Charmaine’s blog

The HIA fellowship is quite, quite, quite ridiculously amazing. Add to the beautiful hostel by the river we’re staying at in the richest district around Berlin the endless flow of thought-provoking, soul searching, mind boggling conversation and the hilarious antics of people who are ridiculously brilliant at the same time that they are wonderfully entertaining company and deeply commited to human rights activism in this completely humble way, and you get what is fast becoming the best experience of my life so far. The amazing thing is finding a good number of Christians on the program who are seeking what it means to fight for social justice in the context of our faith - which, of course, is great encouragement that Christianity is just maybe turning around and re-calibrating itself around service and not the narrow-minded fundamentalism it is so widely stereotyped to be in this part of the world. I would write about what’s happening, but somehow blogging it seems to trivialize everything. You can tell I mistrust words when I start throwing sillly adjectives around. Some highlights:

1) Almost got arrested and injured by almost almost going to the G8 protests in Rostock 3 hours away from Germany with the rest of the HIA fellows, where 520 protestors got hurt yesterday by 443 members of the German police force. I won’t deny the excitement and glamour in the prospect of being arrested - it would’ve upped my street cred so much.

2) Played the Prime Minister of a fictitious European nation in a simulation game and promptly proceeded to set up a despotic and authoritarian conservative government not unlike the ruling party of home sweet home. And then promptly responded to a terrorist attack with a “war on terror,” afterwhich members of the opposing liberation party kidnapped me and bound me hands and feet while they negotiated for their region to seperate and gain independance in exchange for my life - at which my coalition liberal party chairman and real-life friend scoffed and decided that my life was expendable, and so motioned to kill the prime minister. So I died. And the terrorists got thrown in jail. And the militant government passed a bill that was democratically laid out surveillance terms without compromising on the civil liberties of its people. Now why doesn’t the real world work like that??

3) Cried at the Holocaust museum and danced Bhangra in a club in Washington D.C, then flew to Berlin and swigged German beer by the River Spree while arguing about feminism while swans and canoes glided past. Life is good.

Spring is back and summer is almost here. I rang in senior year last week by climbing to the top of Main Building and clanging the big school bell, writing my name along the way on the hallowed passage up to the rooftop, where seniors have scrawled their names from the 30’s all the way till present. Of course, instead of emblazoning my name proudly against the most prominent wall in big scrawling letters, all I had was a G2 pen - so I’ve inscribed my name into Vassar history in tiny font size 24 letters against the rickety staircase that leads out to a beautiful panorama of our 1000 acre campus.
Spot my name amongst the other mammoth-sized ones!

peeking across the rooftops

Yes, I know i look more like the captain of a ship, but I am ringing a bell!

And then of course, there was the madness of founder’s day, which saw Ashley Tay conking out as early as 11am after mimosas on no breakfast, clever girl, and some others romping out to Ballentine field for some crazy crazy founder’s day fun! There were

lots of friends. with lots of beer.

Rides! Not such a good idea on a stomach with lots of beer from lots of friends.

This is Anshuman Beri. Or Beri. Or Strawberry.

And this is the epic Singapore vs. India fight that we have every founder’s day. Last year Singapore lost. This year…

I was determined not to let my nation fall. So with some secret training and ancient balancing techniques gathered from www.findyourchi.com I defeated my foe and emerged victorious.

It was also really beautiful out by sunset lake where the cherry blossoms were all in bloom!

Of course, Ryan was way too inebriated to care. This is him, giggling like a school girl. And that is me, looking at him in consternation.

I’m in Boston for the next week seeing Mark who’s at a Cognitive/Neural Networks conference, while I’m at an MIT library working on my final papers and waiting for him to get out of nerdville.
Also, I just conquered a TWENTY PAGE SHAKESPEARE PAPER!!! One more 10 page and a Narrative Writing Portfolio and I’m done done done diddly diddlyyy….

And I will leave you with Vassar in the Spring:

“Disillusionment is not a bad thing. Disillusionment is, literally, the loss of an illusion - about ourselves, about the world, about God - and while it is almost always a painful thing, it is never a bad thing, to lose the lies we have mistaken for truth. Disillusioned, we find out that God does not conform to our expectations. We find out what is not true, and we are set free to seek what is - if we dare.

Every letdown becomes a lesson, and a lure. Did God fail to come when I rubbed the lantern? Then perhaps God is not a genie. Did God fail to punish my enemies? Then perhaps God is not a cop. Did God fail to make everything run smoothly? Then perhaps God is not a mechanic. Who then is God?

My disappointments draw me deeper into the mystery of God’s being and doing. Every time God declines to meet my expectations, another of my idols is exposed. Another curtain is drawn back so I can see what I have propped up in God’s place.

