WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — President Bush said today that a new intelligence finding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons work in 2003 had not altered his sense that Iran remained a danger.
The world needed to view the report as “a warning signal,” not grounds for reassurance, he said, and the United States would not renounce the option of a military response.
“I have said Iran is dangerous,” Bush said a day after the release of the National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus of all 16 American spy agencies, “and the N.I.E. doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world — quite the contrary.”
The report was welcomed by Iran today, which said it confirmed Tehran’s frequent protestations that its nuclear program has a purely civilian aim.
But it left some United States allies feeling uncertain about the way ahead. Key partners like France and Britain, in line with the administration response, said the report underscored that past concerns about Iran were well-founded.
But the assessment clearly complicated efforts to impose new sanctions on Iran at the United Nations Security Council, offering cover to Russia and China, two members most skeptical of sanctions.
Mr. Bush said that earlier in the day he had spoken at some length to President Vladimir Putin of Russia about Iran but declined to provide details.
“I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger for the world,” he said.
Reporters pressed the president to explain why as recently as October, he was saying that a nuclear-armed Iran could pose a risk of a “World War III.” But Bush said he had learned of the new intelligence findings on Iran, which have been in the works for months, only last week. When a reporter asked whether anyone in the intelligence community had urged him to step back from his tough warnings about Iran, he said, “No.”
Mr. Bush also denied that the United States’ credibility had suffered in light of the N.I.E. report, arguing instead that it reflected a more rigorous approach to intelligence.
“I want to compliment the intelligence community for their good work,” he said. “Right after the failure of intelligence in Iraq, we reformed the intelligence community.”
He said the new assessment was one result of those changes, adding, “The American people should have confidence that the reforms are working.”
The president insisted that the U.S. approach to Iran of “carrots and sticks,” he said had been vindicated by the fact that Iran had halted its weapons program.
“This is heartening news,” he said. “To me it’s a way for us to rally our partners.”
When another reporter offered the apologetic observation that the president looked “dispirited.” Mr. Bush rejected that with a laugh, accusing the journalist of practicing “Psychology 101.”
In Tehran, Iran welcomed what it said was the United States decision to “correct” its claim of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program, The Associated Press reported.
Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister, said it was natural that Tehran would welcome “countries that correct their views realistically, which in the past had questions and ambiguities” about Iranian nuclear activities.
Germany, one of the three West European governments involved in diplomacy with Iran, seemed to cast the American assessment in the most positive light. The finding, said a spokesman for the foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, demonstrated that the dual-track approach “to give incentives on the one hand and impose punitive measures at the Security Council was the right approach.”
In London, a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that Britain still saw a risk of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, adding, “in overall terms the government believes that the report confirms we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons.”
France said that its position in favor of tighter sanctions had not changed, Reuters reported from Paris. “Our position remains unchanged,” Pascale Andreani, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said. “It appears that Iran is not respecting its international obligations. We must keep up the pressure on Iran.”
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said that the report only strengthened the need for the international community to tighten sanctions so that Iran will not be able to produce nuclear weapons, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Mr. Olmert said that the N.I.E. assessment was brought up during his meetings with Washington officials following the Middle East Peace conference in Annapolis, Md., last week.
Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington and Elaine Sciolino from Paris.
as i am with thee.
:: kiathy. 4:25 pm [+] ::
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:: Saturday, November 24, 2007 ::
Travis - Afterglow Lyrics
feeling myself all of the time all of the time feeling alright taking a while raising a smile makes it all worthwhile but if you wanted to find peace of mind then you could find it any time you liked you are the afterglow feeling my way all of the time all of the time doing just fine taking a page out of my life out of my life wouldn't it be nice but if you wanted to find peace of mind then you couldn't find it any time you liked you are the afterglow you are the midnight show the only one i know you come and then you go and when you finally leave you leave nothing for me
:: kiathy. 2:29 am [+] ::
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for once in my life i feel like i'm gonna be terribly homesick before i leave for an overseas trip.
i wonder if it's the length of the trip or the timing of the trip.
i'm so not prepared to go.
:: kiathy. 2:45 pm [+] ::
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:: Saturday, November 10, 2007 ::
haha to everyone out there (especially soh yc), just FYI.
the passage below is from www.botakjones.com
it can be found there
in case you were wondering, botak jones serves food.
and so.
it isn't a love poem.
:: kiathy. 1:15 am [+] ::
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:: Friday, November 09, 2007 ::
Like a restaurant, when there are a lot of orders in, the time to get your food out may take longer than usual. PLEASE be patient, if you give us the time, we’ll have the room to prepare your food properly. PROMISE.
Our guarantee to you is if you taste the food and aren’t satisfied with your order, we’ll replace it, offer you something else or refund your money. Honest. We hope you enjoy what we’ve prepared for you and PLEASE let us know if you don’t. We’ll go to extraordinary lengths to make you happy.
i clearly understand that there is a great thick line between friends and acquaintances in this world. well okay the line isn't too thick because in my life i suppose people can switch camps rather quickly. but those are a minority. in fact i'm not even sure whether they exist.
in any case, due to the cynical streak in me, the first group in my msn contact list is PEOPLE I ACTUALLY TALK TO. yup i mean, how many out there actually bother msging the 398493284932 people on your msn list?
currently the list stands at 13, and as the name suggests, these are the people who have featured i've been actively talking to on msn for like the past week or so. yes even if these people are on my list i don't talk to them every single day. well to most i do. and so yes the list does get revised from time to time.
now after all that definition, all i wanted to say was, what do i do when that list's online status is 0/13? it means scrolling through my msn list and going through names in other groups in a futile attempt to evoke conversation with anyone. well. i'm blogging now because it's been a futile attempt so.
the 13 of you. you're very valued conversationalists/friends. and you probably know more or less everything happening in my life. until you get moved into the other groups. so do come online more often. especially at times like these when i just need a chat. :)
the holidays have come and gone. like wow a week's gone just like that. but alright i did get my mid term break. on wednesday i slept in till 430 pm. congratulations to me. evenings were mainly spent out as well. which was pretty cool.
studied little. relaxed more. very good.
now the suffering begins.
:: kiathy. 11:17 pm [+] ::
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it feels like the weekend already. but no it's only thursday early morning, or wednesday late night.
just got back from mehmeh's 21st birthday surprise. well surprised she was, we're kinda good huh. managed to get her good friends and family to join us at ps cafe, dempsey, which is really a kinda cool place with cool (read: high) prices . well but the ragout we had was really good.
well. i have a mid term paper tomorrow. feeling totally unfeeling towards it. perhaps it's the open book thing-i generally panic an hour before the paper when it's open book cos i then realise i haven't understood anything. well gonna wake up in 5 hours to attempt to consolidate my learnings.
and i had my first spanish class last night. oh well to be pretty honest, i'm not too thrilled to be heading to barcelona now cos my good friends are gonna be in pretty paris. well to spur myself on i can only tell myself that since i aspire to have an overseas career, living alone's gonna be part of it. so yea. i will make it.
hola :) como es tas? muy bien, y tu? muy bien, tambien, muchas gracias.
today i've realised that, being the person i am, i usually set myself up for more disappointment than necessary.
so from today i shall learn to lower my expectations of everything and everyone.
