Last Christmas

Last December was a happy month. 4 of my friends got married. And I say I am happy for them because they are the engineer sort, which means while other people have more colourful lives, I think they are the steady down to earth sort of people who are easily satisfied, and are therefore the most likely to have long and fulfilling unions.

I am old enough to understand that the sturdiest and most enduring types of happiness are also the most "boring". I hope that I'm not jinxing them or anything.

I think that Capricorns are supposed to be happier when they grow old. (Up to a certain point because beyond a certain age life never gets better, which is why death is not always a tragedy - the real tragedy is the passing of time.) I think in a way this is a very optimistic view of things, that things get better when you grow older. It could be the very best thing of all.

Kafka

Kafka was one of my favourite authors. He is a very what you might call guai lan writer, and very funny if you are following what he's trying to do, a king of black comedy. His characters are always caught in psychological turmoil, and nightmarish situations. And he accomplishes this not by setting big obstacles in front of his characters, but putting them into situations which are by right fairly mild, but because of some inherent weakness of the character, he is unable to overcome them. He makes the main character feel very small and pathetic because they are defeated by relatively trivial things. They spend most of their time second guessing themselves, and undergoes existential dread, and struggle to reason their way out of the situation over and over again but none of this ever changes the fact that they are doomed. Kafka is one of the few authors with an adjective named after him: Kafka-esque.

I was in a Kafkaesque situation earlier today. I tried to get to a friend's house in a faraway housing estate, and had my handphone ran out of battery. At first I was really complacent about it. It had happened before that a handphone had conked out of me, and when I turned it back on, it appeared to have enough in reserve to at least show me that address. It didn't happen this time. But I thought, OK. Nokia chargers are quite common, and it should be fairly straightforward getting that stupid address out of the phone book.

It was not. The first person I asked, I noticed that she had a Nokia handphone. She refused to lend it to me, because she said that she was waiting for a call. Fair enough. Another person was a salesman, and he said that he didn't want to let anybody see his handphone. I guess it's true, it is difficult to allow a stranger to see your most personal belonging. The person in the handphone shop was very gracious and allowed me to put my SIM card into his Sony Eriksson because I knew from experience that if I were to put my SIM card into another Nokia phone I would be able to see my messages, and therefore the address. Unfortunately that trick didn't work for Sony Erikssons. There was somebody else who had a Nokia but the batteries didn't match. There were shops which had Nokia chargers but the new models all used the smalled plug. A security guard had a Nokia charger but it was the new type.

There were some other encounters where I could have been nicer, when I asked to borrow somebody's battery, and I asked him what kind of phone he had, feeling pretty sure that it was a Nokia. He said, his was a Samsung. I said, "Are you sure?" and then he whipped it out, saying, "Yes. A Samsung". That was quite embarrassing, even when you consider that every time I tried to explain my situation to people it was embarrassing.

Some people were nice, others were annoyed. Some were apologetic.

There was 1 encounter which almost made me blow my top. This guy had 1 handphone, exactly the same make as mine. I broke my rule to not ask somebody who was walking. (Till then I had only asked people who were either standing in a queue, or sitting down and waiting. This is the exact opposite of the water rule, which holds that when you want to drink water in the wild, you must always take your water from a source which is moving.) I asked him, fully aware that if he were to lend me his battery my problem would be solved. His response: sorry, I'm in a hurry. I asked him 3 times and got the same answer 3 times.

It was not the best I could do. I could have explained to him that it would require less than 1 minute of his time (which is probably true.) I could explain that if I were to borrow a battery it would not invade his privacy at all. I could explain that I would have wasted 2 hours commuting if I were to leave from the town centre empty handed.

But I'm not a person who likes to push too hard for favours, because no favour that you have to push very hard for is ever truly free. And I was getting worked up, it might have ended badly.

I noticed that the more shabbily a person is dressed, the more likely you will have a good response. The most polite people were an Indian labourer and the security guard. The least happy people were the people who manned stores. And I can imagine that they were thinking, I cannot ever grant favours like that because if I were to do so and word gets out there will be hell to pay.

I want to resist the temptation to be cynical about these things. I don't want to criticise them and say "you know, Singaporeans". And I don't think it's true that we are special at all. Maybe you can be cynical if life's been a little too comfy for you and you can afford it. People whose lives are on the line are more likely to instinctively know that they can't afford to be cynical. Hemingway wrote in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" about the "smell of death". You can't afford to be wearing the smell of death on you, no way.

I don't interact with people very much. I don't think I'd make a good salesman because I second guess myself too much. All salesmen will go through 100 people and get 99 rejections and 1 success. Good salespeople will rejoice over the 1 success and think to themselves that it vindicates the other 99 unsuccessful attempts. Bad salespeople will grumble that the 99 rejections make the enterprise not worth while at all. I belong to the second category unfortunately and I sometimes wonder if I have been too spoilt in my choice for a job, which is similar to a scientist who gets paid so long as he puts in a certain number of hours for his work. Even as I think that my evening has ended in failure in a way I'm glad for this experience and what it has taught me. It has not taught me much which is truly new but reminded me of some of the things I had previously learnt.

The other thing is that fate sort of makes up for my bad luck. Through searching for an energy source for my hp I bumped into Shingot and his wife. (No, sorry, Shingot doesn't use Nokias). We had dinner together, it was great, we caught up, asked him about his new job. I needed that because, frankly, asking for favours is very draining for me.

Naturally I didn't make it to my friend's party. I also had problems making it to the one that he threw last year. First I went on the wrong day, then when I turned up I was horribly late, even as I had a great time. This year I didn't even make it at all.

Man City vs Blackburn Rovers

Goddamn. Lost money on betting football.


I looked at the odds for Man City vs Blackburn. Man City at 1.9 to win. Well Man City have a 100% record at home after 9 matches. And Blackburn are on a losing streak. So I thought it would be easy money.


Later on it occurred to me that I might have been more careful. Blackburn have a good fighting spirit, and I should at least cover it up with betting on a draw at 3.25. So I'd bet $10 on a win, and $5 on a draw. So either way I'd make a smaller profit. But I guess the outlets closed by the time I got off work.


So what happened during the match? Sven Goran Eriksson benches his 2 best players. Rolando Bianchi misses a sitter. Blackburn's 2nd goal is flagged for offside but the referee overrules him and awards it. The match ends 2-2. Fate is conspiring against me!!!


Kanina...

Fabio Capello

So they've appointed Fabio Capello as coach. Suddenly there are quite a few people who have spoken out against a foreigner appointment: Gareth Southgate, Mark Hughes, Harry Redknapp, Steve Coppell. I wonder whether it's justified, or rather a lament that so few English coaches are highly regarded that a foreign one gets the job automatically, and with so little forethought.

You can't completely blame the FA for wanting to act quickly. The last time, 2 coaches slipped through the net. One was Scolari who saw what the English media was like, and made a dash for it. The other was Guus Hiddink, who apparently balked at having to sit for a written test. Now it's a little hard to take the second excuse very seriously, even though people in some quarters have held it up as yet another example of the FA's incompetence. I guess once you have a reputation for incompetence you also get blamed for a lot of things that may not be your fault. Hiddink could have turned the job down to work for Abramovich and Russia.

Jose Mourinho has been blowing hot and cold to the FA. He is one manipulative person, and he has suspect morals. Witness the time when he caused a referee to receive death threats from Chelsea fans. Or the time when he falsely accused the Reading medical team of not tending to his goalkeeper soon enough. He is a great coach, but my impression is that he wasn't 100% set on the England job, but rather was making statements through the press in order to enhance his chances of getting the job if he deemed it suitable, and at the same time trying to find out as much about the job as he could. Eventually he made excuses and left, not wanting to be a part of it.

So when the time came to grab Fabio Capello, I don't think it's fair to blame the FA for being hasty. Grab your man when it comes down to it. He might have hesitated, he might have changed his mind if they hesitated. There are plenty of downsides to the job. Like Eriksson said, all you need to do as England manager is to win every game, not get paid much, and not have a private life. And I think that while Sven is a decent manager, he is no extrovert, and may have had a lot of problems with the media which affected his concentration. And I guess that both these guys would have made pretty good England coaches: both specialise in ugly but effective football.

As for what attracts coaches to the England job, we know that some of the better England managers of the last 20 years have had a passion for the job: like Bobby Robson and Terry Venables. One big reason for Sven's unpopularity was his perceived lack of passion for the England team. The obvious downside of appointing a foreign coach is that you're never fully convinced of his passion for the job. Just before Guus Hiddink took the Real Madrid job, he asked his friend Johan Cryuff for an opinion. Cryuff said, "If they're offering the Madrid job, take it - it's a logical move. It doesn't matter that you don't get much time off. Just work, take the money, and then get out of there." So I wonder if Capello is coming into the job with a "take the money" kind of approach.

24 hr McD's

I thought that one of my great discoveries is the reading habit. The thing about reading is that there is no way you can ever finish reading everything you want to read. Therefore it is very unlikely that you will get truly sick and tired of that habit. I can get tired of music, to be sure. Or if I play a sport enough it can get really boring.

And for me the best time to read is in the wee hours of the morning, something I blogged about 2 months ago (sorry my bad habit is to put blog posts in my drafts folder and then publish them when it's time). And whereas in my uni days I found that the undergrad library serves this purpose well (at least until 2am) and some student dorm common rooms are open all night, there wasn't any 24 hour places to hang out until McDonald's started operating 24 hour joints 1 year ago.

All these coffee joints, with their dimmed down lights and their kitschy decor, and their conception as a kind of a "lifestyle" place, where you didn't just buy coffee, but also comfort and a place to hang out for an hour or 2 or even more. I used to think they were something new until one day I saw somebody in Starbucks reclining on a sofa, cold drink in hand, doing nothing but staring dreamily at the ceiling, and then it hit me: the gourmet coffee joints are the new version of the opium den.