No, that is not God. Who then is God? It is the question of a lifetime, and the answers are never big enough or finished. Pushing back curtain after curtain, it becomes clear that the failure is not God’s but my own, for having such a poor and stingy imagination.“

-Barbara Brown Taylor, Faith Reflections

Oh dear. Super duper backlog!

These days have been filled with nothing except work (I sense this is a theme amongst us non-updating, too-busy-to-breathe student types, ehemm Soh Lishan) and work and work and work, but when in my third year I’m still walking around campus with breathy I can’t believe I’m here awe at the beauty of Vassar, and every day is blessed with new epiphanies, I cannot be but certain that here is where I’m meant to be..

Especially when SENIOR YEAR is going to be one heckuva ride with all my major requirements cleared and nothing to do except take all sorts of awesome courses like Beginning Tennis and Beginning modern dance and Weight Traning! Wahooo can you imagine all that muscle toning? I’m gonna be one lean mean Senior slacker machine!

Maybe we’re going a little overboard, but on the day we picked our house for next year, the future housemates (minus Ro, who is JYA in the city) immediately got together and started planning color schemes. We’re going for neutral creams, grays and warm browns, with bursts of ethnic flavour in pretty colorful detailed pillows and throw rugs and curtains. Say hello to SoCo 7!!!
From left: Ro (that’s short for Rohini), Julia, Sam, honorary housemate Ashley, me, and I swear I did not paste Charles into the photo.

Mum came up over spring break for a week to visit me, and how wonderful it was to show her my life at Vassar! We spent half the time in Poughkeepsie and driving upstate to pretty little towns, and the other half in Washington DC, where the weather was abnormally heavenly! Good times. I would post pictures but they are all with mum!

Spring is finally here, albeit hindered by a mammoth blizzard to the tune of 3 feet of snowfall over spring break. You can see blades of newly green grass springing up among the dead tufts on the quad, and there are pathways of fresh green directly above the water pipelines. It’s a lovely lovely 19 degrees today, so out came a dress and sandals, and people are already out sunning on the quad in bikinis. (the guys here are going ‘yesssssss springgg!’ unless they’re gay, which they mostly are. oh well?)

In other news, I received a summer research fellowship from Humanity In Action ((YAY!) and so this summer, I will be heading for Washington DC, Berlin for kickoff, and then to Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Warsaw, or Paris (country posting to be determined, crossing my fingers for Amsterdam!!) for 5 weeks on a summer reasearch fellowship studying post-holocaust issues and minority rights issues facing communities in Europe. I’ll be staying with a host familly, and paired with an European fellow to conduct research (i.e. talking to interesting people, field site visits to quaint little towns, conferences and meeting UN officers in the Hague), which culminates in a colllaborative research paper at the end of the fellowship. And all expenses paid! Yessssssssssssss!!!!! I’m so excited I might pee in my pants. Back home in Mid-July.

Out I go now with some Spivak in hand onto the Quad for a spot of tanning and relaxation, possibly a little bit of rugby with friends, and a picnic. Oh spring!

You might’ve been there on May 1st of 2006 when the rest of the campus appeared in white to march with Poughkeepsie in protest of Bush’s proposed immigration reform policy. The sun was shining and the school wouldn’t cancel classes for the march, so you emailed your professors to say you wouldn’t be there, because marching in support of the immigrants was important to you. They replied to say they understood, and thought how good it was that you were getting out into the community and fighting for the rights of the oppressed. Lacking the mood for sitting in a stuffy classroom in the middle of the heat wave of the oncoming summer, and not having read your readings for the week, you might’ve thought with relief, how good it was to have a convenient excuse to get out into the sun.

The colour of the day was flooding the lawn in front of the library. Girls took the chance to wear their white summer dresses, your friend used her crutch as a pole to raise her banner. If you’d seen the number of banners and bandanas and flags crying out for their countries and causes in insistence against the Bush regime, you might’ve felt a familiar swell, rising from heart to throat as your schoolmates picked their banners up and raised them high into the air, bracing against the warm summer wind. If you’d been there, you might’ve wanted to sing out loud about how great America was, that people could walk freely in the streets in protest. Then the crowd tapered off into lines of two along the sidewalk, and the voices began to rise in unison with angry shouts of “NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL,” and you might’ve felt your heart swell again, with what, you weren’t quite sure: with pride, with honour, with passion for what you were fighting for, with patriotism (though it couldn’t be, this isn’t even your country). And even if you weren’t sure what Bush’s exact policy recommendation was, and even if you had never read a word of or wikipedia-ed the proposal, you would still have felt joy in the shouts of unification, “Si, se puede! Si, se puede!” even though you only found out at the day after that it meant “yes, we can,” and you shouted it mostly because you could shout at the top of your lungs in the romantic lilt of a foreign Spanish.

