I haven't written in a long, long while because work has eaten up all my time. It is a really lame excuse, really, because work is never-ending, and if you commit yourself to it, you'll never find that you have time. But this week's situation was made worse by the coincidence of the Philadelphia trip (which was a cut in productivity that I willingly undertook, and it certainly proved to be worthwhile), the NOMADS scriptwriting deadlines and the due dates of two essays. Nevertheless, not writing for ten days has really had a toll on me, I think: I feel like there is a lot pent up that needs to be recorded. Every morning I wake up and memories flood my consciousness, and that post-sleep peacefulness is all too fleeting. Here, in this journal, I have the chance to release my memories, which is the first step to both immortalisation and forgetting. In other words, I find that I need to have a private channel in which to simply write for no one else but myself.
Anyway, I'd like to get a rant out of the way first. Have been rewriting the script for NOMADS over the last week, and I'm on the third rewrite. It has gotten rather frustrating, because it seems like they don't like what I write. Not just in the sense of finding it distasteful; I am made to understand that they simply won't act in it. Now, in a normal theatre production I would just let matters lie and simply let the play remain unperformed; but, in this reverse-engineered process, we have a performance date but we don't yet have a play, so I am obliged to produce something performable. So, to make matters easier, I let the actors craft out characters that they would like to act, thinking that I would then be able to string them together into some kind of plot. But I should have known that we would end up with a bunch of caricatures and extremities, and that a plot would just be a cosmetic device, an excuse to put these characters onstage.
So what we effectively have is a bunch of zany characters who don't really have a compelling reason to be put on stage at all. I mean, there is the definite entertainment value, and these characters surely capture the actors' abilities more completely than anything I can probably come up with myself, and one can always resort to the convenient escape clause of labelling the play an absurdist or post-modern piece. But I take issue with the fact that the play has no real meaning behind it. I can still write it, but it's really at this point just stringing words together. There is no real reason at this point why this play should be performed at all, why we should compel an audience to sit through all thirty minutes of it.
And without this function of communicating a meaning, the play is really just a technical exercise, an opportunity for self-aggrandisation and self-indulgence. It is not drama; it is only theatrics. And while there is no denying that the technical prowess of everyone involved in this project is beyond reproach, it seems to me to be such a waste to simply use it to preen on a stage. I am not saying that I can write a good enough script that will capture their abilities; I am willing to bet, though, that their abilities are not well captured by this kind of reverse-engineered play-acting. And for me, this is not really play-writing, but a variation of functional writing. Essentially, this is secretary work.
And quite frankly, the degree of self-indulgence that theatre people get into here (a gross generalisation, but indulge me) is repulsive, nauseating. There are times when I just want to shout at them to grow up and behave professionally, and now I find myself dreading our rehearsals, not because I cannot contribute but because I have to sit through hours of that kind of ego-massaging. It seems that we approach this task from fundamentally different viewpoints; whereas it is a feel-good exercise for some, for me, there is something that I actually want to communicate. I can see where they're coming from, but my personal perspective does not permit me to participate in it.
Anyway, that was refreshing, but ultimately unhelpful in the real world, so I'll leave it here for the time being.
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Throughout this week, I've had moments of wistful nostalgia for the weekend trip to Philly, not so much because I miss Philly (though I really like the place and the people there), but because I just want to escape all this work, and Philly's the only other place I know something of at this point in time. Anyway, it was a great trip, and I felt like I really needed it. In fact, I probably didn't have the correct impression of how much I needed it till I actually left Manhattan on the bus. The smooth, wide highways, the easy cruising through the New Jersey countryside, and the wide open sky suddenly drove home how crowded Manhattan really is, how little sky we can actually see. And on the bus, I couldn't do any work, and so I indulged in two hours of music from the good old iriver instead, and realised that since arriving in the States, I've not had the chance to really do nothing but think and reflect, since before this bus ride every waking moment was taken up either by work or by some new experience that occupies all my senses.
Anyway, Philadelphia appeared on the horizon suddenly, rising out of the countryside like a fairytale kingdom. This is a city of glass towers: all its modern office buildings use glass curtain-walls, and downtown Philadelphia gleamed in the sunlight. The downtown section is also more open than Manhattan, the buildings having been set back further from the grid of streets. Throughout downtown are also scattered many handsome parks, especially the one near Independence Hall, which is the most peaceful place I've encountered since arriving in America. And, most intriguingly, the people there are detectably nicer than Manhattanites. People there walk more slowly, take their time more, are more courteous. I mean, when we were walking around on the streets, all we had to do was to stand still for a minute and look in all directions, and some stranger would approach us and offer to give us directions. I actually feel safer in Philly as a stranger than in Columbia as a student (though, partly, of course, this has to do with the fact that I must bear the consequences of my interactions in Columbia more than the consequences of random encounters on Philly's streets).