:: kiathy. 12:24 am [+] ::
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:: Monday, October 01, 2007 ::
rather interesting. and very friedman.
September 30, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
9/11 Is Over
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Not long ago, the satirical newspaper The Onion ran a fake news story that began like this:
“At a well-attended rally in front of his new ground zero headquarters Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officially announced his plan to run for president of 9/11. ‘My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise,’ said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. ‘As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all.’ If elected, Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world’s conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions.”
Like all good satire, the story made me both laugh and cry, because it reflected something so true — how much, since 9/11, we’ve become “The United States of Fighting Terrorism.” Times columnists are not allowed to endorse candidates, but there’s no rule against saying who will not get my vote: I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate.
What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.
It is not that I thought we had new enemies that day and now I don’t. Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers. But we also need our old habits and sense of openness. For me, the candidate of 9/12 is the one who will not only understand who our enemies are, but who we are.
Before 9/11, the world thought America’s slogan was: “Where anything is possible for anybody.” But that is not our global brand anymore. Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”
You may think Guantánamo Bay is a prison camp in Cuba for Al Qaeda terrorists. A lot of the world thinks it’s a place we send visitors who don’t give the right answers at immigration. I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans. Guantánamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
Roger Dow, president of the Travel Industry Association, told me that the United States has lost millions of overseas visitors since 9/11 — even though the dollar is weak and America is on sale. “Only the U.S. is losing traveler volume among major countries, which is unheard of in today’s world,” Mr. Dow said.
Total business arrivals to the United States fell by 10 percent over the 2004-5 period alone, while the number of business visitors to Europe grew by 8 percent in that time. The travel industry’s recent Discover America Partnership study concluded that “the U.S. entry process has created a climate of fear and frustration that is turning away foreign business and leisure travelers and hurting America’s image abroad.” Those who don’t visit us, don’t know us.
I’d love to see us salvage something decent in Iraq that might help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive pathway. That was and is necessary to improve our security. But sometimes the necessary is impossible — and we just can’t keep chasing that rainbow this way.
Look at our infrastructure. It’s not just the bridge that fell in my hometown, Minneapolis. Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. I still can’t get uninterrupted cellphone service between my home in Bethesda and my office in D.C. But I recently bought a pocket cellphone at the Beijing airport and immediately called my wife in Bethesda — crystal clear.
I just attended the China clean car conference, where Chinese automakers were boasting that their 2008 cars will meet “Euro 4” — European Union — emissions standards. We used to be the gold standard. We aren’t anymore. Last July, Microsoft, fed up with American restrictions on importing brain talent, opened its newest software development center in Vancouver. That’s in Canada, folks. If Disney World can remain an open, welcoming place, with increased but invisible security, why can’t America?
We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July — which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.
Kolsom Ahmady lives in a village on the Iran-Iraq border. As a young girl, 40 years ago, she had chosen her intended. Then her elder brother eloped - and she found herself paying for his happiness with her own freedom
Interview by Kameel Ahmady Monday October 1, 2007
Guardian
I have never told anyone this story in its entirety before. My name is Kolsom Ahmady. I don't know how old I am because I never went to school and have lived most my life in a village in Iran called Gardashewan. But I suppose I must be over 50. I was born into a poor family. My father died when I was five, leaving behind four girls and two boys, and we were brought up under the close supervision of our uncles and other family elders.
When I was about 10, Uncle Abdoulla (then the head of the entire Ahmady family) ordered my mother to move to his home; he felt that a widow living alone with her children might bring into question the honour of the whole family. Our new life in the town of Nagheda was great; it was a different world: new things, new clothes - and electricity.
Although there were six families living together and we were under the constant observation of the male elders and our young male cousins, there was always a chance to go outside to fetch drinking water from the nearby pump. That's when we used to flirt with boys, who would wait for us in the evenings. There was no exchange of words but we found other ways to communicate: you could choose your intended by accepting the small bottles of perfume they would offer, or sometimes a carefully waxed apple. They would wax them so that they shined, and this fruit had such a fragrance. We called them shemama.
Life went on this way until we realised that Karim, our oldest brother, was spending more and more time in a village about six or seven hours away, buying livestock to sell on at a profit in the large cities such as Tehran. It was on these trips that Karim fell in love, and asked my uncles to send a messenger to the girl's family to request permission for a marriage. But each time we tried we were turned down - perhaps because they didn't want their daughter to live so far away from them.
After all these negotiations, life returned to normal, until late one evening Karim returned after a few days' absence; however, he was not alone. I would guess the young girl with him, Amina, was around my own age. She looked tired, was soaked through from the rain, and covered all over in thick mud. My mother shouted in happiness, saying: "Karim Jani helgertoa!" ("Karim my son, you have lifted a woman!") - a phrase commonly used when a young man convinces a girl to elope with him. Days passed and many messengers, elders and clergymen were sent to the young bride's house, in order to reach a deal after this small scandal, but her father wanted only one thing: a woman in return for the loss of his daughter - one from our family to marry his eldest son.
In those days, I didn't have a care in the world. I believed in love, but what did I know? I was in love with a boy from the neighbourhood, and all day I would wait for the moment each evening when, with the other girls, I would fetch water from the pump. Once there, I used to see him, waiting for me with a smile, playing with a nicely waxed shemama in his hands. He would follow me almost all the way home - but not getting too close in case my cousins or uncle noticed.
One night, not too long after my brother had brought Amina home, my eldest uncle's wife called to see me. "Amina's family has asked for you," she said. "They want you to marry their eldest son, Qadir." I was shocked, and certainly I didn't want to marry a boy I had no feelings for, someone I didn't even know. I cried for days, but the decision had been made. I didn't dare tell my uncle Abdoulla that I didn't want to marry this man, that I rejected his decision. I tried speaking to his wife, to my mother and all the other female elders, but all knew there was no way around it, however much they might have sympathised with my sadness. The family's "honour" was at stake and a way had to be found to solve this dispute that my brother Karim's elopement had caused. He had found love and happiness, but it appeared that I must sacrifice my own for that. In order to make the marriage halal, I must give up my freedom and my chance for love.
