Blank Doll

Increasingly, work sucks. This cannot go on.

Hello Clare! God I thought you were dead or something.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll

I am going to say that you obviously have some manpower (not to mention a couple of other) issues when you need a clerk whose hips and back hurt half the time to do guard duty for the second time in two weeks.

I am very happy with my Shure earphones because they rock at keeping noise out and music in. Silence is at a premium and I love my new earphones for making silence possible at the most random places.

My ice cream maker is also a darling and my first creation, milk and honey gelato, is working it. It's perfect for a hot sunny day and I only wish I could take it to camp. In the mean time, I seriously need to get a lot of sleep tonight because the coming week will kill me.

Anyone with Raffles Hotel mooncakes, the champagne and ganaches ones, do take pity on me and sell me a box. I'm a little annoyed at how I have no mooncakes at all this year because I love mooncakes a lot and no, the tray of pan pac mooncakes do not count.

I'm going to report sick if they put me on guard duty next week or the week after that. This is ridiculous.

C'est tout.

Blank Dollhause

The past week has flown by really quickly. The break on friday was really much needed after all and I'm a lot fresher now. Yesterday was a fruitful night out and I wonder how often it is that we make friends we actually want to keep. I suppose it's my fault but most people whom I call friends, I don't feel a need to keep them. Damn.

Anyway, the lounge at the fullerton hotel is nice and quiet with very nice cushions. CRAP NUTS like everywhere else. Oh and my beloved mooncakes are SOLD OUT again.

Tomorrow's massage and tea will do the trick. I love my life.

Bon voyage, ma petite chere, tu sais que tu me vachement manqueras.

C'est tout.

BD shouts.

Wednesday evening was a pleasant surprise because Mummy decided to have dinner at Boat Quay en famille. We ate at al dente which was passing fine and anyway, I have a sudden craving for Italian food that needs to be exorcised before I can resume normal behaviour at the table.

Also, the 2008 spring/summer collection has been quite a disappointment thus far. I like what L'Wren Scott has done, some of it and Francisco Costa at Calvin Klein did a few good pieces but that's about it. I suppose we'll need to wait for the French and Italian players to up the ante a little because thus far, this hasn't been the most inspired showing.

I am suddenly the unlikely recipient of backroom bitching from somebody whose rank is higher than me by quite a bit but not quite my boss and it is rather amusing. It's also slightly annoying. When I go to camp, I try to be nice to everybody (NICE) because this is not fashion or RJ and I don't see the need to be bitchy or competitive. Anyway, at the level where I am, army politicking is so lame and obvious there's really no point.

By the way, was talking to an officer the other day and I realised that we have unknowingly added a deeper fissure to Singaporean society than mere race through our education system. This officer is a lot older than me and he comes from a different JC that has been the object of my contempt for quite a while and it's interesting because he told me he didn't like people from my school. You'd think a decade of no longer being in school would have wiped the slate clean. Then there is the myth that senior rafflesians help their juniors when they're working in the same corporate environment. Is it just me or does it sound laughable considering that we're all such an ambitious and competitive bunch?

I was talking to a senior and he was arguing, comme d'habitude, that the state has no reason to intervene to aid the poorest of society. I would have agreed with him in the past and to a great extent, I still do. Nonetheless, increasingly, I begin to question the strident arrogance (!) that such a stand entails. I think the social cost of living the poor to fester by themselves is significant enough to warrant some form of intervention from the government for the wealth of a polity cannot be based solely on its economic strength but must also be founded on a benign society free from the evils of extreme poverty and an absence of social mobility. Note that I don't think inequality is a bad thing as long as social mobility is present but I do think that some measure of social equity needs to be present. It's just, I feel that it would be irresponsible of any individual to say that the state should let the poor die because they deserve it. Well, most of them do of course and I'm not even appealing to anyone's benevolence but I feel that the poor exact too high a cost to society to not have us do something about them.

Having said that, my sister woke me up at this unearthly hour because she was panicking over being late and I really, really hate it when that happens. Like hello, if you're late, just take a cab.