Now you know that it's a sign of the times that you have this sort of thing. Real Singaporeans, and I mean 20th century Singaporeans, the sort you had before the immigrant floodgates were opened at the turn of the century, aren't so crazy that they want to study stuff all night.

There are other places open all night, like nightclubs or brothels or stuff like that. But you know I'm more interested in places where I can read my books. I mean really. 24 hour joints of course make sense in HDB estates where there are so many people nearby that you can be assured of a steady flow of customers at all times of the day. Even if I don't get an astounding amount of reading done at that time of the day I do feel more alive then than normal. Don't ask me why.

Thing is, you sometimes get a lot of weirdos and freaks around. It's true. At McD's you are there for a clean environment (as opposed to my dusty bookshelf room). And I'm sure that there are a lot of senior citizens who turn up there like hanging out there much more than their dreary 3 room flats. They get free air con, it's less lonely than there. I don't mind saying this about them, even though it's plainly disrespectful because I would say exactly the same for myself.

Now it gets annoying when they are tramps. This is unfortunate, but McDonald's is a tramp magnet. I once visited a old friend in the states, and he was staying in a small town. He agreed to pick me up at the McDonald's but later on told me that it was a very dangerous place because a lot of loonies hang out there, and some murders were committed in the bathrooms of that place. Thank your lucky stars you're living in nice safe Singapore where this sort of shit doesn't take place. But you still get a lot of freaks and weirdos.

There are those people who don't really bathe when they have to. Then they will sit down there, without buying anything and enjoy... well I don't know what they're enjoying. I prefer to be reading a book.

There is this auntie who will just rummage through other people's leftovers and collect every plastic bag that she can lay her hands on. Is it possible to sell these things for money? Or is it a fetish? I don't really know. But it's a little painful to watch.

There are some 50 something old people who just go there, plonk themselves down at a table to sleep. I think they probably have homes, but I don't know why they think that sleeping at a table is more glamorous than sleeping in their own beds.

Then there was this Indian guy, extremely interesting. He was clearly a nutcase, belligerent. Spent the better part of 15 minutes hollering at the counter staff to clean up the 2 tables which constituted the smoker's corner. (Now I can understand that our well meaning gahment doesn't like ppl to smoke. But 2 tables out of 50? That's pretty sick.) Screaming Hokkien vulgarities at the top of his voice, and poor me seated 15 m away trying to enjoy his quality time with his book. Then proclaiming to everybody that he's a "Sinhalese from Sri Lanka, not an Indian". Whatever.

Then he still managed to get fresh with one of the Indian staff, young lady, plump but not ugly. And goodness knows how she put up with him. (Later on I found out that she knows elementary Mandarin. Pretty impressive.)

Seated at the next table from him is a middle aged woman, who was possibly a party animal maybe 20 years ago, maybe even a McDonald's kid. But looks like she got dealt a bad hand by life. Puffing on her cigarette all alone. Then the crazy indian guy sidles up to her, and starts sweet talking her. Incredibly she is susceptible to his charms, and soon starts staring shyly downwards, muttering stuff like "are you sure you like me? But nobody likes me". I don't know which of those 2 to be more exasperated with.

I usually seek out McD's because I think that it is a nice quiet place. I try not to get put off by these weirdos (yes I am actually calling somebody else a weirdo) and I try not to be too condescending towards them but watching their antics is not really what I went there for, and people usually have to be better behaved for me to enjoy being in the same room as them.

It's past 4 by the time I leave, and I had just finished a half of "The Gatekeepers". I order breakfast, eat it, and then go home. I had intended to go jogging at 7 in the morning, but am fast asleep by 6:30 and end up waking up at 2 in the afternoon.

Alcohol

Had an extremely interesting conversation. So I was saying that the most I ever drank was 20 glasses in 1 night. But I don't know, I never kept count. But I happened to mention, first that I probably had 20 glasses one night, and no, I wasn't drunk enough to throw up.

I hadn't reckoned that I had just said this to somebody who said that he'd have 8 pints and then pass out. So suddenly it looked like I was bragging. One thing led to another, and before long, I was booked for a drinking competition sometime next month.

Now people who have seen both of us interact will know that he enjoys taking the piss out of me from time to time. And also I know that he hates getting beaten and is therefore extremely easy to wind up, almost like there was this big red button sticking out the side of his body that says "push me! push me!" but this time I swear I hadn't intended to wind him up. These things just happen.

I guess there are things that I could have chosen not to say, like this chance remark I made to somebody that I could do some project in 1 day, and then he got hopping mad and took me to task for it for weeks (but every time he had to remind me that I did say something like that.) I'm like, whoa, some people really do take my shit seriously. Or maybe I'm so think I don't get it at all.

Later on, somebody told me that I shouldn't have revised my estimate of 20 glasses down to 15, and make it sound like I was unsure. I wasn't sure about that, but now I wouldn't have agreed with him. Goddamn I didn't want the challenge at all, all I did was to mention something that happened to me one night.

Yes, I agreed at that time because I thought it would be interesting to see how far I could drink. It was very interesting being drunk. And there are things you should do when you're young. But that night was different. That night was a friend's stag party. That night I did it on a whim. Drinking for leisure is OK. Drinking a lot on a whim is OK.

Drinking for sport... it doesn't sound enjoyable. Somebody at that table mentioned, "don't worry, this is not a social experiment". I was like, how much more blatant do you want to make it? Or maybe there are some people out there who enjoy getting kidnapped by aliens and having rectal probes inserted into him, they volunteer to do that for fun but I'm not one of those.

I'm starting to realise that I might not enjoy this very much.

Then later on somebody asked me, are you going to back out. I said, "I can't back out, I haven't got the balls". Which is not strictly true, and sometimes I will say something ironic and funny just for the sake of it. But that set me thinking, how will I get out of this?

What do I stand to lose if I back out? All my manly honour. (In other words, nothing I particularly care about) Would it be fun to just wind them up over and over again, and then abruptly call it quits? I guess that's another possibility. Yet another one is that I could go and grovel at his feet and beg for mercy. I'm sure that would be good for milking a few laughs.

I still remember the time I jacked my friend off when I was drunk because I somehow thought it was funny. Poor guy was traumatised for a week after that.

When you think about it, I'm probably the only person who decides whether this thing goes on. The other guy's in for it, he can't really back out because he proposed it. I'm the only one here who has options.

Of course I'm still curious about how much stuff I could drink. But not that curious. The ability to metabolise alcohol is not something worth bragging about. I personally think that burping competitions are more significant. As for whether I'd enjoy winning this particular competition, I know I wouldn't. There's something about competition I don't entirely understand. To gamble with your ego at the cost of ruining your health is also something I don't entirely understand. There is something a little sad about all this. There is "friendly competition". I always thought that it is an oxymoron. I approach competition in the manner of an executioner who is sick and tired of hanging people but nevertheless still has to get up in the morning and keep carrying out orders.

What to do now? Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Extreme investigative journalism part 1

Regular readers of mine would know that while I read a lot of books (actually not a lot, but more than 50 a year). Some people might think that non-fiction is quite dry, but it all depends on what you’d find interesting. I think maybe one reason I never really tried very hard to be an “interesting” person is because I can make some really “boring” things look really interesting to myself. Like formidable thick history tomes, obscure maths theories, even if I would draw the line at long meandering philosophical arguments.

But there are instances of extreme investigative journalism, where the author actually has been in extraordinary situations and gives a first person account of the event, and sometimes this can make the book as interesting as fiction, even though it is still non-fiction. In non-fiction, you can’t really put words into other people’s mouths, you can’t say what they are thinking (although you can speculate), you can will things to happen if they don’t happen. But the story can still be interesting.

One fairly famous example is a white man who went through a skin colouring operation to turn himself into a black man, in order to step into his shoes and learn what it was like to suffer the form of racial prejudice that they did. This was during the 60s, the civil rights era, where racial attitudes were, if not more prevalent, then at least more overt than it is today.

1. Islamist

This is the account of a British Muslim and his involvement with various Islamist groups in Britain. He talks about how they recruited him as a young boy, and planted ideas into his head about how they would create a new caliphate that would unite all the Arab countries under 1 Islamic government. (Islamism means not only Islam, but the formation of Islamic governments).

It’s a very interesting book, because it shows that a lot of organisations in the UK which are purportedly just “Islamic” are actually Islamist, support overthrow of Islamist governments, and maybe even 1 or 2 have affiliations to terrorist organisations. They are usually as well organised as the Communist parties of old were.

Reading the book I saw more than a few parallels between militant Islam and communism. Both of them dedicate themselves to the overthrow of governments and the founding of theocratic state. (Communism will deny that it is a religion, but on hindsight it is becoming more and more apparent than it is one in all but name.) Both of them exploit the liberal attitudes of liberal democratic countries, and work on stirring up people to be indignant at inequalities perpetuated in Western / Capitalist societies. Both of them demand unquestioned dedication and have very heavy elements of study groups which indoctrinate their followers with the party’s orthodoxy which they want to propagate. The tactics of battling police, distributing propaganda and fighting rival organisations are also similar.

We see the author conflicted between various interpretations of Islam and eventually he realises that these “Islamists” do not really follow the true spirit of Islam. After witnessing a murder at an Islamist event, he decides to leave the Islamist organisations.

He visits Syria, which he considers to be a fairly moderate Islamic society, and likes it. Although he finds, to his great consternation that he is more British than Syrian, he finds that Islam there is more permissive, and they do not require that the woman wears a hijab all the time. This would be in great contrast with the Bush administration’s standpoint that Syria is a grave threat to Middle Eastern peace.

However it is different in Saudi Arabia. Over there are enclaves where all the foreigners gather, and inside these enclaves life resembles a holiday resort, and you will get the permissiveness you find in most expatriate communities in most countries. Step outside there and then you will find that there is a caste system, where in some really wretched parts of the town, it is much worse than the infamous inner cities of American urban centres. There is a very uneasy alliance between the fundamentalist Wahabbism and the Saudi royal family, because the latter is quite close to the American government.

