von's girl friend from harvard is impossible. i have no idea what to do with her and apparently this has been the case with everyone else von has tried to introduce her to from the sailors down to his mother. i can understand people being unwilling to talk much i mean i lurk quietly often enough myself and i can understand having nothing to say without necessarily being bored or wishing to appear cold and antisocial but she simply defies anyone's attempts at friendliness. start a conversation with her on any topic and within 30 seconds it is at a complete deadend. i really don't understand. she doesn't seem to even make the most elementary effort to smile, talk, laugh, answer in polysyllables, or do or say anything remotely congenial. she has nothing in mind and she doesn't want to do anything in particular and i wonder why she's even in singapore and why she's decided to stay with von, since she doesn't apparently know about or seem interested in sightseeing, and though i had expected her to be a schoolpal of von, it is quite obvious they were never at any point close friends.) she simply tags along to everything, but sits there watching. this includes going to food places with you and NOT eating, only sipping her water. von summoned me rather imperiously thrice within 30min from woollerton park where i was at the uva party and i took this for impatience because he wanted to impress this girl and not want to keep her waiting, but 20mins after i'd sat down with them at nydc i realised that he wanted another person around just so he didn't stab her with a blunt spoon himself. after that we went and walked around holland v till we found siem reap and then walked over to jalan merah saga (what does that mean? red beans? and why i thought the adjective comes at the end? what is saga. like the saga tree that kind of saga?) to see au petit salut. i never knew where jln merah saga was and now i do! anyway yes his friend is terribly unhelpful and impossibly weird and i was expecting to spend an interesting and intelligent evening out with them. how far from it. perhaps my quota of interesting meetings have been used up for the night, cos i met a really cool person at the uva party. she's a filipina who graduated from darden (uva's business school) 5 years ago and now works for lucent technogies and is a part-time docent at the sam. and she is a collector of children's books!!! she invited me to visit her to browse her collection sometime this week so i'm ! and she tells me that she has a friend who's an assistant professor at bu teaching creative writing. he's got a b.a. in manila i think in philosophy, an m.a in literature, and he's published in the phillippines and has done a good deal of translation both of his own work and of others' works and she said that if i emailed him he'd prob be happy to give me pointers on translation and children's lit. yay!