My horoscope mentions that this month needs to be a month of rest lest I wear myself out and that has proven to be uncannily true. I have felt a little worn about the edges thanks to the combination of more work, huge amounts of domestic stress, the unfortunate occurrence of yet another bout of existential crisis, a creative rut and my intense desire to run to Paris. I also feel like checking into Fullerton for two months where I do nothing but visit Woffles for lipo, peels, shots and lifts while I eat at San Marco everyday.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll

It takes so little to make one realise how reliant we are on our technology. I was observing my mother using the computer yesterday and it dawned on me that the whole pc thing sort of left her generation bewildered and this whole Internet 2.0 thing is like, too counter-intuitive.

In one more generation, laptops will be so ridiculously cheap it doesn't make sense to use paper anymore and we'll all be carrying solar-powered disposable electronic pads and they'd have finally invented a prototype of the 3-d printer and for a price, we'd be able to print 3d.

Imagine! Printing a dress! Issey Miyake would be so proud.

Ok, nothing much to say because blogging has suddenly become dangerous and I'm a little torn on the issue of censorship and free speech.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll

Jessie has just figured out why my writing skids too closely to the excessively florid most of the time and I'm not telling you why save for the fact that it's got something to do with ultra trashy lit that I used to read as a child.

David Lebovitz replied to my mail! Haha, this is such a fanboy moment. Now if I can only get my hands on Tom Ford's email address..

Am inspired to prepare dinner next sunday for la famille. The following items have been thrown into the air and I shall somehow have to arrange a meal. I'm thinking of a long dinner with many courses all of which are tres tres petits.

Smoked salmon rolled with cream cheese and wolfberries.

Reverse smoked salmon roll with crepe and cream cheese inside.

Minced meat and tofu molded into a little cube served with a thick teriyaki sauce.

Tea soup with fish broth.

Salad of bok choy, cherry tomatoes and lemon rind with a mirin and shoyu dressing.

Mushroom risotto.

Savoury fromage brulee with minced shrimps.

Salad of chopped scallops, raw fish and watercress with a plum vinegar dressing.

Pan seared chicken with a ginger caramel glaze.

Mint jelly infused with vodka.

Fresh melon juice with longans.

Mango souffle.

Comments?

C'est tout.

Blank Doll

For a non-science geek like me, Charles Stross' Accelerado is one smashing hard science fiction hit. I love the idea of Economics 2.0, the Rapture of Nerds where everyone is uploaded into space and the Matroishka Brain where the solar system is reduced to a pulsating cloud of nanocomputers. It's breathtaking and scary but so exciting at the same time since about everyone who know me for more than 4 minutes know that I love the idea of one day having a high bandwidth interface implanted right into our brains so we can do away with the clumsy artifice of computers.

That's a lot of technological gushing from a non-science geek but it only goes to prove how much of a geek I still am.

Drinks with Jessie after dinner. She's hallucinating about seeing a certain somebody. I hate to say this but I think I'm going through the whole I'm losing a friend shit which I thought I'd been thankfully saved from during my JC years. Sucker!

My orange cheesecake tarts look mighty swell and I've, on a whim, emailed David Lebovitz about pastry dough but I doubt he'll reply. Meanwhile I'm still grappling with the thin red line that separates 20s soignee from 60s sleek and it's just not happening. Obviously one is vulgar and the other isn't but that's seeing it from the perspective of a 21st century kid. I can't see the shock factor in the marcel wave, I can't see the vulgarity inherent in a tortoiseshell smoking pipe. I can't see anything but the slow death of Victorian superiority in the Quantian parade of miniskirts, Zoot suits and plastic dresses. I want to connect Chanel with St Laurent, I want to jet the whole thing into the future without it coming out overimaged and repackaged for our jaded eye. I want the hearts to still trill when the model walks out in her gamine dress of bias cut tea green silk with the conched koi in thread of gold and scarlet bakelite. I want the slinky black cardigan of cashmere and the layered top with embossed python skin to melt the frigid hippocampuses of the front row mavens. I want luxury to explode from every pore, from every tent in Bryant Park, from every pulpit in Milan, from every chateaux in Paris and I want luxury to replace the monolith of accessible designer chic.

I want to weave threads of suede into a gown and cut it on the bias so it clings to your skin the way silk does except it isn't silk. I want-

too much.

C'est tout.