some thoughts on guarded interests

human nature is so contradictory. i was talking with a friend while waiting in hall for lunch, and he was asking me if i was going to stay on in oxford. i told him about my plans to go into publishing and how i wanted to work with the OUP. i eventually explained to him that there was a summer internship for it, at which he broke in and said, "ohh i would love to do that as well. i should apply for that."

i confess that my heart sank a little, especially given the fact that i had a similar conversation with another friend last week, to whom i emailed the OUP application details.

it looks like every single english student out there who does not feel that academia is right for them, wants to go into publishing. i have to say that i have never felt so territorial about something, which is a new feeling because i think myself exceptionally un-possessive and non-competitive hahaha. but now with the whole career thing looming in the horizon, and my own personal stake in wanting to stay in at Oxford and secure a temporary job here at least, i feel that i should perhaps want to be careful about telling everyone about this wonderful opportunity OUP offers. is that bad? yes. is it justified? hmm. not sure.

when i try to rationalize my selfish feelings and inclinations, the argument in my head descends into some kind of... "but i want it more" and "they don't even want to stay in oxford! they want to go home! why don't they let ME stay here when i want to...". but i realize that i can't attribute their interest as a kind of usurping of my plans. sigh. i don't know.

gosh i just realized that maybe this is what being kiasu is about. is it? maybe this is why people are always so damn guarded about their job and grad school applications, interviews, etc.

sigh but i REALLY WANT THIS INTERNSHIP. i don't want to lose it out to them (albeit very nice and intelligent friends, both of whom are doing a master's in English) because well, i would just feel bad about it. i would really like this internship so that i can have a higher chance of being employed with the publishing house. the petty side of me consoles myself with the fact that at least i've had publishing internship experience... ....

and i guess i will have to be competitive in some way and write one hell of an application this coming winter. i hate being this aggressive, but i see no other way around it.

i think i write this post also because i'm slightly annoyed that one of the girls in my seminar has asked to switch presentation weeks so she can talk about John Cheever, with whom she has "fallen in love with" and because of some illness (which i don't see as a legitimate excuse as she still has 2 weeks to prepare for her presentation!) there were 3 of us originally doing that week's presentations, and my two peers insisted that there was no way they could switch, which leaves me with no choice but to switch. this means my stress levels are shooting up because i'm presenting one week advance and no, i've not started the reading. and the reading is about VISUAL ARTS. this was the one week i said to myself, "no, i'm not doing this one" because i know nothing about visual arts. however, the one redeeming thing about this all is that perhaps i get to talk about Benjamin (who i kinda like and at least have read a bit of), and i see that one of the texts is To the Lighthouse. the problem with To the Lighthouse however is that it is so overdone so i don't want my talk to be cliche ridden. but hopefully the professor in charge of that week will be nice enough to meet with me so that we can go over my amateurish observations on modern fiction and visual art...

i swam across, i jumped across for you

very in love with Jem's cover of 'Yellow' by Coldplay:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmYa2Sne2vQ

(listen to it without looking at all the images of flowers - i think they spoil the effect of the music and song!)

i was looking up interpretations of the lyrics. not sure how accurate they were, but they ranged from speculations that the yellow is representative of the lead singer's mother's illness... to yellow being a word that the songwriter started off with, all other ones being fillers for the rhyme and stanza.

anyway... need to rest, despite the gargantuan workload :S.

the bright lights of academia are fading. i find it harder and harder to motivate myself - why for instance, should i spend hours attempting to process the word mush (and magic i suppose) of Ulysses when i hate high modernism? people are always talking about their research "interests" and whatnot, succinct strings of nouns (feminism, the victorian novel, crime fiction whatever) but i'm beginning to wonder how important all of this is actually. as people have half-jokingly asked me in the past, who cares?!

sometimes i sit in class and find the discussions as an exercise in ego-stroking, a competition in rhetoric. i'll be carrying a glass of white wine in hand and have to explain to professors what i'm working on, and make the academic small talk that is paramount in this world. i have a feeling that what i'm interested in IS somehow important, not only to literary scholars, but to any reader or person who has yet to read, but i don't know how to describe this to my peers and supervisors. and in that gap of in-articulation, there goes my faith that maybe this work will lead to somewhere.

i tell people that i am leaning towards pursuing other work and leave behind literature after this year. some are surprised, and assume that Oxford has made a bad impression on me, (or that i'm not cut out for this work). i don't think that's it though. it's just the gradual realisation that i need to develop in other ways. i would love to start work next year and learn to deal with people, strict deadlines, and contribute somehow to a world outside of myself. my mind is weak and i don't have a thick enough skin, so maybe working will toughen me up!

however i shall try to make the most out of this masters program - it might be the last year i get to wallow in books! but no more stressing over grades. seriously i need to grow out of that!

in between worlds

my mind has been racing these past two weeks, from survival-mode to social-mode to settle-in-and-let's-get-down-to-work mode. freshers week is always a whirlwind of names, subjects, countries, colleges... it was fun, but i'm glad that Week 1 has begun so that i can start to develop some kind of routine. thankfully settling into Oxford hasn't been too hard; there is no culture shock this time around, and i'm lucky to have WS here.

i do wonder from time to time what College Hill must look like this autumn... i fantasize about the river Cam and pretty Pembroke, but before my mind wanders, drunken with nostalgia, i tug it back gently to what is here...

it has been hard concentrating on the now though. i'm not sure why my mind is so restless! it's as if it's trying to chase down every single doubt and analyse every single social encounter. and i keep finding myself in the same social situations where i am too shy to proactively reach out and say, hey, do you want to go for lunch together, or, even just, how are you? thankfully everyone around me seems more normal and quite friendly; i like how my cohort from the english 1900-present strand is already organising group outings to the theatre, pubs. tomorrow we have our first class... a little excited actually, to hear everyone's opinions on modernism.

but i'm most looking forward to my small Conrad seminars. the more i read of and by him, the more i worship this man who somehow wrote some of the greatest novels in the English language, which was his THIRD language - a language he first heard only at the age of 16. i love Henry James but Conrad is even more impressive in scope, both philosophical and imaginative. seriously if you liked Heart of Darkness, try to get a copy of Lord Jim, and then Nostromo.

oh and yesterday, i decided to reconnect with my roots by going to the HK postgraduate dinner. at Brown, i avoided the HK society because i felt that i wouldn't fit in with them. somehow i have the impression that Hong Kongers tend to be quite cosmopolitan, and i'm not sure if i get along with very worldly people. but the HK postgraduates here are very friendly and relatively down to earth. and thank you mom, for your uncompromising attitudes towards my linguistic education: "chinese must know how to speak chinese!" it's the one thing that makes me one of them... and i guess part of me desperately wants to belong somewhere. after countless "where are you from?" enquiries throughout this week, i do wish i could lay claim to one place, stake it out for my own. i usually just say HK given that i've spent the most time there (8 years) and was born there. but it is complicated... ... i was born in HK, hopped on a plane one month later and lived in Japan for 5 years, then HK for 8 years, then Singapore for 5 years, then the US for 2, england 1, US 1, back to england. i think most of my friends don't even know my background that clearly :P but there it is!