I wasn't in a position to speak to Karim; he was as young as I was and, to be fair, he didn't have much power over the elders' decisions. Finally facing the reality of my situation, I asked Amina how Qadir looked, how old he was, trying to get a picture of the man I would have to spend the rest of my life with. She told me he was much older than me, but she had a thought - her other brother Ali was more handsome and younger. Having no chance to be really free, I sent a message to the male elders that I would only be willing to reconcile the dispute by marrying Ali, and not Qadir. The reply came back: it was their family tradition, the eldest son was to be wed before other sons. Qadir it would be.
No one could help me and I was too terrified to run away with the man I loved, though I thought about it. I sent my younger sister to tell him what was happening. Although I knew he couldn't help me, he returned the message by saying he hoped one day we would be together. (I didn't see him for many years until I met him by chance in a textile store: I walked in, and it turned out he was the owner, but neither of us had anything to say.) There were so many considerations. My mother was stuck between her love for two of her children, and both our futures were at stake.
A few days later, two cars came to the house, bringing Amina's father and a clergyman, and there they married me to Qadir in an Islamic ceremony, with my uncle as my representative and Amina's father as Qadir's. Neither I nor Qadir were present. Half an hour later I was on my way to my new home in the village of Gardashewan. The first time I met Qadir was later that same day, my wedding night. I was so angry, scared and embarrassed that I hardly looked at him.
Well, my life began there. A new life - cleaning up after the animals each morning before the sun rose, and milking large numbers of livestock twice a day. I was supposed to bake bread, clean the house, make blocks of fuel from the animal waste. These were my routines now. The most difficult part of the year was when some of us used to go to the mountains and live in tents for four or five months to graze the livestock in summer pastures, although nowadays I find this a relative freedom from the dull village atmosphere, and the air is fresh. I can relax a bit.
My first child was born a year after my so-called marriage began. I named her Zolegha, and she was followed by another five boys and girls. I watched Zolegha growing up, and every now and then I used to tell her stories from my past, the sweet days back in the town. I knew she had fallen in love with a young man, Ahmet, from the village. But Ahmet had only a mother to speak for him and my husband's family did not approve. In some ways, it was just like it had been for my mother's family after my father died; without a man as a family head, we had no say over our own futures.
Thinking back about what I went through and how I was forced to marry someone I had never met and didn't feel any love for, I couldn't allow the same thing to happen to my daughter some 20 years later. One evening, I asked Zolegha's boyfriend to meet me in a hidden spot outside the village. Zolegha and I went to see him, and I told him there and then that I gave them my blessing. I did this at great risk, but I did not want my daughter to live a loveless life. The three of us knew that Zolegha would not, after that moment, enjoy any support from her family, and that is the decision she made. My only valuable possession was a pair of earrings, which I gave to her that night. Then I sent them off, with my tears flowing down my face. After a few years, I pushed for a reconciliation between our family and Ahmet's; it began with us, the women, who would try to socialise. Eventually, my husband came to accept his daughter again.
Maybe what I did wasn't something women do, or at least not those from the Kurdish tradition in those days. I knew that I would be looked down upon by other families because our girl had run away. I knew it would be hard to take all this tension within the family itself, where men are quick to blame mothers for not raising their daughters "properly". But how could I allow my little girl to suffer in the way I did for so many years?
Looking back on those days, who should we blame for this? My uncles? My brother Karim? Amina? Or the tradition and religion I come from? For so many years I have lived with this man and looked after him, and he looks after me. We are like one unit now. I know how much anger I stored within me for much of that time. But now my oldest uncle has passed away, and recently Amina died of a brain haemorrhage. Having somehow, after all this time, got used to my husband, I guess I found a way to forgive them all.
· Kolsom still lives in the village of Gardashewan near the Iran-Iraq border of Kurdistan.
ive been meaning to blog for awhile, but there always seems to be a lack of time. well i am one who believes that time can never been a good excuse, so slap me on that one.
packing my room for the past 2 hours has been rather, stupid. i now feel tired and dumb cos i'm waking up 6 hours later for tennis. yes friday morning tennis, the perks of having no friday class. well i suppose it didn't seem like such a bad idea to start packing my room since i felt in the mood to do so. but it was probably a bad idea to be starting at about midnight.
i've too much stuff and memento that i want to keep. yes i'm a hoarder. probably need a big big storeroom when i get my own pad.
in any case. this is a better post than the previous. and i've no idea how to label this. how do you fit such posts into anywhere?
clinging onto my audit textbook today on the train was quite an embarrassing experience - i wanted to hide the fact that i was an accountancy student, but the alternative was walter woon's company law, plus the audit text was way heavier - i didn't want my bag to snap. i also believe that the expats speaking in a foreign tongue were sneering at my audit textbook, the same way i'd do if i ever spotted one in the future.
weird feeling. but i suppose it points me away from one career path.
pot calling the cattle black.
:: kiathy. 1:50 pm [+] ::
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:: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 ::
there's been much talk that the 911 tragedy has been overhyped, and that it's been going on for far too long. memorials have been shifted to other places, families have been told to move on. but i suppose only personal tales can tell part of the story and how, even 6 years on, it still hurts.
September 9, 2007
Modern Love
Passage to India, by Way of an Elevator
By KATHERINE RUSSELL RICH
THEY say that in a different language you become a different person, but in Hindi I’d barely gotten a handle on the subjunctive and already I wasn’t myself. This first became apparent in an East Village restaurant where some friends had taken me for a bon voyage party. The spring before, I’d signed a contract to write a book about learning Hindi, a language I’d been studying on a lark. Now I was about to go off to India, to live there for a year and document the process.
The idea for the book had seemed exotic when I was writing the proposal, ingenious when the pages were going around, but then the deal went through, and now it struck me as deranged. A brochure had arrived from the school where I had enrolled, complete with tips on what to substitute for toilet paper. I read it and realized an obvious fact: I had not been in my right mind.
That night at the bar, with my departure fast approaching, I was a slumped-down portrait of misery, but then a troop of firemen came clomping into the place, all of them attractive in the extreme. They’d been called in to revive a guy at the bar, a heroin addict, best I could tell, who’d begun a slow-motion dive toward the floor; presently, he was stuck midway. Once they ascertained that the guy had some time to go before he hit, they put off first-aid procedures and took to flirting with our table.
“Hey, ladies,” one called over. “You taking bets on when he’ll land?”
“Hey, ladies,” another said, “this is like dinner theater for you, huh?”
They broke to shout “Hey, hey!” at the addict, and then the oldest one strolled over.
HEY, ladies, how’s the food?” he asked with the air of a maître d’, as if this inquiry was part of his job. He had a raspy voice, dirty blond hair and a fine straight nose; in my dazed state, he resembled one of the men in tights in a 15th-century Tuscan painting.
My usual response in a situation like this would be to examine my fork. But I was no longer who I’d usually been. I was now someone who behaved rashly. “Why don’t you join us?” I heard myself say.
