Send An Email Greeting Day/Dance A Polka Day/Corn Carnival (Minnesota)
2004-08-09 @ 7:09 p.m.

Lunched at Marché today, which totally kicks Vila'ge's ass. The best thing I ate today was the potato rosti, and four slices of sinfully chocolatey cake. Don't forget the maple walnut ice-cream from Mövenpick! I love the taste of maple, sweet without being artificially so. To cheer myself up, I bought Book 3 of the Wheel Of Time saga, and Time's Eye, a collaborative effort between Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. It's the first book of A Time Odyssey, an "orthoquel", as the authors call it, of Clarke's A Space Odyssey. Seems fairly promising, but I'm not sure if I'll plough through it. Still have lots of other stuff to get through, so it can just join the creeping crawl. What I passed on this time: Ilium, a sci-fi take on Homer's Iliad, and Roma Eterna, one of those alternate history books. It just struck me that the last time I bought a book related to my academic stuff was when I purchased Antony & Cleopatra.

I feel sorry for my country, whose day of independence doesn't even warrant a mention at 123Greetings.com. So here's wishing you a Happy 39th Birthday (and may I grow to love you as much as I should). Note the timing of this entry, and you can see how bored I am by the celebrations being broadcast to me live from the National Stadium. Everyone Singaporean should be sent to live abroad for a year, then we'd all appreciate our country a little more. For some reason, National Day this year has made me especially cynical about being Singaporean. It usually has the opposite effect. Perhaps a residual effect from yesterday's meeting? Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be an agnostic, hanging out in Orchard Road 24/7, without having to give a damn about what your family/school/church wants from you. Then I wake up, and move on...