The author comes across as an earnest person, which is why he was so pious in the first place. What is surprising is how many otherwise polite and decent people would turn to Islamism – you usually have the image of terrorists as barbarous hate filled monsters, but some of them are just otherwise good decent people, or at least they bother to be polite and congenial, and they are just convinced that they are doing the right thing. This book should be a warning that the problems of radical Islam are probably underestimated in various parts of Europe today.

2. A long way gone

Another book making waves is the memoirs of a child soldier. Ishmael Bael was born in Sierra Leone, and, I’m guessing, probably had a fairly privileged childhood where his father was working for an American company, and he gets to learn English and listen to rap music and Bob Marley. However around the time he is 13 years old, anti-government rebels storm his village, and go on a rampage of murder and looting. Very early in his life, he is separated from his home, and has to fend for himself.

Some of the things he does is harmless, but there are a lot of close shaves, where he narrowly flees with his life with bullets flying all around him. He sometimes has to steal food, even from children. Many times he is mistaken for a rebel soldier, and gets captured by villagers, and miraculously manages to escape without being lynched or flogged. He is unflinching in describing the horrors visited upon villages set upon by the rebels: houses burnt down, food stolen, crops destroyed, women raped, people killed. That sort of stuff.

After being a wanderer for a very long period of time (and having to bear the heartbreak of seeing some of his fellow comrades die) he stumbles upon a village where the government recruits child soldiers. There he is trained to be a child soldier, and is a part of a deadly force where he is high on cocaine a lot of the time and thinks of nothing but taking over the next village and killing plenty of rebels. At first he just says “2 years pass by in a blur”, but later on the memories of what he had to endure, and murders he had to commit, surface. Conducting summary executions. Practicing how to slit throats properly (on real people of course.) He doesn’t talk about raping his victims but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen.

Later on, with the conflict winding down, he is sent to Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, for his rehabilitation, and trying to make him acclimatise to normal society. He’s quite lucky in this regard, finding an attractive nurse who takes an interest in his case, finding a long lost relative, a proper family, and even becoming an envoy to the United Nations for the purpose of highlighting his plight (and of those thousands similar to himself) to the rest of the world. (Of course he has some sarcastic words for officers in the American embassy who ask him to produce a bank account to show that they will return to Africa when the trip is over. Those idiots need to read this book.)

Ishmael Bael is a very lucky person. Not only did he survive his ordeal when probably more than 90% of those who have gone through what he did didn’t, he also got to relocate to the USA and attend Oberlin College and become a bestselling author. But it is truly remarkable that this book got written at all. (I read some reviews of this book which lamented that it didn’t have more literary merit. Please, it is enough that this book uses clear prose and presents a gripping and important story.) I thought that all I would ever hear about child soldiers would be through an article in the Economist or something. I wouldn’t have thought that one of them would actually be educated enough to write a fine book of his own experiences.

Part 2 to follow.

Tabloid Morality

I don’t usually like to read tabloid reporters. A few days ago the Shin Min papers had a large picture of Lin Qingxia in a bikini 25 years ago. Now, you may wonder, who could complain about that? Speaking as a person who reached puberty around the same time that they started airing advertisements of her as a “spokesman” for Lux body wash, and having pictures of her on TV frolicking around in the bathtub, I thought it was a wonderful thing.

But the headlines were this: she never married Qin Han, who was her co-star and 1 of the most handsome Taiwanese guys 20 years ago. And that is because Qin Han was then married to a wife who told him: you can divorce me and marry any woman you want other than Lin Qingxia. Otherwise I will mess up your wedding and commit suicide at your ceremony. I was like, damn. It was bottom of the barrel stuff. Bringing up shit that is of no contemporary relevance (except for the wonderful bikini photos), and poking into other peoples’ private business is not nice.

However there were some stories that I thought that were good calls, and you got to give the tabloid reporters some credit for stirring up moral outrage where it is due. One of them was the case of petrol thieves. Of car owners, owing to the high price of petrol, pumping gas, and speeding off whenever they feel like it. It highlighted the ugly behaviour of these motorists (technically they are thieves and therefore criminals) and I like to think that this reduced the number of petrol thieves in the short term. But it also highlighted the plight of the petrol pump attendants - apparently the oil companies were deducting the cost of the stolen petrol from their already meagre salaries. This is really alarming, although when you think about it, there has to be some form of disincentive for them against allowing petrol theft to happen. And there’s the bad PR for the oil companies so they got to think about whether or not they appear to be too inhumane.

Then there was this other story of this teacher who walked out of the supermarket with goods without paying for them. Apparently he was completely distraught about being caught. He pleaded for clemency towards the police man who refused to give it to him. First, let’s not judge whether he was telling the truth, that he really forgot to pay. Forgetting to pay is not the same as shoplifting, although you could say that whether the person tried to hide the goods is a pretty good test to distinguish.

The thing is that teachers are really held accountable to higher moral standards than anybody else. They exist in a different universe from other people because they are appraised by children, rather than adults. Adults will already have understood moral grayness and in some ways can be more flexible than children. The simple fact is that his career as a teacher was over. And that’s one reason why I will never be a teacher of secondary schools or below. Because I can never stop swearing. I won’t mind trying to be a lecturer, where I don’t have to think so hard about holding my tongue.

The thing is that he told the policeman that his job as a teacher was stressful and the policeman was stupid enough to question that. He obviously does not read the papers or blogs. Every blog I have read tells me that teaching is a stressful and overworked profession, even though they may not be as underpaid as they always was.

Gatekeepers

I’m reading a really compelling book called “The Gatekeepers” which traces a year in the life of an admissions officer for a college, Wesleyan. It is very interesting that the dean of admissions (the boss of the admissions officer who is the central figure of this book) used to come from the college that I attended, and oversaw the admissions process that granted me a place in the college that I graduated from. I remember the sticking the stamps of the huge bulky packages that would find their way to admissions offices in 5 different colleges across the states. (And by some quirk of fate, I would spend 3 years living in 2 different apartments, both across the road from that admissions office.)

Naturally this book does not mention the numerous admin fuck ups that plagued my admissions procedure, (their losing my cheque was one in a series). Eventually I would end up enrolling in that college. Why was this? There were 3 colleges that I really wanted to get into. I was only accepted for 1, and it was the last college that I sent my application forms for. By that time, and only by that time had I learnt how to write a good application essay. In retrospect, with good essays, I stood a good chance of getting into 1 of the other 2 colleges. And possibly gotten to know 1 of my colleagues a little earlier.

They say that a person’s success in life is not determined so much by the college that one enters into, but by the best college one applies to. I guess there are self esteem issues at play. Well I didn’t bother applying to Harvard, MIT, Princeton or Yale. The 3 main colleges I applied to are, in retrospect, very good colleges, but if self confidence is really so important, I have something to be worried about.

In retrospect, none of the 5 colleges I applied to are located in large cities. (My sister went to a college in a large city but in the end she says it made no difference: she didn’t have time to hang out downtown much.)

But for a little while it was quite gratifying to know that people were sweating just trying to get into a place like Wesleyan, when I know that I did succeed in getting into a place that was at least as selective as Wesleyan. And I know that I have had a leg up, a lot of people supporting me up till the time I went into college, whereas a lot of people from more disadvantaged backgrounds really had to sweat their way through high school / JC compared to me.

(But let’s put it another way: affirmative action means that it’s more difficult for Asians to get in. Unless there are other college policies at work that benefit Singaporeans.)

After reading the book I realized that if I had tried to apply to my sister’s university (one of the colleges listed above, which I had considered too high for me to reach) I would have had a very good chance of getting in, because in the book they described how far they were able to relax their entrance criteria for a person whose sibling was in that university. My sister had told me so. Well I got into a fairly decent uni on my own, and I was fairly happy about that.

When I read about some person who had such a good academic and ECA record that all the unis were going after her, I thought about my sister who actually went to the States to visit 3 of the unis before deciding. 2 of them were “out of reach” for me, and 1 of them had rejected my application.

When I saw their thought processes, I often wondered what I could have done to enhance my application chances. And what I would do if I were to apply to graduate school one day. I was a little worried that the admissions officer just managed to piece together a person’s personality based on what’s in that brown envelope (as well as letters from teachers.)

After I graduated, I started reading laymen books about the stuff I had studied in college just to give myself some perspective. And sometimes I thought about the major decisions that I made while I was in college, and wondered if I would still make them today. I think about the things that I think were mistakes, but I’m often open minded (or wishy washy enough) to explain them away, and doubt again, that they really were mistakes. Should I have specialized more? Should I have done stuff that would have made getting into grad school easier? Should I have done things that would have benefited my career more?

And the other thing was, the admissions officer has to make a snap decision (probably around 25 decisions per day) about who to admit and who not to. I’m thinking about the sorting hat at Hogwart’s. I think that getting in is one small part of the equation. The more important question, of course, is – did you get the best of your time at your college? I would definitely have done with more extroversion, more talking to people and reaching out, more sharing information. Aside from that? What did my sister think? She told me, shortly after I graduated, “they wouldn’t have had reason to regret allowing you in. You tried so many different things.” I guess I would accept that.

People sometimes do think of me as an insufferable stuck up asshole but things like this will haunt me: did I deserve going to the college I went to? Did I deserve the job that I obtained? And I will admit that the answer to both of these questions is not "YES!" but rather "yes but....". And there is a third question: did I deserve these things more than a lot of people who didn't get them? My answer is no.

I’m a very shady, murky character. I don’t even think I know myself that well. I described myself as a forest. I could pull a rabbit out of my hat and surprise people. I do that on a fairly consistent basis. I think of myself as mother earth, placid most of the time until I get pissed off. Full of nooks and crannies, full of surprises. Rich and variegated.

