it is very bizarre to be courted by the navy. and the army. and (for goodness sake) changi airport. well, i suppose on the bright side it means that i am finally getting mail, and mail is always exciting :)
at least they spelt my name right. i subscribed to Time a while back, and for two years i received brochures and promotional material addressed to "Ms Claire Lathleen Matthews".
i watched out of africa and now feel a little distressed at realising how people can leave you so abruptly. there isnt much security to be found in us at all. sigh. my whole family is going to malaysia tmrw so i will be alone at home until friday. its very exciting, i love empty houses. if you are reading this and i know you, feel free to drop by. if you are reading this and i dont know you, feel free to send me flowers anonymously. i need to put some in my sisters room. she hasnt cleaned it since intiyah left, and it's starting to smell. i would tell her to clean it, but im enjoying the little feeling of superiority it gives me every time i walk past, because though my sister and i are both equally messy, my sister is now stinky, and i am not. :)
i am now going to go on about the movie.
in out of africa, robert redford and meryl streep were lovers (i ususally cant remember character names in movies, so i just call them by their real names, or assign them names 'the blond guy'. actually, after reading Dostoyevsky's 'The Idiot' i realise that i dont necessarily know the names of characters in books either, i recognise who is who by the way the letters group together, or how they look, how this name creates an unusual gap after the r, or how that name looks as if it belongs to a beautiful person. the names of russian people just go on forever, with too many z's and y's in between.)
anyway.
they were doing wonderfully going off exploring into the safari, or flying off in his little yellow plane until one day she asked him if they would get married. he didnt want to (miser!) and couldnt understand why she wanted to get married. she said she would just like to have someone ask her, and asked him to promise her that he would, if she'd promise to say 'no'. then they fought (of course) and eventually it went on until they separated, and then later when they were about to reconcile, he died (!!!!). and i thought, what an incredible waste. now robert redford is gone and meryl streep is all alone! sadness. i dont really know what point im trying to make of all this but its something to do with marriage and stupidity. i think it was stupid of meryl streep to want marriage for the sake of marriage, but equally stupid for robert redford to not want marriage for the sake of being the cool, independent one. robert redford came back to her, which obviously means he wasnt too successful being the cool, independent one, and that he did, after all, need her in a semblance of a way. argh. confusing. its like a merchant's tale all over again, where neither party really understood what they were getting into. but what is marriage? dunno. but im not getting married until i do.
"I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery."
...Isak Dinesen (alias for Karen Blixen), Out of Africa
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