London is hella expensive man...

IT IS! i thought it's just only me but when i asked london natives they say the same thing. seriously i can't see how you can get ahead here financially here...

Tonight for example. i went out of course, because our weekend starts on wednesday (whee)! We ate korean and that amounted to 10.15 pounds each. and thats not that bad yet. went to a pub where i got a double shot rum&coke for 4.59 pounds. and then a beer for 1.59 (thats pretty cheap actually). and when they kicked us out they proceeded to another pub. at first i thought we were all going home but then what the heck. got a gin&tonic. 4 pounds. hello? i think maybe im just a cheap ass and the pound is in fact depreciating lah. ok whatever.

i think this post is really incoherent...because of the buzzz?! gahhhh.. i paid this much so i deserve to be a little buzzed out ok. you know what's *really* expensive, like surprisingly expensive? apples!!! 3 pounds for maybe 6 apples?! uhh welcome to london i guess.

. . . . .

on another note, the Genius feature thing in itunes is pretty... interesting. Below is the list of songs from my own library that Genius has thematically singled out for me:

somewhere only we know - keane
i knew i loved you - savage garden
stand inside your love - smashing pumkin
yellow - coldplay
stop and stare - one republic
closer - travis
happiness - goldfrapp
sweetest goodbye - maroon 5
come undone - robbie williams
love song - sara bareilles

im pretty emo arent i. never knew...

Insomnia!

It's official. i think i've finally found one pattern to my patternless life: out of 30 days in a given month, there have to be at least 3-4 consecutive days that i can't fall asleep. this is frustrating when you have to toss about in bed fully knowing that each minute is ticking by. and when you look at the clock, TADAHHH two hours have gone by. effing blows. on a night like this i think i should pose something happy to pacify my grumpy self.

Picture from earlier this week, an fattilicious reward i totally deserved. there's nothing better than ending two days of stressful presentations - which i totally rocked - with McDo's goodness. the cashier gave me a weird look when taking my order of "6 nuggets, 3 chicken selects, and a medium fries, please" And no i didn't want a meal, i heard myself insist. And that night i was totally passed out from 10:30PM to 9:30AM the next day. WHICH IS THE CULPRIT OF THE INSOMNIA. grrr...

And then Gmail bust out a pleasant surprise! but then this makes for more frustration because there are now too many templates/themes to choose from and lots of them are really cool. i think i'll stick with the classic for a while until i've found one that i really like.

OK. i should be able to sleep now. otherwise i'll seriously consider cooking at 3AM and piss off my flatmates.

The Namesake

I've just finished it. The quickest read ever (by quick i mean a matter of weeks). it didn't blow me away the way the Interpreter of Maladies did but it was very great nonetheless. Her prose is so simple and everything about the book is just so very natural. Except maybe the whole name business that obviously was carefully plotted, constructed as a guiding theme to flesh out the rest of the pages. AND Jhumpa Lahiri, why did you have to lie when you said during your lecture at Brown that you loved the movie version!? I'm not going to go through the whole "does the movie do the book justice?" judging business because I firmly believe the original and its renditions, although impossible to not be compared, have to be judged in their own merits. That said, the movie, in and of itself, was not all the great. I am well aware that the essence has to be shortened, simplified, but should never be meant to be simplistic. Ok enough with the bashing...

She treats most of her main characters amazingly well. Gogol's wife, Moushumi - who was once again squarely left out in the movie, treated as some sort of Gogol's rebound girl - is such a crazily fresh, tangible, humanly, and important character! Overall, if you look for a seamlessly plotted book, this might not be the one for you. which leads me to think that a novel is not her favorite thing to write after all. On several occasions, she would just leave her climaxes unresolved, unexplained at the turn of the page. This recurrent lack of denouement kind of reminds me of the way she treats each story in the Interpreter of Maladies.

I'm impatiently waiting for my copy of Unaccustomed Earth to arrive! I hope for it to be breathtaking and nothing less. Interpreter of Maladies already set the bar really high. But i'm sure it won't disappoint but short stories are where her strengths lie obviously.

just like a tattoo

I realize nothing's broken!
:)

Stress management

is never my strong quality. Well, it's more like time management skills that i'm seriously lacking in. Grrrr. In due-date order...

• graphic illustration of Frey's theory on the micro- and macro-structure of the city models
  
• a temporal-spatial analysis of the Victoria Embankment site (?!)
• a 2000-word paper on design and...crime, the case study city : NYC (?!!?!)
• a presentation on...the Netherlands' three-tier physical planning (?!)

And why is it that the oldest, largest architecture school in the bloody UK got only one A3-sized scanner?! which is not working. Don't they know urban planners swear by maps?!?! gahhhh