obviously never got back to continuing yesterday. ah well.

jocelyn yeo placed 4th in the 200M IM in busan this morning, i was hoping she'd win a medal, although that's next to impossible with the chinese and japanese swimmers (in the 4x200 relay, i was reading, china came in a full four seconds before japan, and then third place korea was seventeen seconds off that! mo tak deng, as my mom would say!) i'm taking an interest in the asian games, and all the other singapore swimmers are dying like flies. i think i was hoping against the odds that joscelyn would win the bronze, because it's probably her last asian games, zaobao said. she's been swimming for 12 years now, i don't think she's going to be competitive for much longer. which is a pity, i do like her. she's swimming again tomorrow. i shall hope for that one.

no one can imagine a tie-less professor nohrnberg. you can't, and i can't either, but i didn't have to imagine it. he came to class without a tie today. the people reading this either know him and what i mean, or they don't, in which case it doesn't matter. it certainly isn't because he forgot it. he keeps a tie in his office for emergencies (forgetting a tie constitutes emergency in his case) and he usually comes to work already tied. heat can hardly be the reason. it's not very hot today and even in april in a stuffy room at 2pm he has a tie on, which he only removed between classes, in the privacy of his office. i thought maybe it was a new experiment in loosening up, dress the way younger professors do, but is he the sort to care about academic fashions? or rather, obviously he cares about the correct professorial dress, but he is caring in 1975, where coat and tie was de rigeur. not that he hasn't deviated from that in little ways, he has been coming to school in black sneakers for at least 2 years. and the other day i was told by daniel heins that he wore jeans to the departmental reception. black they were, but jeans unmistakably. but still, tieless! people depend on his ties! the spenserians used to shake their heads on the hottest april days about his ties! so i just cannot understand why he would be without today. and half way through class he got embarrassed enough to pull his tie out of his pocket. "i didn't forget. it's the thought that counts." he says it was the heat. but! defeated by an october day! when all those april ovens didn't bring about anything more than a telltale unfastened top button! he's still my hero but there is now a slight but definite dent in my adoration. sigh.

he also spent half a class telling us about george plimpton. and that, the 2nd most decorated man from ww2 was the villian in high noon.

ARGGGGGH. ANOTHER FIRE DRILL. what drilling really does is to irritate the hell out of you and for you never to believe in anything wrong when the alarm goes off until the smoke starts coming through the door. if there was a real fire or bomb though, i wonder what i would take with me before i got out. you know how they always tell you not to stop to get anything but i would you know. my books might be the most important things to me, but i also realise that books are very replaceable, at least if i don't mind not having the exact same edition, and that my marginalia has to perish. wall decoration, tea and teacups, shoes can go. clothes i'd be sorry to lose because those aren't replaceable, but i guess fashions will pass. hm. i think i would grab bear, a stack of letters, a poem off my wall, and my laptop. that's a lot of stuff, innit? actually i should back up everything onto my webspace so that if i have to run i can leave the laptop. hmm. ah well, not that this building is ever going to burn down. anyway. if the alarm wasn't so earpiercing i think i'd happily lie here and read a book and be burnt to death.