting the bitterness of the dark chocolate.  Sore-throat-inducing, if one over-indulges :p

The lady who served me was incredibly chirpy and polite and full of Christmas cheer, even though she was working alone in the store on Christmas day.  I hope she had as good a Christmas as I did.

Another week on national service

The first week of this month saw yours truly again back on reservist training.  As with the last time, it was a productive time for reading – I finished a couple of below-par Nero Wolfe mysteries* (namely If Death Ever Slept and Death of a Dude) and Kathy Reichs’s Death Du Jour**.  (Yes yes, I know that’s a fairly morbid trio of titles.)

I wouldn’t have thought it mattered, but somehow not travelling to work made travel less of a routine, and I began to notice things, and observe, and ponder.  Like, how PSPs have joined MP3 players and multifunctional phones to make our society more crowded and un-connected.  Like, how a woman wearing black wraparound shades sat back, face-up, smiling, in one of the middle seats in a row full of sleeping, rocking zombies, letting the early morning sun play its light on her cheek and nose and cheek.  Like, how an old man, standing half a car away, peered outside with an expression of bland appreciation so intense that I looked in the direction he peered, and there were trees, grown taller and leafier since I last saw them. Like, how our friendship would have changed when my friends come back from their brave journey toward PhD-dom in Arizona and Colorado.  Like, how beneficient one must be to arrange for the wisecracking, foul-mouthed sergeant major taking care of us this reservist to have one of the friends’ name and small, wiry build.  And like, how, at the range, with ear-buds on, the air tinged with the scent of superheated oil from earlier shots, my fist intently pounding at the sandbag so as to nestle my rifle in the resulting depression and tuck it firmly against my shoulder, I begin to hear my own breath pulsing in, pulsing out, and the world begins to confine itself to that moment, and the next, and the next, until the order is given – “Watch your front!” – and the safety is clicked off, and my cheek lines itself along the gun and my eyes narrow and squint and the target appears and my finger pulls the trigger and the moment extends like silk from a spider, until the silk snaps in the wind and the target swings down, and the next appears.

*I’m a huge fan of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series.  For a long period, I would re-read his books before sleeping – the world of 1950s New York, Wolfe’s brownstone house, his idiosyncracies and his wisecracking sidekick Archie Goodwin (who’s a protagonist in these stories in the most un-Watson way) form a restful comfort zone.  These two books were disappointing in that the murderer could have been any of the suspects in either book, and essentially both Wolfe and Archie spend most of the book not solving the murder, but the pleasure of spending time with the two characters was worth the reading time, at least.

**My colleague and I had gone to New Zealand on work with another colleague last year, and we had discovered that we shared a liking for reading during the trip.  After we returned, we exchanged books: I passed her Poppy Z Brite‘s Liquor [click through to read Chapter 1, in pdf form], and she passed me the abovementioned Death Du Jour, and after nearly a year, I finally got to finishing it.  I really didn’t like it very much – I didn’t care for any of the characters – but the author’s web site is so good-naturedly friendly that I think I will give her another try.

Plato in a joke

In Sun with Moon*, and afterwards at the Borders** Bistro downstairs, I had the conversation I have come to expect with two good friends – thoughtful, opinionated, passionate academia-related stuff. As usual, I came away from our session thinking about teaching and doing research at a university for a living.

This time, we talked about what the teaching and research were for. About how schools sometimes focus their research more on theory – i.e. aiming to unearth a more complete picture of the world – or application i.e. aiming to solve problems.

About what to teach one’s students – how to pick among focused, immediately applicable skills (how to write an “inverse pyramid”-style news story, for example), less immediately applicable “life skills” (say, how to think and write clearly) and probably ultimately useless skills (case in point: do we need to know, really, how to do differential equations if we don’t end up teaching others how to do differential equations?).

About the differences between education in polytechnics and that in universities.