So why on earth was I willing to part with a book like that, especially for free, on bookmooch? I don’t know. But I only have a few days to finish reading it, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Newcomer award

I heard that Tang Wei won the Newcomer Award at the Golden Horse Awards this year for her role in "Lust, Caution". Well naturally, since she was coming and coming and coming. Hur hur hur.

Wee Small Hours

You could call me a night person. There’s something I like about the night that gives you a few hours to do just what you want. I’ve always been more able to concentrate on things in the nighttime. There’s more focus, less people to meet, less people to deal with.

I think about all the stuff I did in the wee hours of the morning. 2 of the better plays I wrote. When I was in college, and sometimes pulling all nighters to get my stuff done. How I read “The Great Gatsby” until 3 in the morning and almost failed a chemistry exam the next day.

A few of my favourite movies have to do with the night. Like they have to do with a lot of journeys that take place in the night. “Crimson Gold”, about a pizza delivery man driven to rage by social inequality, takes place at night. He visits a few fairly wealthy places, and ponders, like the film maker wants his audience to do likewise, about what the delivery man sees.

There is “Collateral”, a film by Michael Mann, who is one of my favourite film makers today. In it, Tom Cruise holds Jamie Foxx hostage while he goes on a killing spree. Night is also about struggle. The night that Jamie Foxx had to get through as a hostage was a struggle, but also fairly meditative, because he gets on with Tom Cruise and talks about his life and plans. Manages to kill him (Tom Cruise) by dawn, symbolising the triumph of daylight, but what follows would probably be another dreary day driving a taxi. The characters in Michael Mann’s films, a reviewer has pointed out, are survivors, not winners. They struggle to get by, and then struggle to get by some more.

The atmosphere is broody, almost unreal. Both are loners, one a hired killer who can’t talk to that many people, and the other a taxi driver who spends most of the time driving around alone in the cab. Both are also wanderers who don’t stay in the same place for long. So even though one is black and the other white, and even though one is much richer than the other, they have a lot in common.

The night is a lonely, isolated place, where most people are asleep. There was once when I was walking through a new town when everybody was asleep. Did a quick calculation: if a block of flats had 1000 occupants each, and you had a few hundred blocks, then it was a few hundred thousand in each town. There was so much potential and capacity for life in the blocks I walked past, but all of them were asleep. And like they say, “sleep is the cousin of death”. It’s a minor concession you make with death every day until the real thing takes you away for good. So I was thinking, all that life, and nothing being done right now. Anyway, one of the appeals of keeping late hours is that you’re using some time that other people are spending sleeping, doing nothing. It’s like finding a dollar bill on the ground, except of course you need to pay it back later.

The night is meditative. When you’re up all night, maybe you’re thinking about big decisions, and maybe you’d have reached a conclusion by dawn. Like the Buddha’s enlightenment took place at dawn, after he spent all night trying to figure out why humans everywhere always live in shit.

Another film which features the night is “Nights of Cabiria”, a famous Fellini film, possibly one of my favourites. It is about the resilience of an aging prostitute which suffers setback after setback. When you see a lot of things at night, there is definitely an allusion to dreaming. She sees a person who delivers food to the poor, maybe a burlesque performance at a theatre. All these images (especially the way that Fellini shoots them, if you’re familiar with his style) have a dreamlike quality about them, because she could well have been seeing them in a dream.

Then there is Antonioni’s “la Notte”, where the night parallels the cloud that has descended over the relationship between a man and his wife.

The night has a way of framing many of the events that take place, a way of cooly distancing yourself away from things. It has a way of making you conscious that you are seeing something, but from a detached distance. When you are in a cinema, it is an artificial night too, because it’s meant to tune out all the distractions and focus you upon the visions on the screen. It’s the film maker’s way of telling you that you have to interpret them as metaphors, rather than literally, which is how you’d interpret things in a dream. The night is existential. During the daytime your attention is focused on many things that you can see before you, but during the night you don't have these things to distract you from the really big and vast questions: who am I? Why am I here? Why am I always so busy and there's nothing more for me to give? These are questions that are asked at night.

In the most famous scene of "Rebel Without a Cause", James Dean is inside a planetarium, literally facing the void. Set side by side with the documentary which narrates the creation of the universe, he realises that his whole life pales into insignificance when placed besides this. It is probably the point where the notion of "teenage angst" (highly existential in nature) entered popular culture.

I will at some point blog at length about 24 hour McDonald's joints. But it's become some of my favourite past times to go there, either buy a coffee or a large coke, and plonk myself in front of a book for 2-3 hours. It's remarkable how easy it is to get your reading done, even with the late night music blaring in your ears at that point.

Then, what of the dawn that breaks? I normally find that for all nighters the hour of 5 o'clock is the most difficult because that's when I fall asleep. Usually if I make it through there, then I can catch the sunrise, and retire at say 8 or 9.

I will remember my SISPEC graduation ceremony, because that was the day I earned my stripes. People have described it to me before, but I guess it was still interesting. We left the camp, and then we marched up elephant hill. Then as the dawn breaks, they give you your stripes. It's very cliched, but when it's the culmination of 2-3 months of a miserable existence learning how to fight in a jungle it probably means something.

The half marathon, which I had already blogged about, is also the night turning into day. It is dawn when you start out, and you get the full blast of the sun when you end. It's almost the triumph of light over darkness, of perseverance over lethargy. But I am a night person, and I also feel that with the dawn a spell is broken.

I watched "Crimson Gold" at the Singapore International Film Fest a few years ago (haven't been going down for a couple of years) and I was late for "Crimson Gold", although I knew what happened in the opening scene. The structure of the movie is that there is a dramatic opening scene, and the rest of the movie is all about the events that lead up to that scene.

Thanks to the wonders of youtube, you can now see the opening scene, one of the great cinema moments of recent memory.

Streams of logic

I've always thought that a maths proof and writing a song were around the same thing. There is logical progression, every line must flow smoothly from 1 line to the next. If there is a logical inconsistency, the whole thing falls apart. The nicest bits are when there's a leap of logic, such as when you're introducing a new idea in a proof and things go forward almost by magic, or when you're modulating to a new key or springing some other musical surprise.

There are differences, of course. In maths, something's either right or wrong. In music, there is a continuum between a good phrase and a bad phrase to put into the music. In maths anything is OK as long as you solve the problem. In music, you don't even know what is the problem to solve. It must make musical sense, but even that is ill defined, and also 1 man's meat is another man's poison. Actually there are problems to solve in music. Like when you write a section in music called a bridge that connects 2 parts of a song together it's called a bridge. Then you know that things must flow through both ends of the bridge smoothly.

Why are music and maths so similar? I once thought about what maths really means, when I got to higher levels and it became more abstract and not only about numbers anymore. We had funny little monsters like groups and rings, function spaces, even things like properties. It was then that I reckoned that maths is really about patterns and logic. Well music is also about patterns and logic. More patterns, actually.

People will inevitably get offended when I suggest that there's nothing more to music than a stream of numbers. Well nowadays even the great works of art can be digitised, and after that, it's just a stream of numbers in your jpeg file. So why shouldn't I say that notes are streams of numbers? There is this persistent insistence that maths does not have anything to do with the human soul. No, the organ most associated with your emotions - the heart - is also the most rhythmic and also the most mathematical of all your organs. (Except when you're humping somebody, that's also rhythmic. Aha - sex, one of your most emotional activities, is also rhythmic.) Yes it is possible to say that maths can be divorced from your human emotions, but you can't divorce unless you were married all along.

Is music a linear medium, then? Does it follow a linear narrative? I don't know. Sometimes it can be circular. It is a very unusual form of art in the sense that a lot of elements are juxtaposed, and interact with each other, when you have counterpoint and all that stuff, but I guess in a way it is merely more extreme than other stuff like painting where you can have a lot of stuff layered on top of each other, or novels when you're trying to keep track of 4 or 5 plot lines in your head simultaneously.

In soundtracks and operas, some snippets of tunes (we call them motifs and themes) can be used to call up certain situations in order to achieve emotional effects. It is a weaker form of a flashback in a linear narrative, although it also reminds one of more simple allusions. Like in "Lust Caution", near the end of the show they showed a short flashback of Tang Wei wandering around lost on a stage, while her comrades, pulling the strings from the circle seats, call out to her.

Half Marathon

Half marathon was over. Did what I did to prepare for it, with those long runs every weekend. (Started at 3km, then 5, 7, 10 and finally 15k) Went to do carbo loading before the race. (Prior to that, most of my runs were on a nearly empty stomach.) One thing about carbo loading, though - it gives you an incredible amount of crap. I wasn't used to eating that much, and after the run I had to find somewhere to release. When I was done, my eyes widened as I hadn't seen so much crap in my life. I was so full of shit.

Thought that it would be a quiet affair, with me driving down to that place. But I guess my parents wanted to bask in my reflected glory. So after the race I met them, showed them the medal, we took pictures.

The race itself went smoothly. Lots of people everywhere, but the lanes were mostly wide enough, until we got to the Nicoll highway part, where it always seemed as though too many lanes were allocated for the opposite direction. So I usually ran on the other side, and played cat and mouse with the marshals who were pleading with me to stick to my own lane. Not much eye candy, I'm afraid. Maybe I was too distracted during the real run, or maybe I was just unlucky.

Favourite part of the run was going out of Marina South and running down Robinson Road, like the whole place was just cordoned off and reserved for me. (It was.) I felt like a Mongol entering a Chinese city. Run took 2h 30min roughly, better than the 2h 40min I thought I'd do. I guess the strategy of not completely expending my energy early on but run steadily paid off.

Except that I'm on ICT now and just had to do my IPPT 2 days after my half marathon. Just realised that I neglected training for my sit ups and chin ups for my half marathon but luckily I scraped passes in all these events.