At the end of the day on the way back to campus, someone from the Poughkeepsie community who owned a restaurant stopped you and put her hand over her heart, placed it on your shoulder, and thanked you for your help. You might’ve smiled and put your hand over her shoulder in return, and said, “it was our pleasure,” and walked home feeling like you had finally done something right in the world today.

But in the days following the march, when your voice gone hoarse from shouting began to heal and the white shirt was put away in the closet, when the new Atheist League on campus published a journal called Godlessness, you would not have submitted a piece to counter the voices declaring “God is dead” to share why you believed. Or when the chance came at a meeting to voice unhappiness with certain school policies that you thought needed change, you did not push your point because it received a lukewarm response. And when, in narrative writing class, you spoke against the seeming apathy towards issues of race, and everyone resented you for it, you might’ve crept back into your seat and pushed away from the table and tried to remain inconspicuous for the rest of class. You would have turned away silently and resolved to never speak about it again. You would’ve stopped pursuing the issue. You would’ve kept quiet. You would’ve allowed your aloneness to silence you.

If We Stopped, Even For a Second.

He says, you write poems about what you see: trees, clouds, the streetlamp, and me.

Who would volunteer to live any moment more than once? I might. This morning I smelled rain coming up from the grass and closed my eyes. Suddenly I was 5 again, and your eyes were still alive.

The sky stretched across us at Brighton beach, from boardwalk to sea, and the light on the sand was vaporous. The air chilled, the wind was picking up, and in the weakening light we saw an old man take off his shirt, place it on the rocks, and walk toward the shoreline. There he wiggled his toes and waited for the waves. He bent to reach his feet, and rose up again, stretching his hands toward the sky. And as we were watching him sunlight passed through the spaces in the clouds, and suddenly it had all rolled away, the clouds and the cold and the clammy touch of the water. We were convinced the old man had summoned the blue sky. Sunlight covered us, all shrinking to slivers against our skin. The seagulls sat in droves facing the warm light. We followed suit, sunbathing in December.

I stood on a narrow ridge where the open field meets the bare trees, and I saw two birds. The first one called out softly as it turned and drifted on the wind, while the other one, made of light, slid silently across the surface of the grey sky.

Weeks past the solstice, rain lingering day after they day, I gave up on winter, and surrendered to the obstinate sky. To think I almost turned a deaf ear to heaven. This morning, while steaming ba zhang in the kitchen for breakfast, the sky turned grey, and little flecks of snow floated down onto the dying grass. There is a fresh chill in the air like cold water rushing to my lungs.

There was frost crusted on the windscreen that our gloves could not remove. I took off one shoe and hopped on one foot while scraping the ice away. While laughing at me, a pack of geese flew above us in formation, and spontaneously, we both burst into Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings! For a moment we recovered our child voices, a grace we thought we’d lost.

We wanted to cook curry chicken, just like home, but realised after getting back from the supermarket that the most vital ingredient was missing. Without the curry powder we cooked the chicken with a handful of garlic in coconut milk, brewed thick and bubbly in the saucepan. I added potatoes, too much cumin, what turmeric we could find, some coriander, and pinch of cinnamon. Later, serving it to a table of new friends, we laughed at how it failed miserably as curry, but with some prata, laughter, and some wine, even Saratoga felt like home.

We were standing at the tip of a large stretch of rocks splayed out into the ocean. The sun was setting, and twilight glazed the breakwater and the backwash. The tide was rising. A wave broke around the rock and surrounded it. You laughed at your friend getting splashed as he posed for your picture, until a wave broke over you, too. Then it was my turn to laugh, and you chased me, laughing, as we clambered over the mossy rocks in a race towards the shore.

While I am away it seems another world, not this one where your breath charms the air I breathe in sleep. You were gone too long. In Boston, there were yellow leaves in a whirlwind that followed us down the cobbled streets.

A few random things, because I can’t pull my brain together:

Who cares whether my grandchildren might need to wear protective suits whenever they go out into the sun? I love global warming. Last year it started snowing during thanksgiving, and the year before, after october break. This year, it’s December, and it’s 20 degrees celsius outside, a warm breeze is blowing, and I could walk around today in a wife-beater and flats. Snow can wait, and my grandchildren can roast. Clearly I’m ready to be a mother.

Wife-beaters. Is it troubling to anyone else that at some point in the history of street fashion, someone deliberately named an article of clothing after men who engage in domestic violence? And is it not even more troubling that a greater number of women probably wear wife-beaters than men, and so imply that they’re ok enough with the prospect of their husbands beating them f0r them to wear a shirt that trivializes (valorizes) the activity? America never ceases to amaze me.