About how that distinction may get complicated again, if we talk about the teaching of professions – in which case the value-add in universities may be teaching would-be doctors how to think about doctoring, for example.

At the beginning of our conversation, I mentioned that I had read that, after his student complained about not gaining anything from being at his school, a Greek philosopher had given the student a penny and expelled him. Impressed, one friend asked which book I had read. Here is what I read, and from where:

In the fourth century BC, the great Athenian philosopher Plato established a school (the Academy) at which mathematics was a key portion of the curriculum. It was taught with the utmost rigor of which the times were capable, and it dealt with idealized shapes on which idealized operations were performed.

One student, who was put to stern mental exercise over the Platonic conception of mathematics, kept searching in vain for some application to the various forms of artisanry for which he knew mathematical concepts were useful.

Finally he said to Plato, ‘But, master, to what practical use can these theorems be put? What can be gained from them?’

The old philosopher glared at the inquiring student, turned to a slave, and said, ‘Give this young man a penny that he might feel he has gained something from my teachings and then expel him.’

- Joke 142 of Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor

Here’s Joke 137 from the same book. I do hope my friends won’t turn out to be too much like the good Professor Krumpelmayer:

‘I have brought a frog,’ said Professor Krumpelmayer, beaming at his class in elementary zoology, ‘fresh from the pond, in order that we might study its outer appearance and later dissect it.’

He carefully unwrapped the package he carried and inside was a neatly prepared ham sandwich.

The good professor looked at it with astonishment. ‘Odd,’ he said, ‘I distinctly remember having eaten my lunch.’

And here is Joke 156, about the utter uselessness of it all. Maybe.

Finkelstein had made a huge killing at the races and Moskowitz, quite understandably, was envious.

‘How did you do it, Finkelstein?’ he demanded.

‘Easy,’ said Finkelstein. ‘It was a dream.’

‘A dream?’

‘Yes. I had figured out a three-horse parlay, but I wasn’t sure about the third horse. Then the night before, I dreamed an angel was standing over the head of my bed and kept saying, “Blessings on you, Finkelstein. Seven times seven blessings on you.” When I woke up, I realized that seven times seven is forty-eight and that horse number forty-eight was Heavenly Dream. I made Heavenly Dream the third horse in my parlay and I just cleaned up; I simply cleaned up.’

Moskowitz said, ‘But, Finkelstein, seven times seven is forty-nine.’

And Finkelstein said, ‘So you be the mathematician.’

Or the person who learned the right math. Or taught it.

*One friend had the wafu ramen, which came with red dates. The other had a pork don. Both dishes got enthusiastically positive reviews from their tasters.

**I’d have added a link for you to subscribe to the Borders newsletter, which delivers some pretty good discount vouchers to your email address. Thing is, one has to print them out. And that’s tree slaughter. Anti-greenery is not cool.

Gifts II

Heh – in case the title does not make it clear, this here entry is a follow-up to a recent one titled “Gifts” (it’s a few entries back). Just to wrap things up and provide some closure to the one or two out there who are reading this :)

First, a little about my tastes when it comes to chocolate. It seems I enjoy dark chocolate the most, compared to milk and white chocolate; I’d rather chocolate be bitter than over-sweet, but a little sweetness is essential still. Since the main difference among these three varieties is the % of cocoa, and dark chocolate has the highest concentration, followed by milk, then white, I suppose that means I like a heftier, chocolate-ier choc.

And, oh, I love hazelnut with my chocs. And I think I like the praline type – with the nut in itty-bitty pieces mixed into a cream – the best.

So, to report on the gifts:

The Pocky sticks coated in dark chocolate were addictive – the dark chocolate coating was generous, bittersweet and rich.

The hazelnut KitKat were made of a white chocolate layer over hazelnut cream over the KitKat wafer, and that tasted great – with a very pleasing hazelnut rush – but it was just a bit too sweet.

Haven’t tried the green tea KitKat yet.