“Why don’t you go on a date with me?” he replied.
“O.K.,” I answered calmly, suavely, with the ease borne of oxygen deprivation. I’d never done anything remotely like this. But change your language, you change your life.
He produced a pen. I wrote down my number.
We met in the upstairs of a low-lit Italian restaurant. He had on a suit and tie. He looked as if the tag on his shirt was itchy, or maybe that was projection on my part, for that was about how I felt. Up until now I’d been out only with men who could be described as creative types: a performance artist who hung naked over jacaranda flowers and stabbed himself in the chest, people like that. On a date like this, I wasn’t sure what you were supposed to talk about.
He led with his best shot, stories about his uncle who was in the mob. Then I did, too. I wrote his name in Devanagari script on a napkin. I’d been immersed in Hindi too long, or else I’d dated too many men of the creative kind, but I honestly believed this was a come on.
“Yo, really? That’s how you make a ‘p’?” he said with extreme politeness.
We had so little in common, it made the evening heady. “India!” he said when I mentioned my plan. “India? You mean like with elephants?”
I didn’t take offense when he said he disliked journalists, adding, “with all due respect,” since after all, I was one. He told me about the time he’d grabbed a baby from a burning room and raced him down five flights. When he got to the ground, he tried to hand the child off to the first man he saw, but the man, a reporter, refused to take him.
He shook his head. “Yeah, I’ll give you an interview,” he told the memory of the man now. “Yeah, I’ll give you one.”
He told me how he planned to open a small business when he retired in three years, one with a fail-safe gimmick. I can’t say what the gimmick was, because he held out his pinkie, linked it with mine, and made me do swears. He said he had never been out of the country before, but was thinking of traveling to Italy.
I tried to imagine us in Italy or even together, period, in three years. I decided, maybe I could. True, all I got when I tried to imagine it was a split screen—me on one side returned and speaking Hindi, him doing swears. But stranger things have happened. In fact, stranger things had been happening to me all year.
When I thought about what we should do next, though, I was overcome with exhaustion. We’d been dive-bombing in and out of each other’s worlds, and while I wanted to meet again, right then I had to go to bed.
“I’ve got my car. I’ll give you a ride,” he said gallantly. It was a ride with a detour: he first had to stop at the station for no reason other than, I’m pretty sure, that he wanted to show the guys he was on a date. But when we arrived, no one was there. He brought me out an F.D.N.Y. T-shirt, then we sat in the car and waited. Eventually a firetruck roared up, and I met a sweet and courtly old guy, the captain, and shook hands with the rest of the troops.
After that, he took me home, and on my doorstep he said, “I want to come up.” We argued the pros and cons. The con, to me, was that I’d just met him. The pro, to him, was that he really wanted to. Finally I broke the stalemate. I turned and said I had to go.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait.” And he nodded at a massive brick apartment complex across the street, a soaring behemoth with four towers. “If I can get us up to the roof over there, will you go up and make out with me?”
I asked how he thought he’d do that.
He smiled. “I have the fire key.”
Everyone has his threshold, they say, and it turns out in this new incarnation, mine wasn’t very high. “The fire key!” I said. “Well, O.K.”
We sneaked in the front door, crept by the doorman, pushed a button. The elevator whisked us to the top. But when we got there, the fire key wouldn’t work. “All right, that’s it,” I said. “I’m going.”
“Wait,” he said. “If I can stop the elevator, what about that? Will you make out with me in there?”
“How are you going to do that?” I said, laughing conspiratorially.
We got back in, and for at least 20 minutes, we kissed up there in the air.
And this would have been one of the great moments of my romantic life, except for one fact he’d overlooked: when you stop one elevator with a fire key, you stop them all. Every lift in the system, on a Saturday night, when residents are trying to get home.
We caught up with this information as soon as the elevator landed and the doors opened on a sea of angry people. Worse, they’d all been watching us on the elevator cam.
“Hey, you can’t stop the elevator like that!” a sniffy-sounding man in his pajamas cried. He was holding an aggrieved-looking dog. “Just because you’re a fireman, you can’t use the key that way. No you can’t. O.K., I’m calling the police.”
He meant business, you could tell. I looked over to see what my date would do. But my date was a New York City boy. What he did was bluff. No matter what anyone said, he’d answer, “Waddya mean?” Waddya mean, waddya mean, until he got them all arguing. Then he leaned down, grabbed my hand and whispered, “Run.”
We cut through the crowd. We bolted out the door. A siren that had been faint in the distance was wailing louder and louder. We flew across the street and scrambled onto my doorstep just as the police car pulled up, then we stood motionless in the dark. “You know what?” he said, between gulps of air. “Now you have to let me up.”
I shot a glance over my shoulder. “You know what?” I said. “Now I do.”
Upstairs, he had me keep the lights off. We crouched by the window and peered down. We said, “Can you believe that?” We laughed and breathed in the August night air until motion in the gray light below caught our eye, men in uniforms returning to the car. Then he flung the window screen up and told me to yell down, “You won’t take me alive, copper!”
And I did, without a moment’s thought, because by then it was clear that I was so far out of my formerly right mind, no way anyone would.
When the coast was clear, I said I had to turn in. At my door, we kissed some more, then exchanged addresses. We said we’d write.
I LEFT for India. It was apparent to me only sometime after what that night had been: a moment of pure, shining glee, the kind that can happen only right before everything changes, that can take full shape only then, because such distilled purity can be obtained only in retrospect, in an aftermath.
On Sept. 6, 2001, I arrived in Delhi. Five days later, everything changed.
Friends back home diligently phoned everywhere they could think of to find out if he was alive, to no avail. Finally a friend’s 82-year-old husband tottered down to the fire station and learned: he’d survived. He had been out of the country, in fact, on a first-ever trip abroad — spontaneously booked that week.
I wrote, said how very relieved I had been to hear he was all right. A letter arrived. He’d lost 92 friends, he said. Everyone we had met that night, including the captain, had been killed. He said to call him when I was home again. When I was home again, I did. Several times, but while each time he would say, “Yeah, yeah, we should,” a meeting never took place. Finally I saw that a meeting never would. Because by that time, he was no longer there.
He had already, and some time back, entered another world.
Katherine Russell Rich lives in Manhattan. Her second book, “Unspeakable: A Story About India and Life in Other Words,” is to be published next year by Houghton Mifflin.
i'd like to travel eastern europe next year, considering i've covered a few of the west and central. any followers?
So near and yet so far
Michael Palin has already travelled around the world, from pole to pole and across the Himalayas. Here he explains what drove him to make his latest odyssey, from Estonia to Albania - across the 'new Europe'
In Slovenia it was the Month of Asparagus, in Turkey men wrestled in olive oil. In Poland I went on stage dressed as a three-year-old and in Germany I engaged with the great debate about whether men should stand or sit to pee. One starts with such high hopes, but reality is a fickle thing and makes fools of us all.