I thought I'd give myself some time to be happy with my timing. But some other guy from my company did the full marathon in 4h 10min. Now that is some crazy shit, because I'd have to run sub 2h for a half marathon in order to assure myself that I can make that timing for a full marathon. Guess he's in a completely different league from me.

Now why would I do a half marathon? My old friend told me he never saw me as a distance runner. And frankly I'm not. I highly suspect that most of the people who do the marathon just walk much of the way, and consider themselves to have done it. (If any of you out there is reading this - sorry.) Which is the reason why I'm faster than half of them.

And if you believe that the finishing times are spread out on a Gaussian curve, it means that if I run the median speed and keep it that way throughout the race, I'm always in the most crowded part of the race.

So I tell people that the reason is that I know 6-7 people at work who have done either full of half marathons, and I just wanted to keep up with the Joneses. It wasn't that difficult in the end. But now I got to make the big decision whether or not to do the full marathon. Now that's a lot of time running, and this time I'd have to do 30km endurance tests every week to at least assure myself I'm going to have some decent timing for the full marathon. Or I could just go 40km on my own and then say "fuck the marathon" because I did it already. It's not impossible, because I have the build for running long distance. (skinny, long legs)

I think this marathon is like going to church. Or arriving at Mecca. And shingot did talk about how he had this great emotional feeling at the start of the race. I guess I also had that to a smaller extent. When I started running 10km runs with my jogging buddies I had that feeling too, but it wears away after a while. I think halfway through the 21km run I had a great feeling (especially the Robinson Road part). But after that comes the grit and endurance part, not so bad because this is only a half marathon and you don't know what the full thing is like. And when you're done there is this "is this it?" feeling. Or maybe not.

Well I think next year I will not be running the half marathon. I will either be running the full marathon, or nothing. The only reason why I would run this half marathon again is if I should decide to do a full marathon somewhere else and use this half marathon as a warm up. (At this point I looked up wikipedia for the list of marathon races and found that some sick fuck put in the Bataan Death March as a marathon event.)

There are a lot of reason tags. I didn't get one. I didn't know if I have to buy one. There's a lot of mushy stuff written on them so I usually have to avert my eyes when coming close to them. Stuff like "wait for me honey". "We're getting married on blah blah blah". "I know that I can do it". My reason, if I had to write one would either be "I'm the man" or "it's good for my ego" or "I want to ogle at all the hot chicks here". Or if I wanted to pay tribute to one of the oldest counterculture magazines in Singapore, "Before I Get Old".

Didn't see Nat (full) there, or Shingot (half) or the new guy at work (half). I was with Mao (a uni friend) and Sniper for the first half hour, until I decided I had to go take a pee break in the bushes. But that's OK, thanks to them I found the right pace. I suspect the reason is that both of them are faster than me and I was slowing them down. Anyway I checked their times (sorry guys but on the internet nothing is really private) and found that being a mere 15 mins faster than me means that instead of being faster than 50% of the participants, you are faster than 75% of them.

England Soccer Team

England are out. What to do? I was very disappointed. I didn't think it would happen.

Sven Goran Eriksson is definitely one of the top 5 managers of England. Alf Ramsey was the greatest, and there are other names like Bobby Robson and Terry Venables. England reached the quarter finals of every major tournament under Eriksson, but I would say that the World Cup 06 was the low point of his reign.

People questioned his decision to stick with David Beckham, but I don't understand that. It contradicts other things that have been said about England's World Cup, like how he was playing badly and yet had a hand in most of the goals England scored. Most you can say was that he was not up to the standards that was set 5 years ago.

It is true that Beckham should not have been the England captain. The armband should have been given to John Terry or Steven Gerrard.

When Eriksson came in, he had "the left side problem". I don't really remember how he solved that problem but it was a good England side.

The manner of England's exit left much to be desired in WC 2002. If they had beaten Brazil, who knows what might have happened? But of course beating Brazil is always a big big "if", evne though Brazil was down to 10 men. But they would have faced Turkey in the semi finals, England would have beaten them, and got into the finals vs Germany.

(You could say the same thing at Euro 96, where they lost to Germany on penalties after a very close match. I can still remember Gasgoigne, playing the best tournament of his life, making a lunge for the ball at the goalmouth - and failing to connect. After Germany, it would have been the Czechs, and it would have been a real prospect to beat them and claim their first Euro title.)

That team deserved to go to the finals. It was extremely fortunate that so many of the big powers - France, Argentina, Italy, Portugal, Spain, fell by the wayside so early. But they had to get out of their group of death, with Nigeria, Sweden and Argentina, and they did well to do so.

In the 2006 world cup, England had an easier trip. They had an easier group (it was Trinidad, Sweden and Paraguay). They then faced Ecuador which was not to be underestimated. And then went out to Portugal.

Eriksson had been criticised for his unimaginativeness. Perhaps, or perhaps his options were really limited. At the club level, players like Gerrard, Lampard, Rooney and Terry are the equal of Beckham. The defence of Cole, Terry, Ferdinand and Neville was solid. But outside of this small first team there were few pickings. Aaron Lennon and Stewart Downing are not Ryan Giggs and Cristiano Ronaldo. Theo Walcott was a big mistake. His strikers were all unfit.

McLaren's big problem was the Gerrard and Lampard axis. Eriksson couldn't solve that, and apparently the solution was Barry and Gerrard. Heskey and Owen are still a great pair, but he lost them.

Gerrard did speak up for the coach, but when players have to speak up for the coach, it's always suspect.

I'm wondering why nobody blames anything on Venables. The 3-5-2 that was against Croatia was probably Venables' idea, and it didn't succeed. It is possible that he had a hand in the Owen -Heskey pairing, as well as the Barry - Gerrard pairing. Not so sure about the Richards - Phillips pairing on the right.

I don't know enough about the England team to be criticising his selections for the Croatia match. But I'll have to ask questions about why Wayne Bridge was played instead of Ashley Cole. As for having Scott Carson in goal, it was a mistake. In crunch matches, you want experienced hands for the job. On one hand you could say this vindicates his standing by Robinson all along, but there could have been 2 other solutions. One was to have replaced Robinson with Carson earlier on, so that he would have had more experience going into the Croatia match. Maybe against smaller teams. The other solution was David James.

Of course when people talk about matches, there is only team selection. They wouldn't talk about training and tactics. How you organise your team, and how you plan things. Teams who are good at passing have a good understanding about how their team mates are going to make runs. Teams that are good at defending understand their opponents well.

McLaren should go. (ed: this was written just before he got sacked). It doesn't matter how people plead for him to stay. After Keegan left, Eriksson was able to make a great impression almost immediately. It isn't really disruptive when you change a coach after 2 years. His selections were even criticised in public by his opponent coaches, like Slaven Bilic turned into salivating Bilic after hearing about the 3-5-2 formation which nobody uses anymore. Or how Guus Hiddink was talking about how he focused Russia's attacks on England's weak flank.

But the prerequisite for him to go is that you have to have a good coach waiting in the wings. Somebody who is willing to coach England. Now England's personal problems are not merely about players, they are also about coaches.

Sure, Sven Goran Eriksson is a top coach, and he won the Serie A with Lazio, for the first time in eons. But he was bankrolled by an exceptionally generous chairman, the most generous one until Abramovich came along. He made some small Swedish and Portugese sides play above themselves in Europe. But he's not in the same class as Hiddink, Wenger, Scolari, Ferguson, Lippi, Rechagel. The press against him was so bad that it took him 1 year to get another job with Man City, where he is currently enjoying a rehabilitation of his reputation.

Who are the good English coaches? None of the big 4 in the premiership are coached by Englishmen. Sam Allardyce has yet to prove himself at Newcastle, but he's a contender if he does. Martin O'Neill is Northern Irish. Mark Hughes is Welsh. David Moyes is Scottish. Alan Curbishley did well with Charlton, and avoided relgation with West Ham, but I don't see him being a top manager. In any case, both Curbishley and Allardyce are better than McLaren.

As for why Harry Redknapp has never been considered is something I don't completely understand. After all, he spotted and developed a lot of people who are in the England squad, like Joe Cole, Ferdinand, Defoe, Lampard. And Michael Carrick, what's happened to him now?

Steve Coppell had a wonderful last 2 seasons, but England would be a big big step up for him. Paul Jewell is a real prospect for the future, but we have to see what he's capable of achieving with a top club.

As for foreigners, maybe the renumeration is generous, a few million pounds a year. But let's face it, the England job is fairly unattractive. You have people with massive expectations. You have rich and spoilt players who won't necessarily do their best for you. You have the media watching your every move. You have a really small talent pool to work with. If you're foreigner there will be people who will be willing to see you trip and fall. I think Eriksson did pretty OK under the circumstances.

After seeing what happened to Eriksson, which foreigner is going to want the England job? Scolari backed out. Hiddink made some excuse about the FA not giving him sufficient respect. Mourinho ruled himself out of the job in the near future. Can you imagine a Carlos Ancelotti? An Otto Rechaghel?

That's why the job attracts people like Kevin Keegan, Graham Taylor and Steve McLaren who are otherwise mediocre managers, but would gladly do the England job because it's a job above their station, something that normally people of their capability would not be able to touch.

As for talent, maybe England does have young talent. Just because people do well in the U 21s it doesn't mean that they'll always shine. I can name you Peter Taylor, Stuart Pearce and David Platt as coaches who did well for U21s but were rubbish elsewhere. You have youngsters like Gabriel Agbonlahor, Theo Walcott and James Milner coming through, but it remains to be seen whether they will blossom at a more senior level, and in any case they aren't ready now.

