I am glad it is almost the weekend, although I am not so glad about having to spend it without Marc who left for Cairo this morning. He returns next Saturday evening.

I've spent much of this week on two things:
1) catching up with some friends via the phone, and scheduling time to catch up with friends
2) working on my dissertation proposal (yes, STILL!)

I realized last week that I've grossly neglected lots of my friends, so I started on a quest to re-connect with them. Or maybe I was on a quest to find something fun to do to distract me from my dissertation proposal. The good news is that I managed to send a final draft of it to my advisor this afternoon (it is an iterative process unfortunately), and I got to speak to some friends as well as set up hangout time with others over the next few weeks. These include a Girls-Nite-Out with some former roommates of mine, and a hare-brained idea of going on a road-trip around the US in summer with Edna and Mark Ee, two of my good friends from Singapore (Marc complains I am a bad wife who is already thinking about abandoning him for weeks on end!)

Marc & I also managed to spend much of yesterday evening just kicking back and enjoying each other's company. Together, we cooked an Indian (Madras) lamb dish, served with wild rice and some brocolli on the side, then had dessert at Weaver Street before heading out the catch "Letters from Iwo Jima". It was a very well made film depicting the battle on Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective. Very powerful and sad, but also very humbling. I highly recommend it (and I believe Marc would too), though a caveat I will put is that be prepared to be bummed out afterwards. We have now seen two depressing movies in one week (we saw "The Last King of Scotland" on Sunday) -- both of which touch upon about the senselessness of humans portrayed with a balance of sympathy and outrageousness. I am still processing them.

~ Shuwen