Loser carpark behaviour

I'm sure that every one of you has heard this story before, but this is probably the first time you're hearing it from me.

I was in a parking lot at my town centre, and at that point in time there were fewer lots than cars, so a few cars were lounging around, waiting for people to come out. Suddenly there were 2 cars coming out of their lots. I thought, "great! Plenty of lots for everyone" so I just took my position, put on my indicator, and then found myself reversing into a lot, when suddenly somebody else's car came into my rear view mirror. I hadn't realised what it was all about so I just waited for him to pass, and when after a while he didn't go, I wound down the rear window, and he said to me, "I've been waiting longer than you have. This lot is mine." I was like, what the fuck man what a fucking loser.

I thought there's no point wasting time with the standoff, so I drove to 1 side and allowed him to reverse park the car. After he was done, and had left the car, I drove mine in front of his to block his way out. I reasoned: I was going to only need 5 minutes, and if he was going to cut me for 5 minutes' parking, he's going to deserve whatever grief he's getting out of that.

It was actually 10 minutes because I made a detour to the toiletries shop. I had been toying with thoughts of spraying "ASSHOLE" on his windscreen (shaving cream, not spray paint, because I'm a nice guy.) and I can tell you that a can costs $5 from the nearby toiletries shop, but in the end I thought I'd better go back and see what the situation is.

I was very surprised to find that the lot he occupied was empty. How did he get out around my car? He probably pushed it out of the way or something. Guess my handbrakes aren't very powerful.

Next time I will have this comeback line: "If you don't get out of my fucking way right now I'm going to post your a picture of your face and a picture of your car on the internet so that everybody can see what a loser you are."

OCBC tower

There was an episode which took place when I was 5. I remember it vividly and I think it does say a lot about the person I am.

I had a set of toy bricks given to me by my aunt's boyfriend. (They've since broken up.) I think they knew that I'd know how to make stuff out of it.

One day I tried to make a model of the OCBC building, which was Singapore's tallest skyscraper at that time. (OUB centre would be built when I was 10.) I stacked the blocks in the tower. I did it 4 or 5 times, but I never managed to make it stand up. I would never attempt to do that now because you would need extremely steady hands for that. It's like a stack of Jenga bricks. (But I don't know if Jenga existed in the early 80s.)

I might have started crying at that point. Just then my grandmother walked in. She was taking a break from cooking lunch. She asked me what the problem was. I told her that I was trying to build a model of OCBC.

Then she took the blocks and instead of building a tower like I did, layed out the floor plan of the place. This is where the backroom is. This is where people line up at the counter. This is where people come in through the door. I watched and learnt, fascinated. (As evidenced by how 25 years later I'm still reciting this to you from memory.) But soon a look of horror crept across my face. I demolished the layout with a sweep of my hand, and almost screamed, "that is not the OCBC tower!"

My grandmother must have recoiled from the shock. Shaking her head, she walked out of the room and back into the kitchen. I remember this because 5 minutes later I felt bad and guilty about having destroyed her hard work. But I didn't apologise because I hadn't learnt how to, and maybe I still don't know how to apologise.

But that's me. The guy who's insistent on building his tower of babel instead of thinking of the alternatives.
The guy who wants to be right instead of wanting to get along.
The guy who wants control instead of playing along.
The guy who wants to be difficult and insist on rigid insistance on his plans.
The guy playing with his blocks all alone, answering to nobody.
The guy who favours the grand scheme instead of taking care of the details.
The guy who's the architect, the guy who likes to think of structure and form.
Maybe even the guy who prefers to be phallic instead of - well you know that the flat terrain is more often associated with feminity.

That was 25 years ago and not much has changed since.

NB: This stubbornness and dogmatism is something I've inherited from my grandmother. She can be as difficult and stubborn as I am, although she is in many other respects a nicer person than me.

Spite

Some people told me about their worst trait. For some, it's vanity. For others, it's pride. Mine is spite.

- Once on an outing somebody pissed me off, maybe I did or did not have a good reason to get angry. At the end of the day, I bought myself a present and told him that it was my birthday (which is true). He was a little taken aback, and asked me, "why didn't you tell me earlier? We could have celebrated." I told him, "you pissed me off just now."

It was winter, which is to say, my birthday is in winter, which suits me fine. I'm a little cold like that.

