I was supposed to go for ballet, but I decided I was too lazy, and I realised the real reason I wanted to go was just to get myself in the vicinity of Kino, Borders and library@orchard. Poach and I were discussing the book online for the last few days, and now I just feel that I have *got* to have a copy of T.D.O.H. to read or else I would die. I can't go to Chengsan library to check it out again, because I went and returned it at Tampines the other day. Tomorrow is ages away, and the only thing to keep me going in the meantime is All-Souls Day, which isn't as good as I expected it to be, so far. I think Nooteboom would like to win the Nobel prize, only I bet Mulisch gets it first. Will I be crazy to go to town from Hougang just to get a copy of Mulisch and come right home again? It's thundering and the rain makes me want to stay in. And I *could* just jog over and see what else Chengsan library has to offer. Oh! I wanted to go to the screening of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg but I forgot and it is over. Also the Peter Brook play is sold out. Completely and utterly sold out. Michael Nyman is available, but I bought tickets to see 24 Preludes of Chopin / Le Cri du Monde so I can't go. Till next week, for a life indoors-and-book-smothered, then.

On Tuesday I asked Poach how far she'd got with T.D.O.H - Quinten had just spoken his first word. She is enraptured with Quinten, and I ought to be too, child prodigies are simply fascinating to read about. Poach thinks of him as a sort of fully fleshed-out kind of Roald Dahl's Matilda and I do find Quinten attractive and amazing but in his case I never really could get emotionally attached because I have this nagging feeling of how he's a sort of literary stereotype. Also because he's so impervious and mei2 liang2 xin1. We talk about Onno and Max and much to my surprise I'm actually much more attracted to Max while for Poach it's Onno. I think this is known as opposites attracting. (I don't think I'll ever be able to think of men again without defining them in terms of Onno and Max!)

The best email opener I've got lately was from Poach, who starts her epistle with: "minz you're a nut but a very nice one." (this was in response to me trying to secure her life against the ambushes of wanton rice-dwelling bacteria) In some ways that's a very succint way of summing up our relationship, and probably of looking at the way Max would think about Onno. We talk about how we're a little like Onno and Max ourselves. Poach is sympathetic to Max's orderly perception of the world. (she agrees with Max about how he saves a year not looking for things under other people's clutters, whereupon, aghast, I cried: "Poach! you big horrible J!") I've got a giant mess like Onno's, and the first time Poach visited me in Charlottesville, she made a choked disbelieving noise when I threw open my door. She's also very very smart in a disciplined, quietly ambitious, thorough and professional way, whereas I tend to bumble through school sloppily but with flamboyant mock egotism. In fact, when I get back to school, I'll probably put on my wall Onno's: "you're one of those people who think that achievement is more important than talent". We had a good talk, which ended when I threatened to tell her what happens next, whereupon she shouts NOOO!! and dashed offline immediately. heehee. Next morning she came online and accosted me with an "Onno!" and I hollered right back "Maxima!" This cracks me up somehow. Poach is a fast reader, and probably more thorough than me too. Already she's where Quinten and Onno are looking for the tablets (she's actually lived next to Campo dei Fiori!, where Onno hid!) Today she's all done and we talk about our favourite bits of the book. The historioscope. The intellectuals living in the Groot Rechteren. Thermaat's architecture rambles especially. Max: When the sky stops raining, the trees start raining. Quinten: They're crying. Sophia: So you're not a tree then? Q jumps in puddle: "I am the rain!" I read somewhere that Onno and Max are thinly-veiled portraits of Mulisch himself, and his best friend, a chess player. We try to guess whether he is Onno or Max, contemplate writing to Muslich (he must be a genius!), and then go wild at the idea of watching the movie together. (Stephen Fry is Onno, and Greg Wise is Max.) Were subsequently plunged in the depths of abjection, when we find out the DVD isn't out till September. (At least, I am in positive agony. What will I do from now till September?) This reminds me, for some reason, of us reading Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One, (this was when we were fifteen or so) after which we talked about nothing but Peekay and Hymie as if they were our next-door neighbours. (I suddenly remember now, did not the two of us once make a list of all our favourite male fictional characters? I don't remember if we ranked them too, but Peekay must have been somewhere very high on that list. I am positive that I had Turgenev's Bazarov on it. Poach, let's make a new list when you get back!)

Poach can do these crazy things with me, which is why I appreciate her so much. As further proof, she also didn't mind me, when we were thirteen, dragging her all over Grange Road looking for the house of a French teacher I was unabashedly smitten with, hoping to catch a glimpse of the poor man, and all we had to go on was a phonebook address I'd found by looking up all possible permutations of the spelling of his name (which i'd never seen in writing) with my rudimentary grasp of phonetics. (as it turns out, it was the wrong name i had) Some young friendships, as ours was then, might have been irreparably fractured as an aftereffect of the wildgoose chase, but she never let fly one word of reproach, so you see. I think we're comfortable in how we're very different, but in fundamental ways alike. The fundamentals, I think, include how we're always just about on the same plane intellectually, and how we're so used to each other, and how, after so long, we have the same points of reference, so that we can talk about books without anxiety to impress, fear of sounding either ignorant or pretentious, and we are often excited by the same books. We have a good idea of the kind of books the other likes, the kind of approach we take to work, how much this matters to us, and Poach says we can go "off" together.