The University of Pennsylvania itself is also a beautiful place. It is more of a campus than Columbia is, with ornate architecture, sweeping paths along and across great expanses of lawn, little nooks in the dorms that only residents know about, and many, many places to eat (and the food is better too, to boot!). The ovewhelming impression is one of space, as the rooms are bigger, the libraries emptier, the ceilings higher in the big halls, and if you want to get across campus, it actually is a chore that requires ten minutes of hard walking.
Met many great people there, from the other Singaporeans in UPenn (there are more than 15 of them in the Class of 2012, which means that the Singaporean community there can form a viable clique of its own) to international students and Americans alike. And once again, the people there are palpably nicer, less in a rush. It veritably makes Columbia people seem like they're always on edge, with urgency permeating their every move. And in between bleary-eyed bouts of studying, the students there get up to some pretty reckless things. I didn't plan in advance to arrive on a party night, but both night I was there involved alcohol, and the first night involved a person getting so drunk he had to be hospitalised (which, now that I look back at it and I know the guy's alright, seems pretty darned funny - especially the antics he got up to!). The other night had a big birthday party for one of the Singaporeans, involving much dancing in one of the larger dorm rooms we had at our disposal (I simply bobbed my head, having no real envy of embarrassing myself in another school), and bouts of singing such classic songs as Home and Where I Belong (and I have the videos to prove it!). And this was followed by thoughtful conversation (aided by alcohol) into the wee hours of the next morning, the first of its kind since I came to America. There was only time for a nap before we had to start studying again.
But all this notwithstanding, it was simply good to see Joel again, and to get back into our old pattern of interaction and our old antics. Exchanging notes about college life, revisiting old threads of conversation, even reviving old half-forgotten jokes, I managed to recapture some of the old sense of security. I am ashamed to admit this, because I know that philosophically, this shouldn't be the case: but I was really happy to see a familiar face that predates the whole long goodbye and long wait, and to return to a state of being and interaction in which so many more things can be taken for granted.
On Saturday night, we went down to South Street, which is apparently the happening place in Philly in the evenings. Walking down the street was like walking through Jane Jacobs' version of the Lower East Side; the place was chock-full of people and vibrance. We popped into a multi-storey carpark, following a sign promising free music, and found a garage band playing on the roof. We bypassed a lot completey covered by cut-up beer cans and glass bottles, and some huge murals that are apparently a Philly trademark (something like the murals of Lyon). There was a flea market on the street; among the bricabrac was a computer that had a 3.5" floppy drive. We popped into a hat shop and a comic shop, and finally ended up at a great Greek restaurant for dinner, finishing with a divine Greek dessert, a supersweet pastry stuffed with dates whose name escapes me now.
One of the really cool thing about Philadelphia, though, is that these streets tie into my coursework. South Street, which is presently the hip street in town, used to be the boundary of the old black ghetto, back in the day when WEB Dubois wrote his seminal sociological account of the plight of The Philadelphia Negro. Closer to UPenn itself is another neighbourhood, Powelton Village, that is mentioned in my Urban Studies class; in fact, UPenn itself is mentioned in the assigned reading. So, as I walked those streets, I was also looking out for signs of what I'd read about in class. And there is a special kind of satisfaction in looking at something on the street - a house, a street interaction, anything - and suddenly realising you have the terms with which to explain it.
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Anyway, speaking of sociology, I was out for two afternoons this week doing field research for the paper. Well, it really isn't rigorous, academic-grade research, because all I did was to ride the Staten Island Ferry back and forth and observe how tourists behaved. Heck, there wasn't even a field in sight (except for the minor league stadium near the Staten Island terminal for the ferry)! Anyway, though two short afternoons of observation is nowhere near enough to draw any concrete conclusions, there were some interesting phenomena, like how tourists communicate with each other more readily in an environment that is clearly tourist-friendly, how locals are more indulgent of tourists in this environment, and how tourist and local negotiate the cultural barriers that are highlighted through their proximity on the ferry.
One of the quotidian satisfactions of sociology, though, is that you are better able to read ambient conditions and predict the behaviour of groups of people. Here, for example, we are just passing by the Statue of Liberty, and predictably, the whole row of tourists decide to snap a picture of the lady at the same time. It makes for a cute photo, but it also makes a sociological point, that people tend to behave in predictable ways given the same stimulus, and that even though each person may exercise individual will, collective order still emerges out of the aggregate result of all the effects of the individual exercises of will.
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And a last note about the weather. Woke up today with the campus shrouded in fog. Throughout the whole day, the fog did not really lift, but hung around, clinging to the tops of the skyscrapers. It has been a damp day, but oddly enough, it has been warm enough that I can open the window of my room and enjoy a bit of a breeze. In fact, I could swear that it's gotten warmer at night. But anyway, my astronomy professor would have me know that the autumn equinox occurred at 11.44am on Monday, and that moment marked the official beginning of autumn. And on campus, the first of the trees have started to turn colour.
Time passes. The seasons change. And it has already been a month's worth of school.
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