Monday is Ralph Lauren Boy day. He wore purple today. I walked him to class as we talked about Chungking Express (about me having watched the film obsessively 8 times and him only 2) and he ended up skipping half of his next lecture and we sat at Coffee Club Express to talk about film and literature and music flowed through his ipod and music notes were saturating the misty rain around us. Music by Kelvin Tan, a Singapore Singer-Songwriter, writer, playwright and ex-friend of his. He told me about his
favourite book and how he ended up writing a brief entry on Wikipedia because he believes Kelvin to be a Singapore gem not to be disregarded. It was very comfortable to just be languid and unintentional. Though he spoke more than i did, because he had more interesting things to say. I wanted to listen.
Ralph Lauren Boy is special, unlike most people that i know; artistic and yet attuned to the underbelly of the Singaporean existence, passionate about the arts and yet aloof to the expository of ideas in political theory class. He's an enigma. But with him it is a "sterile excitation" of the intellect, to quote Weber; no special flutter of the heart (except for last week when he was acting strange but after a while i got used to his antics aha!), just a curiosity of what goes on in his head. it was much that went on in his head, it so seems, despite the telltale restlessness that plagues him in political theory class. You wouldn't have thought he was someone who thought very deeply. But he does, except that it wasn't about political theory. To him, it was writing, film, music. Interesting.