Edit: since this long spiel was written, Fabio Capello, Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho have declared themselves in the running (even if van Gaal quickly clarified that he would only available in 2 years' time - duh. Probably his chairman told him to shut up.) That's encouraging, even though none of them are synonymous with attractive football. (Capello, after delivering Real Madrid's first trophies in 3-4 years, was sacked for playing ugly football.) Van Gaal is abrasive and not successful at the national level. Mourinho for all his achievements is unproven because, like Eriksson who won the Serie A with a blank check, he won his EPL titles with a blank check. Benitez is trying to get into a war of words with the Liverpool owners so that he can get fired? I think that of the big 4 clubs in EPL, Liverpool is the most stressful because they have never won the EPL. Next comes Chelsea because Avram Grant has to fill in Mourinho's shoes. Ferguson and Wenger have to screw it up really big time in order to be fired.

So maybe what I said about the England manager being an unwanted job is wrong.

Projects part 1

Around the time when I was pri 6 I decided that I would engineer a series of pranks that would be the crowning achievement of my then young life. I can remember 3 of them.

You may not laugh a lot about them now but I have to honestly tell you that they were downright hilarious in the day. The first prank came about when I noticed that some of the magazines I came across had advertisements for a new (this was almost 20 years ago) product called tampons. Then they had this cut out which said, "send me a free sample!"

So I usually took my friends' names and feminised them, then put in their addresses. Justin would become Justina. Paul would become Pauline. Lincoln would become Lynn. Then I mailed them out and watched the fun pile up.

Didn't get a reaction, and so I tried again. Until I got a call from Justin who told me, "I have here on the table in front of me 3 packages wrapped in pink. Now my older sister thinks that this is great that she has something to use but I am hopping mad. If this happens again I'm reporting you to the principal."

Well guess it had to end but I had great fun.

Lying in bed at night I had to think about my next plan. This involved sending fake radio dedications to other people. It got boring after a while. Some people told me they heard the radio dedications on the air but I never managed to catch something that I sent out. It was time for my third and crowning achievement which would be discussed in a blog post coming your way soon.

Crouch and Owen

Yesterday was talking to water tap and I passed a remark that certain operations are like Michael Owen and others are like Peter Crouch and when you play or analyse them you got to do it differently. Which is a motherhood statement of course but that remark gave him an idea. When we joined the football game one of us had to join one side each, and then he decided I would be Owen and he, Crouch. I knew it was a joke, of course, since I was taller and he, shorter. So one team thought they knew what they were getting and they asked for Owen (because water tap is a much better footie player than myself) and har har har they got me instead.

I wonder why they went for Owen because that side was already stronger. Well crap for them, then.

Eight

1. I was born on the 8th day of the month.

2. I feel like I was born on the 8th day. If you think that God made the world in 7 days, then I arrived after all the action is done. By the mid 70s, Singapore was firmly on the path to being an Asian "tiger". It had completed the transition from post-war, post colonial third world country to Highly Regimented And Anal Retentive Economic Power.

3. I thought of myself as an octopus. I nicknamed myself octopus once.

4. I used to stay in Lorong 8. (Toa Payoh, not Geylang.)

5. I had another nickname with the number 8 in it.

6. I have 8 uncles and aunts*.

7. On my mother's side of the family there are 8 grandchildren. On my father's side of the family there are 8 grandchildren, of whom I am the eldest.*

8. 8 is considered a lucky number because it sounds like "fa". "Fa" is in my father's name.



* My grandmother, finding herself unable to raise all her children, gave 2 away. They're not counted here. I have met 1 of them, "the missing aunt", before.

Crouching Tiger Fucking Rabbit

I'm referring of course to "Lust, Caution", directed by Lee Ang who also did Wo Hu Cang Long.

They cut the motherfucking film. It's 9 mins out of almost 3 hours. But your penis is also a few grams out of a 60-70 kg. does it mean that it's alright to cut it off?

http://book.sina.com.cn/books/2006-07-20/1423203180.shtml

Apparently Edward Yang (RIP) wanted to make the film and asked Zhang Ailing (RIP) about it. He was thinking of casting Leslie Cheung (RIP) in it. Well we know it's not ever going to happen, everyone's dead now.

Well there's been a fair amount of bad press about the censorship. And it was just as well that they released the R(A) version last week. The ST reviewer even wrote in the papers that the movie isn't worth half of what it would have been without the sex scenes. Then later on I read this newspaper article about some distributor or cinema manager saying "I'm surprised at the overwhelming response for this movie." I think that watching "Lust Caution" with cuts is like watching a porn movie acted by eunuchs. Only a small part is cut off but it makes all the difference.

It was of course sold out by the time I got to the box office half an hour before the start of the show. However I never panic when these things happen, especially when I'm alone. It just so happened that the cinema I went to has all the theatres in the same place, so I could just buy a ticket for another movie and go watch "Lust Caution" anyway. So this may be possible for places like Vivocity and Marina, whereas in places like Plaza sing or Cathay Orchard you will have to know in advance whether the show you want to watch or the one you will sneak into are in the same half of the theatre complex. And impossible for other places like Shaw where there is an usher for every theatre.

So I bought a ticket for "Lions for Lambs" and went and watched "Lust Caution" instead.

A great part of the reason for me to watch this movie is that Tang Wei is such a babe. And it's a shame that she's wearing a cheongsam so much of the time that obscures the view of what I'm sure are a pair of shapely long legs but of course there's the story as well.

The story doesn't drag. I think there are a few reviews who say so but I think that most of the parts were necessary.

Spoilers from now on.

There was this part where she almost lured Tony Leung into the apartment and the students were about to pounce on him. Then they told her, after discussing it in her absence, that she had to seduce and fuck Tony Leung as part of their plan to lure him out and assassinate him. That night, one of the comrades, the only one not a virgin, teaches her how to fuck. Then in the morning, she finds out that Tony Leung and his family are moving out of town. What a bummer - lost her virginity for nothing. I had to laugh.

There was also a murder committed by the "comrades" that was terrifying precisely because these guys didn't quite know how to kill a person properly. Leave you to imagine the gory details yourself.

There was this part where Tan Wei complains to her resistance commanders about how she was opening her hole to him and graphically describing the details of the sexual encounters to him, because he had always been coy about talking about what she was supposed to do. He was pissed off and left in a huff but when the thought came to my mind that he just went somewhere convenient to jack off immediately I burst out laughing. Then there was this rape scene cum (no pun intended) body cavity search when they were having sex for the first time. Then at the end, she is splayed out on the bed, and there's a quaint smile on her face: is she happy that he's taking the bait, or does she actually enjoy being roughed up like that? There was also the perversity of him inviting her to the geisha quarters, only to have her sing a Chinese folk song for him in there.

Why did he buy her the ring? Was it a trap to make her reveal her real intentions, or was he really falling in love? (If you ask me I'd say it was the latter.) Then why was she so touched by the ring that she gave him a chance to escape his assassination? When she could have just kept the ring and run away? Why didn't she swallow the poison pill when she was cornered by the roadblock?

And the guy who was the ringleader, why is he so wooden? Compared to the wizened and tortured Tony Leung, he seems almost like a spoilt brat who's in this for his abstract ideals. Why are the Japs drinking their lives away every night? Because the Americans are going to fuck them upside down and they know it.

There she was, wandering around on stage, only to be called up to join her comrades on the circle seats. The thing that deserves to be emphasised is this: yes, some of her happiest times were mingling with her comrades while they were freshmen in the U. Yes, she accepted this mission because of the loyalty she felt towards them. But after Hong Kong she was never again shown in the same room as them, even though her cell leader had told her that they would meet up again. And their positions in that scene depict that: her, lost on the stage, in the spotlight in them middle of the action wondering what the fuck she was going to do next, and her comrades in the back, plotting her next move, and sometimes even treating her like a pawn. And that's the basic situation: the only person she's really intimate with is Tony Leung.

Well, good film. Maybe even excellent. Not great though. Or maybe I'm just jaded.

Gangrene

A short update on my wound. I had been treating it with dettol and wrapping it with cotton wool for the first few days. (I didn’t have gauze bandages). And I knew that the cotton wool was sticking to the wound, and I knew that I had to cut it when I took it off. So when after a few days, when the wound seemed to dry up, I stopped putting on the dressing. However something wasn’t right: why is my wound yellow?

I went exercising this week, shortened my run to 5km, although I think I would eventually manage my normal 10k. Then I went for my first swim in months, which means that I would have been soaking that wound there for 1 hour. I thought, I guess there’s a bit of cotton wool there from 1 week ago, so let’s see about that. To my surprise, I managed to rip off a whole layer of cotton wool. It wasn’t pure cotton wool, but it had fused with the clotted blood. And I guess the cotton wool was choking the whole thing, and responsible for there being a small quantity of sticky pus around that area. Underneath was some fresh pinkish flesh which fortunately grew underneath that muck. But no wonder there's so much pus. No wonder it hurt when I try to move my leg. (cotton wool impeding the motion of the knee and scraping the wound.)

Well not too bad. But imagine – I could have been fostering the growth of gangrene all tha time. Yuck.

Next day at work, I make the colossal mistake of not protecting the wound while wearing long pants over it. By the evening the constant abrasion of cotton / polyester pants over raw newly grown flesh has become a sensation somewhat akin to fingernails on the chalkboard. I was forced to walk home with 1 leg of my pants rolled up, inviting stares from all the people I pass. (Note to self: it seems very difficult for people to stare at a person without that person noticing. I will keep this in mind next time a lady with big breasts walks by.) What a pain it was.

Aftershave

Now you ladies wouldn't know what a bloody pain in the ass it is to have to shave every day. But even then I cheat and shave every other day, allowing myself a 5 o'clock shadow every 2 days, maybe a beard on the weekends. Then there are the fortunate people who can get away with shaving every other week... they don't know how lucky they are. In fact I was complaining about this to my grandmother. I've never seen my grandfather because he died before I was born, and I'm curious to know why both my father and I have fast growing beards. So I asked her if she had an affair with an Indian, but I never got a straight answer from her about that, funny thing.

