wedding bells

I am barely alive now, having not had a proper sleep for quite a while. School has never been this bad.

This month i attended a friend's wedding, and learnt that another friend is making preparations for his wedding next year (i didn't know a wedding requires such a long period of planning and preparing, seriously). At the wedding dinner that i attended, i learnt from another friend what his ideal wedding would be like: it'd be a private, cozy affair; a reception in the open-air, where the solemnisation will be held; i will have flowers all around; it will in Thailand or Australia and i will invite my friends over; and it will be next year.

At the same table were two married couples (i know everyone seated at the table), one recently tied the knot, the other are expecting their first child.

As i told my friend who's preparing for his wedding next year: i am entering that stage of life where friends around are getting married.

false optimism?

I haven't made much progress in my work since yesterday. Right after i reached the library, i went to the shelves to look for a particular book. It wasn't there, but i ended up taking 6 other books, two of which are pretty thick. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I had randomly picked a few books whose titles suggest that their contents might be somewhat remotely relevant to the subject on Imperialism. I browsed through the content pages and felt a (mistaken) sense of comfort when i see the words 'empire' and 'imperialism'.

I returned to my seat and put the books on the table. Turned out it's quite a considerable stack. For a moment i foolishly wondered if other people might have noticed it. 'Here comes another chao-mugger in our midst, damn!' Then i proceeded to check my email and was reassured by my professor's prompt reply to my email that was sent out this morning. No, it wasn't any approval for an extension of dateline; it was just a clarification of my doubts. Nonetheless, i felt a sense of relief. In such precarious times, uncertainty only serves to breed a sense of panic, so clarification is important - it helps you to plan the right strategy (like doing only the absolutely necessary stuff).

Sometimes, in a bad or urgent situation you know things aren't making the slightest improvement, but occasionally when there are some unexpected adjustments or new inputs, it is possible to feel a sense of optimism.

And optimism, i assure you, matters a great deal.

sleepless nights

A few days ago it was European Empire and the film The Mission that gave me many sleepless nights. Now i am dividing time between modern imperialism and peasant entrepreneur in post-Mao era. Political ideologies must wait. But all of them to be settled by next Tuesday and Monday respectively.

There goes my weekend sleep.

memory. history.

"Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. It is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unaware of its successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and manipulation. Sometimes it remains latent for long periods, then suddenly revives. History is the always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there. Memory always belongs to our time and forms a lived bond with the eternal presesnt; history is a representation of the past."

Piere Nora, 1984

Quote taken from E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914, p1.