The blue parcel with the wintry feel (take a look at what I’m babbling about) housed some packets of confection – round, flat biscuits, with a layer of peanuts, and another of sugar. It’s interesting how the taste of the confection comes in a few phases – first nutty, then the plainer biscuit, then the sweet sugar. I’m now licking the sugared nuts from my teeth.

Gifts

A pal went on a Fly & Drive holiday to Japan with her folks, and brought me back some stuff!

So, that’s some Pocky – clearly stated Men’s, apparently because it’s bitter chocolate Pocky, and as a colleague said, men are bitter – and some grape jelly (lower left) and what looks like hazelnut KitKat and green tea KitKat.

And there was this box as well.

Wonder what this is. Will open it and see soon.

The average bear is now basking in the warm glow of good will and appreciation – for the pal, as well as for the fact that, in 70 days, it will be Christmas :)

Inconsequential

Last evening, I was talking with a good friend at Curry Favor*. We talked about how the last few months of our university days – spent in the ulu** reaches of NTU, completing our final year project (which took the form of an interesting experiment comparing personal relationships formed in face-to-face communication with those formed in ICQ-type instant messaging communication), writing lyrics that used to be familiar and challenging one another to remember the name of the song or the singer – were some of the best of our lives. As we talked, I realised that, to us, this FYP – to be completed so we could graduate – was one of the most important things in the world. We argued over whether the word “dovetail” belonged in an academic article. We made sure that each time the experiment ran, the two chairs our experimental subjects sat on to talk face-to-face were the same distance apart, because we did not want “distance between chairs” to be a variable. We approached a government organisation for grant money so we could provide some incentive for folks to participate in our experiment. We stayed till late to run the experiments; late was when students were not in class and therefore available to participate in them.

And then I realised that two rather contradictory things almost at once: One, that, while it turned out to be a widely cited paper, the FYP was inconsequential for me – I firmly believe I could have gotten to where I am without it. Two, that I don’t feel for my work a fraction of what I did for that thesis, in terms of sheer doggedness to getting it done and doing it right, and willingness to learn stuff and accept alternative views.

And my conclusion then was that what we do probably fades in significance to us as we age, due to a combination of increasing jadedness and growing recognition of the fact that what we do will not change the world. I thought it a natural thing, this paling of the world as we age.

I told my sister this, and I was feeling a little proud of myself for coming to that conclusion – I thought I had come across a truth. When I finished talking, she looked puzzled for the tiniest moment, then said, “But that’s because you’re not as passionate as you were…”

I realised my sister (she’s 11 years younger) was right. I realised I can re-capture that sense of dedication to excellence, that sense of crafting something that matters. I just need to find out what I’m passionate about.

P/S. My sis is a sage in disguise, I tell you.

PP/S. Our theme song for this half-year of late nights was an oldie by 邓妙华.

温柔的夜

<词：木子*** 曲：李思菘/李伟菘>

我的心是悠悠的湖水 温柔的月色是你的倒影
你把自己浸在夜里 未湿的长发牵动我的相思

我的心是轻轻的涟漪 开展的波纹是我的情绪
若能让你向着湖畔 你眼睛将是我梦里最美的心

多希望拥有小小的衣裳 轻轻为你点亮一盏灯
让我看清你 让我看清你 怕过了明天你不是做梦的年龄

多希望用我全部的生命 滴滴为你清唱这爱情
让你感觉我 让你感觉我 思念的湖水里浮动你的倒影

让我看清你 让我看清你 怕过了明天你不是做梦的年龄…

*Tried their beef and mushroom curry udon. Thought the curry was bland, the mushrooms okay, the beef cubes excellent. Also tried an appetiser of mushrooms coated in batter, deep-fried. I liked the fact that the mushrooms retained their winey juiciness.

**”Ulu” means out-of-the-way.

***Really enjoyed being taught Chinese by 木子 in secondary school.