It was not my intention to do another journey. It never is. At the end of my TV series Around the World in 80 Days I said I wouldn't do anything like that again, and I said the same thing for the five series that followed it. I shall doubtless say the same after Michael Palin's New Europe. So why do I bother to lie? Why don't I just get the bag out, get down to the airport and get on with it? Part of the problem is that it's hard work and takes me away from home. Yet even as I write this I realise these are two of the main reasons I enjoy it. I love my home and my family dearly, but I'm aware that love grows in direct proportion to the amount of time I spend away. And as for the hard work, I need it to combat a dangerous tendency to sit in cafes, read books, have long lunches and watch all five days of a Test match.
And of course I learn a lot from my travels. Things I wouldn't learn at home, like how to survive on five hours' sleep a night, how to distinguish yoghurt from mayonnaise in hotel buffets, and how to say sorry in Pashtun.
But sharing my travels with large numbers of people across the world, on film and on the page, is something else altogether, and carries with it a whole lot of anxieties that have to be wrestled with before each new departure. Like what I should be telling people and why. What is my agenda? What is my purpose? What can I possibly tell the world that the Charles Wheelers, Colin Thubrons, Dervla Murphys and the like haven't already told them?
But this way madness lies. I have, for the past six series, found that it is better not to be too self-conscious. My approach, and it's one I'd urge on any would-be travel writer or journalist stepping on to a foreign dockside, is be yourself, and see where it gets you.
I like to travel as light as possible. I try not to go out with too many prejudices or come back with too many opinions. I'm frequently approached by people who want to know how travel has changed me and what great insights I might have had on dusty roads and in blazing sunsets. Now I no longer even try to make up an answer. Any journey away from the room you're sitting in will increase the potential for coming upon the unexpected and occasionally wonderful, but that's not to equate travel with ultimate enlightenment or universal solutions, any more than breathing will ensure you become president of the US. It helps, but that's about all. I've learned that what I like about travel is that it doesn't sort everything out. Actually, it doesn't sort anything out. Where there was certainty, it sows uncertainty, where there is conviction, it sows doubt, where there is comfort, it sows heat rash. It's just that being in unfamiliar surroundings watching unfamiliar activity is something I find, on the whole, deeply refreshing.
This sort of floppy, undemanding reasoning is why I usually end up packing my bag for some sort of journey, somewhere, even though I've said I'm not going to. And as I always take a notebook when I travel, why not a camera - especially one wielded as skilfully and discreetly as my old friend Nigel Meakin's? And how nice to have someone record the sounds that no notebook can ever capture. And wouldn't it be nice to have someone to share laughter, decisions and food with, someone who's not a stranger to adventure and recklessness, but will leave you alone when required? In short, why not take a film crew ?
In the case of New Europe, however, things were a little different. Since we'd last been on the road together in April 2004, the Saga factor had kicked in. I was about to turn 63 and aware of Nigel, my cameraman, being hard on my heels, and sound recordist John Pritchard not far behind. Meanwhile, Roger Mills, my hugely experienced director, was well on course to be our only septuagenarian. After two years away from each other, advancing age might well, I thought, result in polite "No thank-you"s all round, unless the new series could be set entirely in deckchairs. (John Pritchard had indeed come up with a title for such a series: Death by Luxury.)
I was quite wrong. There were not only "Yes please"s but "When do we start?"s. Indeed, some were keen to make this trip as tough as any of the others, and for a while South America was in the frame. But then there was the Archie factor. When we were planning the series, my wife and I were expecting our first grandchild, who was due to emerge less than two months before the start of filming. Working within a few hours' flying time from home no longer seemed optional, but essential.
So I started looking very seriously at Europe, the only continent our journeys had not yet covered and which we normally flew over in half-darkness while returning from Bangladesh or Bamako. Western Europe was overvisited, but the east, the half of Europe that used to be concealed behind the Iron Curtain, was much more promising. It also fulfilled one of the main criteria for choice of journey, being somewhere as new to me as it probably would be to most of my audience.
But I sensed that eastern Europe remained a turn-off for many people, for whom it would always be a state of mind rather than a location. Himalaya tripped nicely off the tongue and had an exotic, escapist image. Say eastern Europe, and Soviet tanks rather than snow-capped mountains come to mind. However, the more closely I looked at the countries we might visit, the more I realised what exciting things were happening there. Half a continent was being transformed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of countries in eastern Europe doubled. And it's not just new names on the map, but new political systems, new currencies, new ideas, new problems.
In fact the N-word was repeated so often in what I read and heard that I realised it could be the hook for the series. If eastern Europe evoked a dour and shackled past, new Europe, or, as we say in television, New Europe, suggested present and future. Horizons of hope. Around the beginning of 2006, as our two directors and their respective location managers began to make their first visits to the eastern half of Europe, things began to fall into place. Countries suspicious of visitors for 50 years proved welcoming and cooperative. There were people who had great stories to tell and were eager to tell them. Word came back of landscapes like the Danube delta, the Carpathian mountains, Transylvania, Cappadocia and the Curonian Spit, as beautiful as any we'd seen in the wider world, and much less well known.
So a series of six episodes fell quite quickly into place. (It has since become seven.) The BBC accepted it. Archie Palin arrived, and evoked such a primal rush of adoration that I couldn't possibly have imagined working a continent away from him. And on the first day of filming none of us arrived at Heathrow with stick or Zimmer frame.
At risk of breaking the Trades Descriptions Act, I have to admit that new Europe proved very much a story of old Europe. The past intruded on almost every conversation we had and in every town we filmed. Not the quaint past of cobbled streets and church spires (though there was plenty of that), but the raw and shocking past of the 20th century. We in the west have fought and suffered through two world wars, but in eastern Europe the misery was prolonged and relentless. The first of our journeys, which took us down through the former Yugoslavia, was a reminder of how recently Europeans were fighting each other. As late as 1999, our boys were bombing Belgrade. In Sarajevo we talked to people in streets that were death traps only 13 years ago. The eloquent and painstaking leader of a Bosnian mine-clearance team was the same man who had planted some of the mines in the first place. A young Serbian told me that her people had no hatred for others in the Balkans, but then, with a look of bitter frustration, added that the same mentality that had brought Milosevic to power was taking things in that direction again. In the former Yugoslavia, the hurt is so recent that optimists can only hold their breath.
Much of the rest of east and central Europe was brutalised 50 or more years earlier and some of the pain is receding, partly due to the candid, unsensational but comprehensive preservation of concentration camps, torture cells and grim historical records, which make both complacency and denial that much more difficult.
