i made friends with the coolest chair today! the sort you see on danish or swedish design websites, just 2 slim pieces of dark-coloured wood slotted together balanced on a point. beautiful, and looked impossible to sit on, but oh what a chair! i'd need von to properly describe the chair, he knows these things, but for me it was enough to say ooh! the chair was jared's, i didn't want to let him have it back after i'd sat down, but alas, he threw me out before i could get more attached to it. haven't seen jared for the longest time, not, as a matter of fact, since day one of school, when he helped me move in. (we also ended up sitting on my floor eating chinese takeout with our hands, indian-style, a very painful experience to say the least, but that's another story) i was just trotting along towards newcombe hall when someone hails me. what ho, jared says, and what ho, i say back. i follow him home and discovers that he has a very nice room in the basement of a house! it's large and all you see when the door is opened is a low flat bed and empty white walls and a bookshelf in a corner. zen themed? i asked him. very minimalist, and very spacious. i would love a room like that, only i'd just go fill it wall to wall with bookshelves, and then that'll spoil it all. oh i want bookshelves! very very much! but there isn't room. 48 inches is all i've got! i know this sounds crazy but i think bookshelves are sexy. i really do. one day, i will have bookshelves too!

i'm waiting for it to be late enough to call home. i want to thank my parents for the pineapple tarts they'd sent me, and also ask them about which flight they'd like me to come home on. sq tickets are completely and utterly impossible to get. either i leave on the 16th, or i don't at all. well there was a flight out of lax too, but that was the only seat left, and it leaves at 1pm. it'll be awful trying to get over there. plus, we have to go through taipei, and that just makes me uncomfortable. there's no other star alliance airline that can get me home under $2000, except united, but i so refuse to fly united. that leaves ana, and i won't even talk about how much that is costing. i think though that's what i'm going out on.

julian sent me a rather sweet song this afternoon. a very awkward-fumbly-inarticulate sort of love song, and sweet. :) before that i was listening to james thurber's favourite song (or allegedly anyway), byebye blackbird, in several different versions. i wonder why that's his favourite song. i don't think my suitemate understands my music choices. one week it's all opera, another week it's all strange norwegian gospel music, and then now oldies she doesn't recognise (she came in to ask what i was playing, which astonished me, because it was sound of silence and i thought everyone knew that song). ah. von informs me that i'm thinking not about a swedish chair but about vitra. and he is right! i was thinking about this book i'd seen back in jc, but couldn't remember what it was, and i said, what is that red bound book called chairman about some chair design and von gave me title designer and publisher right off. von knows everything!