I went to a WashU-SLU medical schools mixer-fundraise event tonight. SLU, or Saint Louis University, is the other medical school in the city and a few miles away from WashU. There has always been a sort of rivalry between the two, or so I feel. Nonetheless, it was an opportunity to meet some people outside of WashU med, so I went with fairly high expectations.

I manned the fundraiser booth for a while. The SLU girl manning it was quite nice, I thought. We talked for a bit, but the conversation never took off. My turn was over, and I took off to walk around the bar, talking to different people--all within WashU med. There was a cute Asian guy from SLU who caught my eyes. Three girl friends were more than happy to act as wingchicks and managed to get us in an one-to-one conversation, but it didn't lead anywhere, and after 5 rather insipid minutes we went off our own ways.

Amusing as the incident was, it did get me thinking. I have not flirted successfully--however you define success: feeling good about it afterwards, regardless of any actual numbers exchanged, is usually good enough for me--for a good while. If I really think long and hard about it, I think that period coincides quite well with the period of time since last November when I have stopped reading and writing. At first it was because of schoolwork. Then it really became a habit.

I suppose an easy explanation is that I have simply been too busy and too stressed to really keep up with anything else. I am certainly not the first or only medical student to have suffered a dive in social skills. But somehow it seems to go deeper than that. I no longer can express myself in writing as well as I used to--and with that comes the natural corollary, that I no longer can think as I used to. I have stopped reading for the brain-racking but immensely satisfying pleasure of conversing with great or not so great but still brilliant minds. Rather all that I read now are Cosmo articles, glistening and smooth as jello, but no deeper than the shotglass which contains it. I am turning into a creature of slothful mind. How can I love that which I so abhorred and that which is becoming me?

Time to pick up the books again. Not for scoring with guys, not for meeting new people, not even for having thoughtful philosophical conversations, but for me, for recovering the old me, for recovering the true me. Time to pick up the books again.

I am obsessed with this song.

Currently Listening Lara Fabian By Lara Fabian Adagio see related

A perfect love story?

 I have yet to come across a perfect love story.

When I was little (read: Grade 6), Wuthering Heights was THE love story for me, but it has eventually been removed from that pedestal the same time Byronic heroes started losing their appeal.

I might also be the only woman on this planet who doesn't like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice as love stories. The first I no longer hate as much as I used too--but its bourgeois Englishness still stiffles me. The latter I consider a delectable satire on love and expectations, but it doesn't do anything for me as a love story.

Persuasion comes close but it is a better deathbed novel than love story. It lacks a touch of insanity--but then one can hardly expect that of Jane Austen.

Salome, on the other hand, has too much insanity. De Profundis may end up being the best love story I have read. The only problem? It's non-fiction.

Dream of the Red Chamber is too distant in its representation of love. Plus no one knows how it ends.

The title of Love in the Time Cholera gave me so much to look forward to. The book, however, is as insipid as skim milk. The only good two pages happen to be the consummation of marriage between the heroine and the man she doesn't love. I find that hilariously ironic.

Middlemarch is not I repeat NOT a love story all you douche-bag female fans, although it offers some of the greatest insights into the nature of love. The Mill on the Floss is too painful as a love story.

Lolita and "Lust, Caution" are anti-love, rather than love, stories.

Romeo and Juliet is for horny teenagers. Othello is, ironically, the most convincing Shakespearean love story I came across. Perhaps Antony and Cleopatra will be up there too. I need to read it. Troilus and Cressida? Don't make me laugh.

“Letter from an Unknown Woman” is good, but male fantasy plays too strong an element there.

I wish I could get The Lover. Two readings later, I'm still frustrated as hell.

The Red and the Black comes close. I just didn't read it that way the first time. A re-reading may be due.

Books I need to investigate: Peony Pavillion, La Reine Margot, Dr. Zhivago, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

无缘由地被一句歌词牵住了：

离不开思念 回不到从前 我被你遗忘在人间

我没有谁好思念，也没有什么从前好回去，至于遗忘，也一贯只有我遗忘他人的份。

但是不知为什么，就是被它抛进了连绵不断的秋思。

恋的，应该是少女时代那个飘渺的梦。

Currently Watching Shakespeare in Love (Miramax Collector's Series) By Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes, Tom Wilkinson, Antony Sher, Martin Clunes see related

It feels so nice to be on a real date, walking around St. Louis zoo eating Ben & Jerry ice cream, lying on the grass in Forest Park just talking and enjoying the sun, having bad Vietnamese food, people-watching on the Loop, listening to live music in a bar, and watching "In Bruges" which is a surprisingly good movie.

But he's leaving for the summer on Wednesday to work in D.C., . Must find other sources of entertainment for the summer. The cute half-Canuck in my class is out--he loves Jesus way too much, and wants a wife to stay at home barefooted and bear babies, . Time to check out the hot residents at the hospital!