Opportunities

...and another day brings new challenges and new hopes. These days have been filled with so many extremities that they are very tiring to live through, as emotions crash from highs to lows to highs again. Such great mood swings have not been experienced since the days of Frexprog, and to reencounter them in this context was unexpected and undesirable. The mood swings rob me of clarity of perception, force me to turn inwards and to retreat from the social interactions that are so crucial at this point in time to construct a new, meaningful context in this strange place. But then again, I should have seen this coming, as this situation does bear a substantial amount of similarity with Frexprog: I have felt, in Paris and Lyon, the same kind of alienation and disorientation before, feelings that are so intense that they can paralyse you.

But also, in a very fundamental way, New York is a place of extremes, a place that enables you to experience extremes, to plumb the farthest and most absurd possibilities of human experience. Here is a place where vistas of incredible inspirational power coexist with scenes of abject deprivation, where the most helpful and warm people live alongside people capable of startling rudeness - and both parties still get along surprisingly well. Here is a place that awes one by making incredible things real, and disappoints only in that in making these things real, it renders them in the dull, unattractive colours of human imperfection. Nowhere else in the world have I experienced this effect of rendering the fantastic into human scale, or, to put it equally in another way, to elevate things that are human to fantastic levels, without sacrificing the grimy, flawed, imperfect human quality of it. Here is a place where greatness can be lived, rather than just observed as an artifact. Here, wonder is participatory rather than simply a spectacle.

I've said it before, and I'll say again how here, opportunity lies thick on the ground, more so than anything else. New York tires you out by throwing ever extreme at you with scant consideration of whether you can handle it - and you have the feeling that you'd better find a way to handle it, and fast, because there's lots more where that came from. During the academic introductory talks this morning, the deans made it a special point to point out how the class of 2012 is liberally peppered with prodigious talents, like the guy who's already made $40,000 by publishing his own children's book, or the future Olympic archer. And they also pointed out how being in New York connects one to the world, and how the world reciprocally impinges on every aspect of our intellectual, social and physical lives. And I was thinking: what sorts of opportunities for synergy and insight can arise from such a remarkable milieu? What wonderful things can we make by catalysing the opportunities available to us with our own talents? We stand, indeed, on the brink of a world of unimaginable opportunities - but the thing is not to just stand there, but to go out and actively, bravely grasp it.

And I still feel overwhelmed by that prospect, and quite inadequate as well. I am intimidated by this place and the people it houses, by all that they're bringing to the table, and by the comparatively paltry abilities that I can offer. I feel as if I'd somehow snuck in by a back door, and that I'm just extremely lucky, and by right should not be here at all, taking up space, breathing the hallowed air of genius and curiosity, and collecting opportunities without knowing what to do with them. I only bring my self, my experience and my abilities, but I am beginning to see how these may not actually count for much in such a charged context.

*

Had a bit of a fright today, because I had arranged to meet a couple of the Singaporean students to go down with the folks to Chinatown for dinner, when my phone ran out of battery power. I had told them to meet at the "Canal Street station" on the subway, but I had neglected to check the subway maps, and to my dismay found out that there were actually 3 different "Canal Street" stations, each on a different line and serving a different avenue in the Chinatown area. So, being unready to deal with this unexpected communication failure and having no way to contact them, I tried to recharge my phone at local phone shops, but could not find one with the right charger. And we then proceeded to search all the stations called "Canal Street", until, by sheer dumb luck, we ran into each other when I was coming out of the Canal Street station on the green line.

Went into Chinatown, and Mum and Dad showed us a great shop that they found, that stocked such critical comfort foods as mooncakes, Khong Guan biscuits, instant noodles, sauces, Teochew porridge preserves (like the spicy beancurd and various pickles), and a range of authentic-looking Prima Taste sauces (laksa, Hainanese chicken rice, satay) imported from, of all places, Singapore. Suddenly, New York doesn't seem like such a scary place. And they also stock instant noodles, steamboats and woks. It was great to step into the place, and to have the familiar smells hit you on a visceral level. I was quite frankly surprised by the intensity of the nostalgia.

After that, we went to a Chinese restaurant run by a Cantonese family, and had an excellent Chinese dinner of fried rice, beef noodles, hor fun, soy sauce chicken and char siew. It actually tasted like the Chinese food from home, rather than the sweet-sour fare that usually passes out of allegedly Chinese takeaways. Even the scaldingly hot Chinese tea, nothing more than reused tea leaves steeped in boiling water, tasted like nostalgia. I had not expected to miss home so much, and certainly not so soon, and definitely not when the folks are still here. I wonder what it'll be like next week.

*

And to top it all off, we took a train up to 83rd Street and 5th Avenue, because the university had rented out the Met for an event that night. Yep, that's right - Columbia took over the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an evening, so that students could wander the galleries at leisure till 8.30pm. Now, I've seen some pretty good museums over the years, museums that would put anything Singapore can offer to shame, but the Met very nearly takes the ticket. I mean, there were mummies that were so perfectly restored that they seemed almost fresh - almost moist, even. There were Grecian urns with brown figures traced out on black backgrounds that have appeared on many covers of Greek literature works, pottery that is hallowed by age and recognisability. There was even an entire Egyptian temple, donated by Cairo, dismantled and shipped to New York, to be put back together in a dedicated gallery in the Met. It blows my mind to be among such objects that are eerily familiar, eerily meaningful, and so old that I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to make them or use them for the first time. Only the Louvre, in my mind, surpasses the Met.

So there we were, Columbia students all, from the various undergraduate schools, some dressed up impressively (the girls from Barnard), others coming in sandals and berms (the guys from the College), filing through the hallowed and high-vaulted galleries, looking at objects of incredible antiquity, discussing classes and orientation activities, and pondering on how these ancient objects we can see and sometimes touch will fit into our lives from now on. Certainly, the connections that we formed tonight between the museum and our syllabus are laughably simplistic, and certainly real classes will begin soon that will take us through those same galleries to explain the connections far more eloquently, but already I feel like opportunities are coming together here in ways that I had only imagined about, daydreamed of, before.

Ran into lots of CUE people in the Met, and inevitably, the group grew till we could have formed our own tour group. It was a chance to reunite, and to share the experiences of the previous days apart, as if CUE had not already ended, and that we were simply taking a break from the distractions and laying the foundations for the imminent resumption of CUE. We had only been apart for two days, and we were already talking in nostalgic terms, planning our next reunions and promising to keep in touch as if irrevocable departure was impending. And afterwards, wandered the streets of the posh Upper East Side with K and A to go to the subway on 77th Street, reflecting on what we've seen of the city, the new people we've met, the old people we can't get enough of - and how much of all this we really owe to CUE. And it really was a special time, and it deserves all the hype it's getting. And I do think that, judging from the trend over the last few days, the memories and relationships of CUE will become more and more meaningful and precious as time goes by.