Cities of great history and culture such as Gdansk, Warsaw, Dresden, Budapest and Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) were devastated not just by Nazi and Soviet armies on the ground but by Allied bombers from the air.
And it went on. Eleven years after the war ended, thousands were rounded up and killed in Hungary following the unsuccessful uprising of 1956. As recently as 1991, people died under guns and tanks in Lithuania. There was civil war in the young republic of Moldova in 1992 when Transnistria broke away. All across the east of Europe the 20th century was a pattern of retribution disguised as liberation.
But in this new century a fragile peace has broken out across these bloodied lands. Whether it's from exhaustion or new-found tolerance is hard to tell, but I found that the confidence gained from EU membership has made an enormous difference (something that makes quite a change from the continuous whingeing with which the same subject is greeted here). For the likes of Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria, membership is more than just access to money or freedom of trade - it's a sign that they're once again being taken seriously as European players (Hungary, Poland, Lithuania and the Czechs having at times had great and enlightened empires in Europe).
It's not clear what the future holds. Alongside relief that there is peace and security comes expectation. If ranks start to close again, there could be trouble. Countries, like the individuals of whom they are made up, want to be appreciated and respected. There are many we spoke to in Turkey, for instance, who feel themselves to be European, and cannot understand why somewhere like Bulgaria should be welcomed into the EU while their bid for membership is viewed with suspicion and often downright hostility. Raffi Portakal, an art entrepreneur who recently brought the first ever Picasso exhibition to Turkey, told me that he accepted that a club should have rules, but if that club keeps changing its rules then it risks losing respect and authority.
Whatever happens, I feel I have learned a lot this past year. Eastern Europe is no longer faceless. I can remember all 20 countries we travelled through (twice as many as in the Sahara and Himalaya series put together) and I can recall what makes each one different. I no longer see rows of concrete housing blocks as the only urban landscape in the east, and those I do see I now know much more about, including the multifarious lives going on inside them. I see beyond the cliche of belching smokestacks and fog-bound factories, to some of the most unspoiled and beautiful agricultural landscape on the continent. And the only Soviet tank on the move was being driven by me, at a school on the Polish-German border.
I've laughed as much as, if not more than, on any of the journeys so far, and I've done some very silly things I can't imagine being allowed to do in eastern Europe 20 years ago, like strutting the catwalk in a Budapest fashion show and appearing on Polish daytime television.
What's most important is that instead of seeing east and central Europe as a mysterious world into which I, as a westerner, could never be fully initiated, I now see it as a cultural, political extension of my own world. The bond of history and proximity is stronger than any ideology. We have much more in common than sets us apart. It's a bit like discovering a long-lost branch of your family. We shall doubtless still quarrel as families do, but at least we can get together for a party every now and then.
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks. Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.
"Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world," said psychologist Will Reader, from Sheffield Hallam University.
Social networking websites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace have taken off rapidly in recent years. Facebook was launched initially in 2004 for Harvard University members but has since expanded to more than 34 million users worldwide. MySpace, which was set up in 2003, has more than 200 million users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 2005 for $580m (£285m).
Previous research has suggested that a person's conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people whom we keep in touch with less regularly.
This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people.
But Dr Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure.
The team asked more than 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face. The team found that although the sites allowed contact with hundreds of acquaintances, as with conventional friendship networks, people tend to have around five close friends.
Ninety per cent of contacts whom the subjects regarded as close friends were people they had met face to face.
"People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close friendships," added Dr Reader. He told the British Association Festival of Science in York that social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy. "What social network sites can do is decrease the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post information to multiple people," he said.
But to develop a real friendship we need to see that the other person is trustworthy, said Dr Reader. "What we need is to be absolutely sure that a person is really going to invest in us, is really going to be there for us when we need them ... It's very easy to be deceptive on the internet."
i wonder if the world trusts my reading. like do the things that i read, and recommend others to read, actually add value? well i'd like to think so. so here's an article to chew on.
Polish author jailed over killing he used as plot
· Pole orchestrated murder of suspected love rival · Police stumped until they read gruesome thriller
Ian Traynor in Warsaw Thursday September 6, 2007
Guardian
A Polish pulp fiction writer was sentenced to 25 years in jail yesterday for his role in a grisly case of abduction, torture and murder, a crime that he then used for the plot of a bestselling thriller.
In a remarkable case that has gripped Poland for months, Krystian Bala, a writer of blood-curdling fiction, was found guilty of orchestrating the murder seven years ago of a Wroclaw businessman, Dariusz Janiszewski, in a crime of passion brought on by the suspicion that the victim was sleeping with his ex-wife.
In the novel, the villain gets away with kidnapping, mutilating and murdering a young woman.
In real life, however, Bala got his comeuppance, even though it was seven years after the disappearance of the advertising executive whose murder confounded detectives until they read the book.
The killing of Janiszewski was one of the most gruesome cases to come before a Polish court in years, with the "Murder, He Wrote" sub-plot unfolding in the district court in Wroclaw and keeping the country spellbound.
Janiszewski, said to have been having an affair with Bala's ex-wife, was scooped out of the river Oder near Wroclaw in south-west Poland by fishermen in December 2000, four weeks after going missing.
The police tests revealed that he was stripped almost naked and tortured. His wrists had been bound behind his back and tied to a noose around his neck before he was dumped in the river.
The police had little to go on. Within six months, Commissar Jacek Wroblewski, leading the investigation, dropped the case. It remained closed for five years despite the publication in 2003 of the potboiler Amok, by Bala, a gory tale about a bunch of bored sadists, with the narrator, Chris, recounting the murder of a young woman. The details of the murder matched those of Janiszewski almost exactly.
Bala, who used the first name Chris on his frequent jaunts abroad, was arrested in 2005 after Commissar Wroblewski received a tip-off about the "perfect crime" and was advised to read the thriller. But Bala was released after three days for insufficient evidence, despite the commissar's conviction that he had his villain. When further evidence came to light, Bala was re-arrested. The case against him, however, remained circumstantial.
Police uncovered evidence that Bala had known the dead man, had telephoned him around the time of his disappearance and had then sold the dead man's mobile phone on the internet within days of the murder.
When Poland's television equivalent of Crimewatch aired details of the case in an attempt to generate fresh police leads, the programme's website received messages from various places in the far east, places that Bala, a keen scuba diver, was discovered to have been visiting at the time of the messages.
All along, Bala protested his innocence, insisting that he derived the details for the Amok thriller from media reports of the Janiszewski murder.
Sentencing Bala to 25 years' jail yesterday, Judge Lidia Hojenska admitted that he could not be found directly guilty of carrying out the murder. But the evidence sufficed to find him guilty of planning and orchestrating the crime. "The evidence gathered gives sufficient basis to say that Krystian Bala committed the crime of leading the killing of Dariusz Janiszewski," she said.