In 12 days times, hell (hell: 62 pages of writing in less than two weeks) will be over, and Mark is coming to visit. YYYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

I miss you. and you and you and you and you. and you too! Drop me an email. say hello. I promise I haven’t disintegrated.

I have a memory of me looking through the back window of the school bus, Sec 2 and bleary-eyed, as it trundled through the Oriole Crescent / Lavender / Sixth Avenue area. The radio was in my ear, so I had a soundtrack of something old school (circa 1999) like PM Dawn in my ear. The morning was misty and still murky black in the six AM pre-dawn, but the street lamps, placed at neat intervals, made pockets of road glow burnt orange and yellow. The Lavender neighbourhood has roads that have a way of making themselves seem not-Singapore: some curve and wind up strangely green rolls of gentle hills, others reach deep into the unknown away from the main road, and teeter on the edge of Singaporean jungle, that unknown place of mystery. One particular stretch, connecting one estate to another, was nothing but grass on either side, and a bumpy, undulating road wound and curved around the contours of the (almost negligible) slopes. As we drove through it, I stuck my head up and looked back, and there I saw, on that deserted stretch in the chilly morning air, dancing under a streetlamp, a strange figure, contorting and clicking its heels and shaking its hips. It seemed as if it was dancing forward and chasing after the bus. And there it moved, obscured in part by the mist that hovered across the road, almost completely shadowed, becoming distant as the bus moved away from it. I’m not sure whether it was the morning blankness, or if I was dreaming, if my memory tells me things that did not happen, or if I did indeed see a figure, but there in the puddle that glowed, on an empty road in an unfamiliar Bukit Timah neighbourhood, I knew I saw someone dancing in the morning.

This is the figure of the past. A young girl, nose pressed to the glass of thevehicle she rides every morning, looking silently- longingly out to the unknown, sees someone dancing under what little light it has found. The figure - what is surreal and unknowable to her- dances towards what is known/knowable: her schoolbus, taking her to her premier girls’ school with privileged children from the most privileged backgrounds, the routine process of the every morning, the safe path of a bright future. The girl longs for what is outside her schoolbus-glass cage. Her face is turned towards the past; she faces the road she has just travelled on, looking back - wishing a number of things: To go back. To escape from the routine that propels things forward. To look at the past as if grows further and further away. The spectral presence is a reminder that something else is out there, a realm that is behind her and therefore mysterious; outside of her and therefore Other, not herself and therefore unknowable. And she is there perhaps in all of us, longing, longing, for something else, remembering the magic in our history, and moving forward, driven by that which is beautiful and mysterious that propels us to seek other moments like it.

Why the new address, you ask? Because a brand new website is in the works and on its way. I promise more regular updates, and a cooler page - anything’s probably an improvement from the decaying swamp that is my blog now. watch this space. yay!

I’m sorry I’ve been remiss in my updates. Junior year looks like it is going to leave me utterly burnt out, as if it isn’t already: The house intern position is turning out to be infinitely more heavy than I anticipated, we’re facing one of the toughest rugby seasons in a while, there are so many things to do with the Inter-Religious work, and of course there’s the Worship team and Christian Fellowship, along with 4 classes that happily hand me an average reading amount of 3 novels a week.

The thing is, it’s not just the millions of responsibilities I’ve chosen to take up that are exhausting, but the spaces in between, so occupied and inundated with thoughts of the people who are under my care, or what I have to do next, or what’s left undone, or what I could do better, that I am left at the end of each day sprawled on the mounds of cushions on my floor, completely steam-rollered, completely incapacitated.

And I tell myself that this is college, and I want to live it, be the best I can be, do all that I can with the abilities and sensibilities that God has given me, milk every moment for all its worth, do my best in everything to the glory of God - that’s why I do what I do, that’s why I run myself to exhaustion, that’s why I don’t stop.

Stop. Pause. Think.

I’ve lived a full life. I already have journals full of stories and miracles and things I’ve done, I have people who love me and people whom I love. I live for Christ, who strengthens me. I am blessed, there is nothing more that I could want in this life. So why do I do this crazy I-am-going-to-do-everything-I-possibly-can-to-kill-myself-with-exhaustion thing? Do I truly do it because I want to do my best for God? Or because I want to impress?

Yesterday Mark sent me an excerpt from an article about a journalist who lost his hand in Iraq. He said, in pondering his reasons for going into the battlefield: “I realize that something else had driven me, an old problem of self-worth: I was good because of what I did, not because of who I was. I had important roles as father, brother, lover and son. But without achieving in some material way, I felt empty and unseen. And there it was unwrapped in an email, the truth of why I do what I do, the inescapable, undeniable truth.

How does this story end? I don’t know. Where do I go from here? I don’t know. But it’s a problem, and something needs to be done - but the clock sings 2am, and I am so tired now, so tired -