i took poach's advice and went to turn in my graduation forms because i wasn't making any progress here, and a walk might clear my head. thereupon i met bob reeder, who was a huge comfort as always. he pointed out that i have a great capacity for ruining myself or something like this which is very funny and accurate! i appreciate how my troubles can turn to jokes like that, at least temporarily. and to think i only knew him because i sat next to him during nohrnberg's bible class. i am lucky to have friends like that!

i wrote to nohrnberg for help on flight and he gave me some great ideas only they are in a totally different direction and i can't think whether i should abandon everything i've got so far and write a totally new paper based on nohrnberg suggestions which are 20pages on their own. (he said one thing that i really liked. i asked what the point of fleeing is. he said the answer was in the transparent hummingbird. to flee = to fly = to take wing. but also, at the other end, immobilisation. and that the point of fleeing is to get away from one form, but not from all forms. i think of fleeing as a means of escape, a way out, but he showed me there is no way out, there's just a way into something else.) but this is not helping. words still aren't coming for the paper. so maybe let me just tap here for a while about things in general and maybe words will come back

for instance; i saw a boy knitting an orange scarf today. i find it hard to imagine anyone knitting at all, let alone a boy our age, but he was knitting very skilfully and rapidly and when i got off the bus he had about half a metre done already. and; yesterday as i trudged to school a girl was wearing plastic bags around her feet. i went out and wrote in the snow and closed my eyes and wished. and; today i have hot jasmine tea because i am out of wulong.

or; why don't i enjoy french? it's not that i dislike it, and i'm doing alright in it, but i don't feel i have a french self at all whereas i think i'm developing a latin-thinking me. i can't seem to think of it much as a living language, the way yt does; my interest in it is more of a theoretical one. i don't seem to want to be able to use it to read and to converse - if i have to i will - i'm decent at it only by dint of having done it for a bit, and because languages never give me the sort of trouble chemistry or calculus would. but i don't know that i have in anyway developed a real interest in either the language or the culture. but latin, "dead" as it is called, makes me feel tingly good inside. i know compared to addy and poach and everyone else i am incompetent and practically monolingual and i've gone and devoted my time to something no one else would speak i love it and want to learn about it as if i were preparing for something special, a trip, as if i were learning all i can in order to go out into a world where it is the lingua franca. i don't know that i would ever buy a french book but the idea of owning lots of latin poetry excites me terribly and i would read them, however slowly, i really would. and i would write letters in latin if i had anyone to write them to. and i've never felt the least urge to write english or chinese poetry but the mere possibility, however dim, of writing elegiac couplets one day makes me excited. it's my secret language, in some ways. remember anne fadiman's friend, who received a book with an inscription in dactylic hexameter? it was a gorgeous inscription too - a request has been made, and whenever you, my dear, ask anything of me, it shall be given. or something like that. i know it starts poscitur, but i don't remember how the rest of it goes. i wish i had the book here for i can read the latin now! i think receiving a book with a latin inscription would be supremely sexy. and i'm surprised how many people here can read latin, though no one in singapore can. if i have children, their fourth language will be latin. after english chinese and teochew. i would feel like that about greek too if i were any good at greek. i think. zachary biles gave me a peptalk yesterday - he said with me he always feels that i can read greek but why do i flunk all his tests and assignments? i explained to him that i didn't learn my first year greek well, didn't catch up, got behind, skipped too many classes, was sick, and also mentally gave up half way, and that to be honest, i'm sightreading on most of his tests. we conclude that this semester is not quite over and the final might help abit, and that next semester things might pick up a bit, if i stop skipping and do the work. so i feel much happier about it. think i should have talked to him much earlier. so i'll get a C this semester. okay. i can live with that. next semester, righto! plus we are reading fun stuff, herodotus and euripedes, and not xenophon and plato, which would be a help. a great one.

ah well i better get back to that paper and see if anything will come.