Once you get a cut, it's crap for you, because you know that in 24 hours (or 48, depending on which schedule you're using) you're going to run the razor over that cut again, and it's going to be a stupid wound for the rest of your life: open, close, open, close. Which is why I'm glad they have aftershave. That bottom of your face has to be well moisturised, well taken care of. And it's good because it just washes away those small cuts that you get.

In fact I always think about this disaster movie filmed by those cute little bacteria colonies that grow on my neck, how they would found the colony, grow, multiply, become civilised, start walking on, if not 2 feet, then 2 blobs. There would be the stratification of society, discovery of agriculture, religion, formation of great cities, great irrigation projects, masterpieces of bacteria art. The bacterian Renaissance. The bacteria religion, where they worship the Great Germ in the sky. The Reformation. The Enlightenment. The Industrial revolution.

Then one dab of my aftershave, and they're all screaming bloody murder, their cell walls bursting in horrified bacterial agony, their mitochrondria exploding. The apocalypse, armageddon. Death, destruction, pestilence.

Gilette, the best a man can get.

Cross Cultural communication

This is most interesting.

Here is a video clip that caused a great big furore on the internet.



You can see the reactions of the Singaporeans from the comments, enough said. We're all very upset that these guys ran away without paying, and sat 3 people on trishaws that were only designed for 2. Singaporeans were upset because:

1. These people were rowdy, drunk and by sitting 3 to a trishaw, were bullying a helpless old man who couldn't keep up with them.

2. They called it a taxi when it was clear to us that trishaws are never used as transportation in Singapore, but novelty rides for tourists.

3. They didn't pay up for the trishaw ride.

The comments got so vociferous that it even made it to the newspapers, like the front page of the New Paper. And I personally wanted them to die of AIDS.

Then there was a big discussion on the internet, and much to my surprise, many of the British posters argued that:

1. The trishaw driver was providing a service. If the trishaw drivers in UK are too slow, they could opt not to pay up.

2. The old man was looking at the tourist's wallets and was being an asshole.

3. The old man shouldn't have agreed to take on the 3 people.

Well I thought at first that it was a deliberate ploy on their part to treat the trishaw as a form of transportation, a totally false argument in Singapore's context. But some of their arguments were so consistent with each other that I begun wondering if there wasn't some big misunderstanding at work. And I remember one of the 3 guys saying that he didn't really think it was that big a deal, and that the comments were an "eye opener". (He didn't say he was upset at the comments but it was an "eye opener"). What's going on?

I came to realise that:

1. Trishaws are actually used in London, and are used for transportation!
Now this is surprising because you couldn't imagine that happening here with our wide boulevards. But London is full of nooks and crannies because it's an ancient city, imagine that the whole city looked like our Arab St - a bit like what London is like. This makes it more ideal for trishaws to be used. They can also weave around traffic and are actually faster than cars in a traffic jam.

2. In London, trishaws are driven by fit young people. Because they are a form of transportation, the value of the ride is in getting from point A to point B.

3. Trishaws in London can seat 3 passengers. And therefore they weren't completely wrong in thinking that it was the same here.

Whereas in Singapore:

1. Trishaws are a symbol of our national past. The old man represents the coolie, a potent symbol of Singapore's early days. They are very closely associated with the suffering of our forefathers.

2. Ang mohs are always the bad guys in movies.

3. You treat old people with respect.

4. The only reason why old people drive trishaws is that they're meant to be joyrides, and that there is absolutely no time pressure on them to get your tourist around from point A to B. It is hard work, but not backbreaking work, and may not even be as bad as being a hawker's assistant.

Now if you saw it from our point of view, these 3 factors are explosive. There is racism, xenophobia, lack of respect for the elderly, nationalism, all sorts of emotions involved. The rage at the inequality in the world.

But if you see it from the other perspective, it could be a genuine misunderstanding. Sure, those guys were very obnoxious, and made a lot of snide remarks about how crappy and slow the trishaw was. But if you're drunk and loaded you could make the mistake of thinking that the trishaw is a form of transport. We treat the old with respect but why are so many old people still working and not on welfare?

And if you see the end of the video, they hopped onto a cab. This doesn't forgive them for not paying, but it supports the view that what they really wanted was to get to another place. What was the distance? They started at the junction of River Valley and Hill St, which is where the trishaw riders wait. Then they got off where? Before Funan centre. They had travelled the length of the MICA building. The brits were right. It was barely 100m. $10 is a little expensive for 100m. Would you be reluctant to pay up? I know I would. When they took out the wallet, were they taunting him, or were they seriously considering how much to pay?

The old man was upset. He said that his average takings are $30 a night and he probably had a right to feel robbed. But he didn't think that much about it later on and he was probably puzzled about why this video clip raised so much media attention. And when you know the facts, the only real thing he had to complain about was not being paid.

They were laughing, sure. But when you're drunk, anything is funny. And if you know all the facts, maybe it's a little funny.

That guy Bo Davis wanted to say was that a big misunderstanding had taken place. It's much less sinful if it was a misunderstanding.

I don't want to defend them too much because they're plainly assholes. But I think that the legions of Singaporeans who flamed them on the net did so based on first impressions and disregarding a lot of plausible alternative explanations for some of the things they said.

There's this other thing you have to consider. What is the vocation of a man? Why would an old and weak person drive a trishaw around when there are taxis and buses which do the job better? There are only 3 reasons: transport, entertainment (as in the novelty of the experience of riding an old quaint method of transport) and begging (as in the old woman selling you overpriced tissues is not really retail, but it's more respectable than begging). Let's not contemplate the transportation (because that's ridiculous) or the begging (because that's disrespectful). Therefore his real job is to be an entertainer and a tour guide.

And what's an entertainer and a tour guide to do but make tourists happy? If a tourist out for a good time and comes across a beggar, what's he to do? If he keeps on making merry he's insensitive. If he wants to be respectful, he's just spoilt his mood. Now laughing and being merry is of course different from mocking a person in his face, but the line is very fuzzy. In that video, I couldn't definitely say it was the latter and not the former. And with the old man casting a disapproving eye on the rowdy youngsters and grouchily intoning "very happy, very happy ah..." I'm sorry but there is something genuinely funny about it.

What is a guy like that doing at Clarke Quay? But he has every right to be at Clarke Quay. In physical resemblance, he looks perfectly the part of those coolies who used to carry rice sacks at Clarke Quay 50 years ago. But now it's a watering hole. Big big difference. I think this encounter has to be seen in its big context, which is the clash of cultures between the rice sack Clarke Quay and the watering hole Clarke Quay.

I've seen boorish behaviour as bad as this, in the old town square of Prague, where a gang of yobs were shouting out "USA! USA!" I was embarrassed to have been living in the United aSSholes of America for 4 years. Then this other time when some yankees were taunting some old busker, asking him if he knew how to play Charlie Parker (for non-Jazz folks, Charlie Parker was an immature fool who make a total mess of his life, died young, and was also the greatest jazz musician of all time.) In the end, they didn't pay up, and the busker angrily launched into an impromptu rendition of ABBA's "Money Money Money".

Shit like that happens all over the world, I guess.

Bulletin

I'm motherfucking pissed off because while running around McRitchie (in preparation for the half marathon) I fell. It was near the SICC golf course, on the reservoir bank, I stepped too near the edge of the jogging path, my right foot went through, and my left leg hit the floor but not before my knees scraping the gravel. Now I got this bloody patch roughly the size of your palm (not including the fingers). Blood everywhere. Grazes on my left hand. Mostly shallow grazes but 1 place where a itsy bitsy chunk of flesh was ripped out. Kept on running, I guess. Had it cleaned at the Ranger station. Ran the rest of the way back to make it 1 lap, but I forgoed the extra 5km. (Was supposed to increase the mileage but I guess I didn't.)

How the fuck am I supposed to train this one last month with a grazed knee? How am I going to make it in time for the fucking marathon? Goddamn.

There's this bottle of dettol in my house. I looked at the date: manufactured Feb 98, expired Feb 01. What the hell I'll use it. Got to go around hopping these few days.

Have discovered, over the last few days, that the pus from a wound and the pus from your pee sai smell very similar.

(Sorry about the language. I'm trying to make this an R rated blog instead of a sissy NC17 it is right now.)

Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

I heard another super watered down funk tune and after a bit of straining I recognised it as "Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)". Fair enough, since it was performed by the Shrek guys, can't expect too much of an ass like Eddie Murphy. Then the radio DJ says that the thing is James Brown. What a dickhead.

I picked up a copy of August 2007's "Vanity Fair" and in it was a story that almost made my eyes pop out. It was an interview with Sly Stone. "The first in 25 years!"

It was. Anybody who wants to read Sly Stone's sad story can refer to any of these links. He was a great original, a trailblazer who managed to fuse soul, rock, funk and jazz and make it sound like they were all meant to be together. A great songwriter, whose tunes are still being covered today. A musical inspiration to many, like Kool + the Gang, Parliament / Funkadelic, Earth Wind and Fire. He practically invented 70s soul and funk. Almost everybody in that extraordinarily rich period of black music copied him. Many rappers sampled his music.

The reason why he's never been made a hero is simply because he isn't one. Yes, his early records were utopian. He put his band, Sly + the Family Stone together as one of the first multi- racial bands which featured both men and women.

And guess what - at the grand old age of 64, he's planning a comeback. A comeback! He had been making comebacks since the mid-70s, when the drug habit got the better of him. By then he had lost a great deal of his stature because of his erratic behaviour. His music, while still competent, was not as brilliant as before. In the 80s, he was arrested for a few drug offences, and made a few attempts at comebacks that were best described as shambolic.

But now he's back! And guess what, for the first time, we heard that he'd been off drugs for 10 years! Nobody saw him much between 1993, when he turned up to be inducted into the rock and Roll hall of fame, and 2006, when he performed at the Grammys for a short while.

