there is a very leggy spider in my room. as i'm generally alright with the creepie crawlies, and because of charlotte's web, for a long time i have nodded politely to it and let it do what it likes because it's got to eke a living too. but now the silly thing's gone and stuck my window together. i don't think it understands i bear it no malice but in the interest of breathing i have to destroy its web. oh well.

i did not mention this here before, though it's been a good three weeks since i first had the idea, because i wasn't sure if it would happen, and i wasn't going to get my hopes up. but, after much scheming and plotting and hushed whispering bob reeder and i have successfully invited professor nohrnberg to lunch! on the monday after next. as bob said, nohrnberg on the corner would be hard to picture, and he is so frightfully busy. eeek! do you know how excited i am? the gods haven't dined with the mortals since the wedding of cadmus and harmony! also he has apparently told bob that "we might sneak her into the renaissance area gathering again" (at his house) so also very happy about that. i didn't think i was going to get to go to any more of these things! and professor dan kinney will talk about ovid. ovid!! eeek! actually, i think eek is more like a squeal, which i can't do, but squawk would be more like, ahhhhk! which is more like how i feel, so *SQUAWK*, alright.

was just telling yen that i always have the desire to get things that don't remotely have anything to do with my lifestyle, like opera gloves and knee-high boots. yesterday someone was selling a lot of 35 leather gloves in all kinds of colours, pastel pinks and baby blue and mint greens and rich burgundies and purples, with tooling and fluttery cuffs and all sorts of little details. i sat on my hands because i know very well it's complete folly but the thought of owning things in every imaginable colour always always appeals to me. take scarves. for a person who was born and bred on the blooming equator i own more scarves in more colours than anyone i know. what i will do when i move back to singapore i don't know. now chicago doesn't seem like such a bad idea. hee.

i think it's all this talking about a-ha in public. i've just gone and downloaded pet shop boys and richard marx and duran duran and other shameful things like that. *cover face* slippery slope!!! are we very, ninetiesish? (what should that be, nineties-ish?, ninetish? no such word/expression, i suppose, but aiyah.) mingchen said, about my recent m&m email, that we're obviously eighties kids. i think she's wrong. she's wrong about the m&ms, which a quick check showed were first given to american soldiers during ww2, and she's wrong about the decade, because like yen was saying, we're nineties kids, really. anything before that was all, very bochap and blur and enid blyton and ice-sticks. and those little tubes of pinkish gum that stink like anything, but which you daub on the end of little tubes and blow hard and a gigantic bubble comes out the other end which you can pluck off and throw around? and coloured rubberbands. and cassette tapes. do you think we're the last generation to remember cassette tapes? i used to go after school to hougang ave 3 to buy my xiaohudui albums. (argh, i am admitting this in public. xiaohudui!! possibly more embarrassing than a-ha) and i remember switching to cds for the first time (it was the 2nd youke lilin album) and feeling very excited and also a bit heady having spent all my allowance. by the way minyin and i once got nostalgic and bought ice sticks from a mama store under some flats in marine parade, they were not very good and got all over my hands (and i had to spend ages trying to break it down the middle) all in all it was very disappointing and cured me of wanting icesticks.

what other telltale signs, besides our music? slang? (like how if you go around saying "awesome!" you must be a college student in america?) i can't remember what i said that was particularly us. is "cool" and "gross" us? or did ppl say tt before us? no one ever says "gross" nowadays but when i was in primary school i remember we said tt all the time, an umbrella term for anything at all we didn't like, it was gross this and gross that. oh yeah, i was sent out of the room for calling someone spastic, i think. did we not also say that a lot? like "don't be spastic" or "that's very spastic"? olivia tan said that a lot. eunice yeo did too? argh. this is very bad. i will stop thinking. this pet shop boys song i'm listening to is called "being boring" and it's all about looking back on youth and how "we were never being boring. we were never being bored. we had too much time to find for ourselves. we were never holding back, worrying that time would come to an end." sigh. wish it were like that.