The court heard expert and witness evidence that Bala was a control freak, eager to show off his intelligence, "pathologically jealous" and inclined to sadism. "He was pathologically jealous of his wife," said Judge Hojenska. "He could not allow his estranged wife to have ties with another man."
His lawyer said yesterday that Bala would appeal against the verdict and sentence.
Stranger than Fiction
·William Burroughs' accidental killing of his wife Joan while attempting to shoot a glass off her head was later documented in his novel Queer. He wrote: "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death."
· Thirteen years after OJ Simpson's acquittal for the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, his controversial account of how he would have committed the crime was published. In a chapter entitled The Night in Question, Simpson describes his confrontation with Goldman, "Then something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can't tell you exactly how."
· In 2001 the son of author Errol Trzebinski was murdered in a similar manner to that described in her book The Life and Death of Lord Erroll. She believes the killing was a warning against an investigation she was conducting into the suspicious death of the 22nd Earl of Erroll, whom she believes was killed by the British intelligence services.
i can't grapple with my life. not just my facebook.
:: kiathy. 8:45 am [+] ::
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:: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 ::
i can't grapple with facebook.
i think i'm growing too old. 23 and. growing.
oh noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
the week's gonna be rather packed. having project meetings for one topic almost every day is totally brain-sapping. it's week 3 and i was in school till 11 yesterday for a project meeting. speak about absurdity. well that's mainly cos we're presenting next week. that means another meeting today, tomorrow, thursday. f u c.
my exchange results will be out this friday. i applied to barcelona so i'm gonna be needing to learn some espanol, if i do get my first choice. it's really quite fast eh i'll be there in say, 13+4 17 weeks. wow.
people are saying it's 12 weeks to the exams, i see it as 12 weeks to the end of the term and half way through my 3rd year. i don't really want the school years to end honestly. as much as i'd prefer to have money in my hands and stuff. like hey it's only about, 30+15+12 = 57 weeks to the end of my undergraduate studies. :(
i'm extremely bored and restless so here's something for today.
just some interesting reads, which i've pretty much been doing (reading, sleeping, eating) for today. i shan't lament my fate because i've been out having fun friday/saturday, so sunday has to be a stay-home-to-study day. problem #1 was when i only woke up at 1 pm. not much of the day left. problem #2 presented itself in the endless supply of unhealthy snacks (read non-fruit) available at home, and problem #3 - nasilemak my mum cooked today. problem #4 - a nap from 5 pm to 7 pm. problem #5 - this.
my choir, victoria chorale, is holding her concert at the Esplanade Concert Hall tomorrow, 730 pm (Sunday). So if you're someone who reads this, come hear us sing. Tickets are still available at Sistic.
a few movies that i've loved this past year. in no particular order, just in order of what i remember.
1. cashback 2. the lives of others 3. stranger than fiction
i've thought that maybe i want to write more and blog less. but there's this thing about having an audience, albeit a small one, when you write to the open world. so maybe i shall pass about the tiny book that i write on. and it shall be a physical facebook.
on the same note, facebook is really too complicated for me. or more like, it's too complicated for me to be bothered, not too complicated to learn. i'm not that old yet.
oh by the way, i'm 23 years and 6 days old. :). shame on you if you didn't wish me happy birthday. nah that's a joke. there's really nothing to celebrate when you turn 23.
:: kiathy. 12:57 am [+] ::
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:: Sunday, August 19, 2007 ::
new term new beginning.
one more 3.9 please.
:: kiathy. 11:07 pm [+] ::
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:: Monday, August 06, 2007 ::
and this was what i was up to last year in germany :). turn up the volume to hear stupid chatter in the background. and it features a cameo by scary-gf.
so i feel inspired to think, reflect, write. what inspired me?
august inspired me.
i can't believe it's august already. yup the sense of disbelief really struck when i was tearing parking coupons today. and i wondered where july went. don't we mark the end of months with at least a reminder that it's ending, like 'oh it's 30th july already' or something. well i thought i usually did, but not this time.
august is here. what does august mean to me?
i don't really know yet. let me think about it first. :).
:: kiathy. 2:19 am [+] ::
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A buffet meal featuring a varied number of dishes.
A varied collection: “a smorgasbord of fashionable paranormal beliefs” (Martin Gardner).
[Swedish smörgåsbord : smörgås, bread and butter (smör, butter, from Old Norse + Swedish dialectal gås, lump of butter, from Old Norse gās, goose; see gosling) + bord, table (from Old Norse bordh).]
i hope to use this word in my daily speech.
:: kiathy. 2:15 am [+] ::
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:: Friday, July 27, 2007 ::
headline on nytimes.com:
Study Says Obesity Can Be Contagious
one quote from the article:
It also may mean that the way to avoid becoming fat is to avoid having fat friends.
haha this is rather interesting. there's so gonna be a list of people i have to stay away from. and also alot of people who're gonna be staying away from me.
check it out here. :).
:: kiathy. 1:27 am [+] ::
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today i spent my afternoon in the most ideal way i wanted it to be.
i had my laptop, a nice warm drink on a cold drizzly day, some good company, and people to watch as i settled in at a coffeejoint.
i didn't actually get to reading my book cos i was spending time online instead. well until they decided to cut off the power (i'm convinced they did). and so my battery lasted for like all of 40 mins before dying on me.
by then it was night. and i had dinner.
speaking of reads, i'm onto angela's ashes by frank mccourt now. yes a classic pulitzer prize winner that i've just picked up. kinda enjoyable. and yes i'm kinda onto the harry pooper craze like everyone else, but i'm just reading it online, so nope not a fan yet. and it's funny how the movie's actually sparked my interest in the book because now i can put faces to these characters? yes i have no imagination.
hey it's a good life afterall.
:: kiathy. 11:26 pm [+] ::
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:: Sunday, July 22, 2007 ::
this was the original text to Sleep.
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening - Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
Frost wrote this poem about winter in June, 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont that is now home to the "Robert Frost Stone House Museum." Frost had been up the entire night writing the long poem "New Hampshire" and had finally finished when he realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." He wrote the new poem in just a few minutes and later stated that "It was as if I'd had a hallucination."
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was Frost's favorite of his own poems and Frost in a letter to Louis Untermeyer called it "my best bid for remembrance."
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter. Each verses follows an a-a-b-a rhyming scheme, with the following verse's a's rhyming with that verse's b.
The evening hangs beneath the moon A silver thread on darkened dune With closing eyes and resting head I know that sleep is coming soon
Upon my pillow, safe in bed A thousand pictures fill my head I cannot sleep, my mind's a-flight And yet my limbs seem made of lead
If there are noises in the night A frightening shadow, flickering light Then I surrender unto sleep Where clouds of dream give second sight
What dreams may come, both dark and deep Of flying wings and soaring leap As I surrender unto sleep, As I surrender unto sleep.