Brian Wilson, as the head Beach Boy made "Pet Sounds" in 1966. Paul McCartney acknowledged later that "Sergeant Pepper" was an attempt to match up to its lofty standards. Elsewhere it was acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of pop music. Unfortunately, he went mad trying to make the follow-up, "Smile" in 1967. He remained productive, and some of the songs that were supposed to be on "Smile" surfaced on other Beach Boys albums. Incredibly, "Smile" was finished in 2004, when he decided, as an old man, to go back into the studio after 37 (!) years and finish the job. Equally incredibly, it seems to be more or less what he envisioned in 1967, and everywhere it was lauded as another great album, although not quite the equal of "Pet Sounds".

There are other great recluses of music. There is Kevin Shields, who as member of My Bloody Valentine created "Isn't Anything" at a cost of 250K pounds, almost bankrupting his record company in the process. But it was worth it: it was a masterpiece. But that was in 1991, we waited for a follow up that never came.

There is Syd Barrett, who was the founding leader of Pink Floyd, made an exceptional album. (He's now dead.)

There is Lee Mavers, who as the leader of La's, made a pop album as good as anything that came out during the 60s.

There is Cat Stevens, who became an Islamic fundamentalist.

Well let's hope the Sly Stone album comes out and we'll see what happens.

Heaven can wait

I bought this book on a whim. But I didn't think much of it. It was a slim volume, looking fairly unsubstantial. An exchange of letters between Bonny Hicks and some unknown academic called Tal Ben-Shahar.

Now I'm not one of those shallow idiots from the Straits Times who would diss her writing based on her modelling career and her lack of academic qualifications. The fact is that she did write a best seller about her life. How many best sellers are there in Singapore? Now you only have "True Singapore Ghost Stories, vol 21". We think of models as bimbos, but at the level of a supermodel, you need a lot of brains to survive, especially if you're drinking yourself half to death partying with coke in your nose all the time. I managed to get my hands on "Excuse Me, Are you a Model?" which I will read.

There has been an attempt to cash in on the book. "Excuse Me, Are you an Actress?" was written by Eileen Wee. Now I got my reservations about that. Met her in person, when she was hosting an event, she was standing 1m in front of me. Nice ass but she's got one of the most piercing voices I've ever heard. Maybe I'll stick to the model model.

This "Heaven Can Wait" book, though, is when she starts talking about philosophy and stuff, a little straining on the credibility. Until I listed it for sale and somebody snapped it up, telling me that this Tal Ben Shahar is the same guy who's now conducting the most popular undergraduate course at Harvard, one that teaches you how to look for happiness. He's also written another book based on the course that's become a worldwide bestseller. I'll be damned. Well not much for me to do but to speed read the whole book in between now and when I have to mail the damned book out.

She was replying to a reporter who criticised her for wanting to live life to the fullest and do everything when young. Her attitude is heaven can wait, I want to live my life now. And it proved to be a very wise decision in the light of her early death. And for all that she's done with her life, I've done something she hasn't, which was to celebrate my 30th birthday earlier this year. One of her last letters is especially poignant, written just before that air crash, where she finally decides that she has found her peace of mind and decides that life is wonderful.

And you know, that air crash was one of the worst because people til today aren't able to give good answers about why a perfectly good plane went into the Palembang river.

It wasn't hard to read. Finished it in about a day. There's this constant impression that Tal Ben Shahar has a crush on Bonny Hicks. It's all very nice and pleasant exchanging emails with nice girls that you have a crush on and I've done that before but this is not the time for such pleasant distractions.

Death of the father

Went to the wake for the father of a friend. This is the 4th person I know who's lost a father, and the 3rd one who was 30 or younger when the father died.

This last person who has lost a father was a good friend of mine during secondary school. Let's call him CEO. Funnily enough he has the same name as a high ranking executive from my company who left under a cloud recently. He is one of the rare people I have met who is even weirder than me. We used to be really good friends, although mostly we talked on the phone: the calls lasted around 4 hours on certain occasions*. It's not really unusual for 15 year olds to have plenty to talk about, it was the period that I was also very close to my sister. People of that age will have plenty to find out about life, and plenty to figure out. (Think: Anne Frank's diary is compelling reading not only because it took place under the Nazis wanting to wipe her out, but because it is a document of a life in full flower in spite of the circumstances.) We drifted apart: at 15 it is easy to make a lot of friends, because the ideas that you can discuss are really general. Young people are much more like each other than old people are.

CEO gave me a lot of unconventional ideas, introduced me to unconventional music. Was proud of being an Aquarius (who are known to be unconventional people). Later on we drifted apart: maybe we knew a little too much about each other. He wasn't that comfortable. There are 2 sorts of friends: the sort where you have social activities ("having social activities" is the adult version of "play") with. And the sort that you confide in. Understandably people typically want to keep the 2 separate. Also, we are very different people. He was an artsy fellow. I'm a science-y fellow who managed to cross over to the artsy side once in a while, and I've come to realise that those guys completely do not understand the scientist and engineer culture, but I digress.

Still it was nice to be meeting him again. And a bit of a shock to realise that I was the only guy from sec school he invited. He thought that he was a little embarrassed that he wasn't attending the other peoples' weddings, so he couldn't possibly ask them to the funeral.

Fitzgerald's novel, "Tender is the Night" hinged on the father figure. The difference between the Dick Diver who was a successful psychologist and the one who was an alcoholic wreck was the death of the father, even though not very much was made of it. My sister who is better than me at reading literature spotted that. She was also perceptive enough to say that he's laying all the blame on Nicole, Dick's wife. Something that has resonance because Dick is modelled after F Scott Fitzgerald, whereas Nicole was modelled after Zelda.

I think for most of our lives we are preparing for this moment. There is this saying that you really only grow up when you lose a parent. Well maybe, I've seen people lose a father and still act like a kid but probably that's the exception. Interestingly 2 of the deaths took place very near the weddings, and both after the engagement. The father maybe holding on until you see the kid happily married. The death of a parent ends a process created by the birth of the child. The child takes the baton that the father passes over when the father uh passes on.

And it's interesting to know that you are just a link in a chain that passes back to antiquity. That human civilisation is only around 10000 years old and you are only around 300- 400 links away from a caveman. Somewhere along the line there was a coolie who went around with a manchu queue, or some minor magistrate or some farmer in Swatow. All very interesting.

And you know, I had a near brush because my father was in London on 7/7/05.

* was there anything unusual about our friendship? I don't know, but probably not. I now know that he's gay. He had a few girlfriends, and he is a lady's man, but you know, the people who are best at having female friends are the gay ones.

Pissing on a grave

Way to go!

The (probably drunken) actions of my old schoolmate Alfian would go a long way towards putting to the sword my old school's reputation as a bunch of government nerds.

The text of the email sent to Thio Li Ann can be found here. Pissing on her grave, indeed! And you would not put it past her to shamelessly milk it for what it's worth, 1 piss and 1 fuck could amount to being "full of obscene invective".

When he's done pissing I will be next in line.

Real Run

I wonder why they called this the real run.

Well went for this. Thought I'd get an early night before the run, but there was dinner with some old friends. So I took an afternoon nap. I think I more or less napped this weekend away. Then there was the sudden appearance of Wong Li Lin and Allen Wu. The first time I saw her in the flesh while not 7 months pregnant. We were at Dan Ryan's. This is the 3rd time I was in Dan Ryan's. The first was in 1993, the second was last week, and by coincidence the dinner took place here again. I remember the 1993 occasion when I went there because it was 1 week after I had finished a 20k route march at scouts and it was almost like a reward to go there.

So incredibly I got up with the alarm sounded. It was 5. By the time I had fully woken up (I'm cold blooded so it takes a while.) and checked the internet for soccer results (what the fuck happened to Man City?) it was 5.30. But still OK. Drove to Changi. Today was one of the rare times I drove the manual car without getting horned at or into a near accident, so I'm glad. I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up at Changi Naval base. This is scary, I could have been blown up by JI operatives. So when I got there there was a massive traffic jam (which is weird, a traffic jam that far away from civilisation.)

Bumped into a friend who had left my company, it's interesting like that. It's nice to be running with everybody like this. I used to hate exercising because I was always running alone. I started exercising every week and making this a compulsory routine around the turn of the century, so it was nice for a while, some structure and discipline in your life. But then it became a chore. Many chicks who are physically fit. It's good to have things to watch when you're running, although mostly you're just overtaking or being overtaken. You turn to one side and you can see planes taking off and landing. Then after that you can see nicely toned bared midriffs as flat as those runways. And sometimes you get hot teenagers in St Johns' Ambulance uniforms. Fairly pleasant.

Yes, I'm alone, though. Shingot and Nat were supposed to be here but for various reasons they opted out.

I think, though, I can only run 5k at a time. What happens is that I run roughly 5k, then I take a rest and walk, then repeat. Think this is how it's going to be in the marathon. I don't have a steady running pace I can sustain from start to finish. I didn't feel like I was going to die at the finishing point although I was tired enough as it was.

Was a hot day. Just as well most of the route was shaded. Good for them. There weren't 4 different surfaces. Just 2: asphalt and sand. And for the beach run everybody copped out and trampled on the money plants next to the beach, either to avoid the sun, or to avoid the sand, which bogs you down. Other than that, not much complains. They know how to time this run, it's quite obviously a dress rehearsal for stanchart marathon.

Timing was crap - 1:59 for 15k. If I extrapolate this linearly (take into account I don't have to run on sand), then it should take me 2:40 to finish a half marathon. Was never really that much a sportsmen. I'm just doing it, getting the T shirt and then moving on.

Oh, there's this very interesting boil that I got on my left foot. Like the liquid in there was red, so there must have been some blood mixed with it. I pricked it with a needle, and already got ready the tissue. But it was a splatterfest, just like a horror film. That's cool.