Teddy Bear Day
2005-11-18 @ 11:13 p.m.

Paper 8 went okay, although it was probably not very wise of me to start on an answer only to discard it after I'd written nearly a whole page. Had to rush my essay on the single poem, so that wasn't as good as the essay for the prose passage, which was a really boring one incidentally. An extract from Philip Jeyaratnam's Making Coffee, which struck me, dare I say it, as being one long whinge. Hello? Almost everyone has felt lonely and isolated at some point, and if the mid-life crisis is so well-documented that they've had to create the quarter-life crisis to sell more books! Get over it already. Okay, rant over. (Jeyaratnam is, after all, a published author, which, as Mr Purvis will point out, is more than I can say about myself. Ergo reason not to criticise him. Bullshit.) This is one of the reasons why I don't like reading Asian literature, especially prose. It's like a cultural dislocation; the words are strung together in comprehensible ways, but the context that produced them feels ironically foreign.

Had dinner at Pepper Lunch, which is some new Japanese import into the local gastronomical scene. Bumped into Amanda, Charissa and Shu En at MOS, which is the sort of coincidence that I'm surprised doesn't happen more often. Made the mistake of going into Kinokuniya, where I found another book of Sade's stories and Barnes's A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters, which is a delightful read, more so than Metroland anyway. So broke now. Ben found this book called The Book Of Answers, which you're supposed to hold and riffle through, whilst thinking about the question to which you seek an answer. Then you crack open the volume and presto, instant fortune-telling. I don't see why anyone would actually believe it works, although as our experiments have shown, it makes a really funny game for parties!