Sleep, by Charles Anthony Silvestri (to the music of Eric Whitacre)
just one of the songs we're singing for our concert. :). come watch me pleeease?
victoria chorale - in song 2007. 26th August 2007. 8 pm. Esplanade Theatre.
:: kiathy. 3:20 am [+] ::
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:: Saturday, July 21, 2007 ::
i just caught harry potter. it was really scary. yes the adult word for it is 'dark' but i shall eschew being mature now and just point out that yes it was scary and at the start when harry got attacked i think i jumped. as did everyone else. alright just creating excuses for myself.
all in all, quite an enjoyable show though i've really little recollection of what went on in the first 3(?) films. i thought cho chang was really being a pretty flower vase in the movie who just gets to kiss harry, while i think yea daniel radcliffe is really getting too old for the role. it'd be sad to have them change actors now but no he can't act like a schoolkid anymore. it's weird how all of them have grown up. the weasley brothers are cool though i really like them.
cho chang looks like jessica. the canadian-hongkong one in your hall. you agree? go check her out. :).
i think i've lost a little so i guess weekday gymming/blading does help. my stomach can be tucked in now (it couldn't, to be really honest, when i returned from the states) and so it can be hidden. the face is still a little fat but well i'll work at it haha.
i think i'm still feeling a little rotten inside but i can't express it to the world although i want and need to. so dear world, just give me some good company will you? :|.
hey cool i've had 800 posts. but i've been publishing since what. 2003? so that's..2003,2004,2005,2006,2007. about 160 posts a year. on average. so about a post every 2-3 days. on average.
now that's pretty pathetic huh. but welcome to my 801th post anyway.
i wanted to start a post with "the world is so chaotic now." that was because of the on-going potential cold war between the uk and russia. the whole thing's erupted because russia's refusing to deport one of their russians to the uk for trial in the case of an ex-KGB spy murdered in the uk earlier this year. and so the english decided to boot some russian diplomats out of their country. rather amusing rebuttal was that if russia had decided to act tit-for-tat, they'd have had to boot 80 uk diplomats out of their country by now. well.
and there's the ongoing thing in pakistan, the aftermath of the red mosque attacks. and of course russia's pull out of the nato agreement to prevent arms buildup cos uncle sam decided to place some missile defence system pointing toward russia (i think).
well all the above points to one thing, the world is in chaos now. hey i've hit the point of my post already. the point which would be - i'm too bored at home, with nothing to do, waiting for time to while away until it's time to hit the gym - and so i keep myself occupied fervantly reading news sites. latest news is a gas pipe exploded in downtown manhattan, 1 person died with 20 odd injured. no terrorism suspected, but hey it's not fun walking down lexington avenue and then getting blown up in the air. my heart's with the victim on that one.
i have 3 livefeeds on my firefox. guardian unlimited, bbc news, and nytimes. and my Home page is soccernet. i've always wondered why the straits times, in the face of such great FREE writing, can afford to charge its subscribers for news. premium service? hah. if i weren't living in this country i'd have no reason to read the straits times. guardian's full of brit wit. bbc is full of news. nytimes is full of stuff better than Life! can provide. the ST has LOCAL NEWS. that's all that matters. but no i'm not paying for it.
on the topic of my being bored. what's going on in my life now. well the only thing i'm paid to do now is to teach every wednesday. yes i teach a bunch of p4/p5 kids math olympiad. and i do enjoy it although it's a chore going to the school every wednesday. they say the silliest things and i'm the nicest teacher so i suppose it makes a good combi. the furthest i get to scolding them is threatening to send them out of class. no screams, no shouts. no piercing eye stares.
every other day? nah. zilch. nada. nothing. numero zero.
and that's the end of post 801.
:: kiathy. 4:10 pm [+] ::
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anyway it's funny how my archive has disappeared. i don't know where it's went.
somewhere tonight i thought that hey, i want to start a new blog. this one's so old and dusty and like. dead. and my archive's disappeared. like i want to start afresh.
but i guess i like orangecow.blogspot.com - yes cow is female and orange is gay. but put them together what do they say? me. alright just kidding that was just a rhyme.
to give this place a new lease of life. i've decided to just start posting.
that ought to work. no major change in life required.
:: kiathy. 12:39 am [+] ::
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the unbearable lightness of being by milan kundera has to rank as one of my favourite books. i won't admit to understanding every part of this classic that was written a long while ago, but i'm glad i did pick it up instead of the fantasy The Fourth Bear by jasper fjorde (which i will probably pick up some day but not these days.)
well as usual it's about people - in case you haven't noticed (obviously you have not because i've not told you), i've been really into people recently. to summarise, i've read tony parson's man and boy, man and wife and 1 or 2 other of his books i can't remember - they're about how a man screws up his life cos of a one night stand but eventually ends up alright. yes i know i've been rather late in touching those books but well, better late than never.
i've also been reading haruki murakami, the first of which was norweigian woods, which i totally enjoyed. about this guy's life in japan and the people around him. and the wind-up bird chronicle which unfortunately, i gave up 1-200 pages prior to the end. writing about a man losing his wife + the fact that i fell in love with norweigian wood made me pick the 2nd book up, but well it's too whimsical for me so yea i've stuffed it in favour of the unbearable lightness of being. which is what i'll touch on now.
there're only like a few points that's really caught me in this book. the first was about living in truth. the classical viewpoint of living in truth i.e. being truthful to the world/to yourself is that you act as one person whether in public or in private. i.e. you eventually blur the line between your public life and private life - eventually your private life is no more and you are simply, the public. that's one idea of living in truth.
the book presented another idea, of fiercely guarding your private life - for only in privacy can you live in utmost truth. with a peek of the public, you tend to behave as the public wants. and that was rather cool, to me.
the next point was about seeking happiness. it claims that man can never be happy because we seek repetition. i suppose it's repetition of good things - but we can never attain such repetition (unlike a dog chewing on his bread roll every day - that repetition keeps him happy and wagging his tail) because the first premise of the book was that, our life never repeats for we live a life without rehearsals. once we make one decision, we move on. and we don't lead the same life again. and if our life's decisions have no worth (because you cannot repeat/learn from them), we suffer from a lightness of being. and our life is not worth living.
well the above comments are what I've conjured from my understanding of the book. and it doesn't reflect my personal life. and if you think i'm being a pseudo intellectual, it's alright :)
so i think i've only read bout, 5 or 6 books the past 2-3 mths. not many. i need to read more.
I carry your heart with me(I carry it in my heart)I am never without it(anywhere I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) I fear no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)I want no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
sigh of the times.
