i need a plane ticket to go home. that's the problem with saying you won't and then changing your mind. all the sq flights seem to be full already. if i have to go home on united i will - er, actually, i won't do anything, i'll just be quietly unhappy about it. but, erm, very quietly very unhappy. today. mainly feeling down in the dumps today, and listening to eimear quinn's the voice which was the 1996 eurovision song contest winner. has anyone noticed how these new-agey celtic melody type songs tend to win? i think the year before, or after, secret garden's nocturne won, although i don't think it was fair, calling that a "song". oh! choonping has my secret garden album! nicked it in sec 3, never gave it back, and probably very pleased with himself for it!!

i got up at seven to go to the farmers' market, remembered that i was supposed to go with allyson suhendra, gave her a call and nearly thought she was going to be another of those can't-get-ups, but eventually the phone was answered and she wrangled for 30mins extra for the rise and shine routine. we took the 8 o'clock trolley downtown, where she spent over 30 dollars at the hungarian bakery alone, and also bought peppers cucumbers and apples. i wonder why the jam fellow hasn't been there for three weeks. my dad has asked me to bring some back, so this is most bothersome. there's only one market day left to me! hardly any flowers either, so i got some zinneas (dark pink) then we go to the nook restaurant for breakfast. normally, i eat at a different place (higher grounds. yeen teck and addy know where that is) but allie wanted to try a place she hadn't been to. i don't particularly like the nook, but i remember that it's the first place i've ever gone into on the mall. one saturday morning, in first year, i went out for a very early morning walk and kept walking until i came upon the downtown mall for the first time. i was astonished by what i had found. eventually after walking up and down three or four times i got hungry and went into this one. pancakes, with cold spiced apples on them. that's what i had, and i still remember! i also saw being john malkovich that day, at the jefferson, which is one of those cinemas that bring in movies late, at an unbelievable $2 (i had to go in and ask because i didn't believe my eyes. it is now $3, i think. inflation!) allie is amazed that i take coffee black, and that i managed to eat nearly all my pancakes. you like the downtown mall don't you? she asked me. i said i did. i don't like it, she says. it's not the kind of place that i imagine she would like either. i'm surprised, though, how few of the singaporeans like the downtown mall or spend any time there. it's different from singapore, of course. i think many of the sporeans here don't like the it (or the rest of cville for that matter) because they find it uninteresting but i do and think i will always have a special feeling for it. there's something fundamentally attractive about it to me, though i couldn't say what it is.

on the whole, i might have fitted in better at columbia. christine was here a few weeks ago for tea, and she said she thought she'd have fitted in better elsewhere, at harvard perhaps. more cosmopolitan, was the implication. also kids who are more intellectual, (i bet von would contradict me in a second) i thought that this is probably true for both of us. the other sporeans don't seem to have this problem. they go to parties, attend football games, i don't seem to have picked up any of those habits. the ones i picked up have got me more withdrawn into myself. going into the gardens to sit, getting up to go to the farmers' market, spending time in used book stores, keeping a blog. my weekends would sound very dull to most people. actually, when i consider the singaporeans here, with the exception of jared, i don't see any of them writing down "reading" on a form where it says: hobbies? actually it is funny isn't it? reading is so passive that you don't think it ought to count as an interest or hobby. though those people who would write so read so voraciously you couldn't think that's passivity, no. didn't addy say, on her website, something to the effect that if she couldn't read she'd rather not live? that's not a hobby, that's a to-die-for, literally. but no, not "fitting in", either with the singaporeans here, or many of the other students here, that doesn't seem to bother me much. and i do think that's because i've been lucky that charlottesville is conducive to solitude. a person could be on her own here for a large part of the time and not feel it's strange. here, i don't seem to expect the telephone to ring at all, and i am always somewhat surprised when it does. and i feel perfectly happy about that sort of solace and quiet in my space, as if it's the most natural thing, when, in singapore, i don't think a day ever goes by without the phone ringing twenty times for one of us, or without smses coming in at odd hours, and that seems absolutely natural too. in singapore i would want to be out, i would want to be doing and seeing all the time, and my neighbours are always surprised that i'm at home. if i were elsewhere and not fitting in, i think i might feel it a whole lot more, but here solitude is an option, and a very pleasant one.

yesterday, before ovid, the first years (there are a lot of them) began talking about admissions. whether they were glad to be here, and what other places they were rejected from. a lot of them were rejected from princeton and brown. i wonder how many applications those schools get compared to here. everyone has indignant stories about a nasty classmate who tells others, i'm going to princeton, and about someone they didn't think should have got in someplace who did. paul gazoli (sp?), this multilingual first year, says someone he knew did nothing but play hockey and gamble all the time and got into princeton. "it's the gambling. probably he won a bet with the princeton admissions dean," he quips. while we're on quip, quippe is a latin word meaning "oh yes indeed", "obviously", "why naturally", in short, what people usually say "duh" for. totally irrelevant of course, i was just remembering that it was one of the words in the reading that day, and some of the kids were tossing it around. i do like latin and greek words. giant compounds. there's a greek participle meaning, she having been courted and won, that is marvellous! and of course i did write a whole mail about how pente and quinque, the greek and latin words for the numeral five, show how the "indo-europeans" counted. *beam* i really liked that one!

okay dinner beckons.