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Friday, November 29, 2013
This morning I was practicing posture in the mirror and I realised that I was beginning to develop abs from all that Latin practice!
And then I ate Thanksgiving lunch, and I'm pretty sure whatever baby abs were developing were quickly sucked back into a vortex of fats T_T
Need to practice like 6h to work all this off...
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7:34 AM
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Friday, November 22, 2013
An amusing conversation I had with my senior from ballroom:
S: Did you always want to dance ballroom before?
Me: Hmm, kinda! My middle school made us learn chacha and jive because they wanted us to be good wives.
S: What?! No way!!! That's so funny!
Me: Haha! I'm serious, they made us learn cooking and sewing and dancing and all that.
S: No, I mean, if anything, for good wives, should be Standard dances. Hahaha
Here is a video of waltz, which is a standard dance:
And here is a video of jive, which looks really different from what we learnt in RGS. Jive and cha cha and samba and rumba are all part of Latin dances, which... are sexier and have shorter costumes. Totally unrelated to why I like Latin more. Kinda.
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7:31 AM
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glitter
Thursday, November 14, 2013
"I saw your make up trial photos!" said my partner to me gleefully. "They didn't look that scary. You looked quite nice."
"Oh," I said, "Yeah. Except when I showed them to my bigsib she was like 'ehh, yeah, you need to put on more makeup. And that she'll be helping me with my make up for the competition... helping me put much, much more makeup on."
And I watched as his face fell.
I present this gem from my favorite blog of the moment: againstlineofdance.wordpress.com.
Also my Latin partner just informed me that he remembered me from when we were doing tryouts (why the hell is he even trying out, I don't understand - he is so fabulous he just needs to walk in and they will be falling on their knees to get him on the team), and he even clearly remembers that I skipped the team welcome party and was sitting in Axe and Palm waiting for my hamburger while doing homework, so that I could go home and eat and do more homework.
Lol. Not the best first impression ever, but hey, he still asked me to be his partner! And gosh I have learnt So Much from him even though he sometimes still laughs at my bad form :(
Also it's quite interesting that the only 2 guys I actually talked to during tryouts ended up becoming my partners, haha. Tends to give life a very narrativistic sheen.
Okay, off to perpetuate the stereotype and do more homework!
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3:18 PM
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Crises
It's been a week of crises- firstly an identity crisis brought on by the mandatory writing class all Stanford freshman are supposed to take. We're supposed to be writing an academic paper on nostalgia, and in the first week when I was super homesick, the topic that immediately came to mind was the construction of national identity in Singapore.
(It also helps that no one there is an expert on Singapore - I mean, yeah fine it's all nice and good to be writing about more well-known topics like... The renaissance or something, but less people knowing about it = less dissidence = you are usually always correct and can mostly smoke your way through)
So somehow, after examining treatises on the nature of history (yes - you can probably spot a common theme of work evasion here lol) I have decided to argue that national identity should be subjectively created, rather than handed down by a government. Of course that leads right into the dilemma of the implications on collective identity - can a collective identity ever be reached? How can I say I am Singaporean if I can never be sure how my definition of Singaporeaness is the same as or even similar to another person's?
Another person in my class is writing about Chinese architecture and Western influences, and she brought an image of a billboard that said "We Will Never Be Second" on Chang An Avenue in Beijing. When I was blowing some smoke and "deep-reading" the image, I inadvertently slipped into using the pronoun "we"- and the teacher caught me out for it: "when you say 'we', who are you referring to?"
I was stricken. Who am I, really? I call myself Singaporean - there was a period of time when I would get really snooty and give looks of disdain to people who said I was Chinese, and say down my nose, "no, I'm SINGAPOREAN," but it seems like there is a part of me deep down that identifies with Chinese-ness.
It's funny, actually - I have 2 dance partners, and while all 3 of us look exactly the same to a casual American observer (we are all Chinese) we are 3 different Chineses. I'm (without the snooty tone) Singaporean, and they're Taiwanese and Chinese respectively.
I actually wonder if the "Taiwanese" identifies as that - his parents are Taiwanese but he was born and raised in America. My Chinese partner said he was hoping to migrate to America, even though it is hard for the first generation of immigrants, but now I'm wondering, does it ever get easier for successive generations who hold the seeds of their historicity within their bones but are unable to express it or are at tension with it?
And that leads into the whole idea of my future. I always took it for granted that I would return home after 4 years, but now I feel like there are more things I want to do. I want to get a PhD, I want to do an internship here, I want to fucking study astrophysics and near death experiences and national identity and dance.
Can I be satisfied with having my mind amazingly broadened for 4 years and then being like, yup, thanks, and then pack my mind into a tiny suitcase and send it back to Singapore? Can I be satisfied with being -just- Mrs so-and-so instead of Dr Yeow?
But how can I not?
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8:48 AM
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Saturday, November 02, 2013
It's been a long time since I last updated, but even though it's late today I wanted to blog because we had the Fall Ball earlier, and I am so happy because this is the first time in my life I've played in an orchestra.
After watching Nodame Cantabile, I've always wanted to play in an orchestra, but I never thought I could do it because I'm almost tone deaf and the orchestra rarely ever needs pianists. So I was so amazed when I came to Stanford, and the Festival Orchestra took me in without an audition, and even lent me a stand and violin and basically everything I needed to get started (the violin they lent me: "an old violin I dug up from I don't know where," said our chairperson, and it's so much better than my own violin at home).
And all these weeks of practice - I think 5 or 6 now, have culminated in the FALL BALL! Stanford has a huge dance culture, and everyone who takes Social Dance in Stanford is taught by the same prolific dude. Loads of people turn up for the ball (they even pay money to get in! It's $25 for non-Stanford students, and $15 for Stanford students) and they all know how to dance. It's amazing. Lumpy and I snuck out to watch at the sides like little children, and murmured, "You'd never get this in Singapore."
It's true, you know. There are so many things I'm doing here that I would never have gotten the chance to do in Singapore: I'm playing in an orchestra, I'm learning how to ballroom dance, I'm taking classes on near-death experiences and its relationship to medicine, astrophysics, and I'm going to pick up French. And I'm so grateful for it. It's days like these that I just sit here in my room feeling contented and so happy that I came here, never mind that (real) Chinese food is hardly available and that I have to dress like an onion in the morning (layers that can be easily peeled off later when the temperature soars). I'm glad I came - that I was allowed to come.
:)
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2:51 PM
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