- Sometimes when I'm upset at someone, I might take pains to be nice to everybody except him. But I've stopped doing this because I'm not good at withdrawing from this position. Once you've started being nasty to a person it's really not easy to stop, even if you want to. I think this should be the most important reason why you'd want to get along with people. War is like fire: you can start it, but you won't necessarily be able to put it out.

- Somebody once cheated me of something, and I waited until she was upset at something else and feeling vulnerable before I yelled in her face for 5 minutes. I can only plead that I was really really upset at her to want to plan things out this way.

- Somebody once hounded me over the internet. First I made it hard for him to back out by taunting him back (ie he had to keep on hounding me or else he'd lose face). Later on I found out who he was and gave him hell. I've stopped for now but I had an inkling that I could start again.

- I had a form teacher who once was berating the class for not being interested in Literature. Then she called me one of "those" Maths guys. I was a bit pissed off: later on I entered a play in a competition and she only found out about it when it was about to be staged. Of course that's not the main reason why I wrote a play: I did it because the idea was there to be written. But I admit I enjoyed the satisfaction of not telling her anything about it.

If you are a sadist, you will understand this: pain is physical, but suffering is psychological. And the worst suffering is the sort where you don't really know when (or even whether) it's going to stop.

When something irks me and I decide not to act out at it, I don't always know whether I've conquered my anger or whether I've deferred it so that it snowballs into something larger.

NB: for those of you wondering why I wrote this entry, I just said something spiteful to someone and I wish I didn't do it. I'm just reminding myself not to be so quick to anger...

Being Digital

Reading "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte, he of the MIT Media lab. Similar to "When Things Start to Think" by Neil Gershenfeld, also of the MIT Media lab.

I remember that in the 90s, at the birth of the internet era, it was generally assumed that the "information superhighway" was going to incorporate a lot of "rich" content". You'd have talking machines, holographs, interaction with the computer in new ways (speech? touch and feel? Virtual reality booths?). But 10 years after the big bang of the internet, it seems that the networking aspects of the net have become more significant than the ideal of delivering "rich content" to the consumer.

I'm also in the business of information, so I think I can say something about the nature of information and data. It's relatively easy to talk about how you want such information to be presented, but not so easy to actually process information in that way. You could have clients who think that it's very easy to "just show the data in a different way", but it could take hours and hours of programming time to manually change all that shit.

Since 10 years ago we've started to realise that the internet is very rich in data, but getting useful stuff out of the data is the hard part. You could have very rich operating environments, but the economics are such that a lot of work needs to be done in order to manifest data in these environments. Furthermore, these environments might well be walled communities or gardens where information is not easy to get in or out. I think that the majority of the users have grown to accept a relatively low production qualities in exchange for being able to access a high amount of content. We can have stuff in HTML, but I guess that's probably good enough for > 90% of what's on the web.

I think one other work that is like a "State of the Internet" work today is "Search" by John Batelle. I will be reading it and trying to understand how searching and networking, rather than the possibilities of multimedia, have come to dominate the uses of the net.

Technologists will probably have their own priorities, but I don't ever think that technologies ever exist for their own sake. All technologies reside within our socio-economic realities and you'll have to think how they interact, not just with people, but also societies, in order to understand what does or does not work.

Oh, when I read "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward, I found 1 US ambassador to Iraq who was remarkable in that he actually volunteered to go serve there. His name is John Negroponte. Turns out that John and Nicholas are brothers.

Boring weekend

This weekend was boring.

I drove the manual car to my workplace in the wee hours of the morning. I think I will stick to driving in the middle of the night, because there's no way I'm going to drive in rush hour traffic when I won't succeed in engaging my clutch 100% of the time, and I still get engine stalls from time to time. A pleasant surprise was that they allowed the car in. (I had a pass but my car didn't have a label.)

I used to look forward to weekends, because that was when I could catch up with my books, but my books hardly matter now. I think I might have spent too much time with them.

Maybe it was meeting up with some old friends and hearing them talk about how much $$$ they made (or missed making) at the stock market.

Or maybe it was facing, for the first time in years, the prospect of...

I think what is novel is the sensation of being liked, being approved of, probably on a deeper level than just... . God knows it's happened so little for me.
It's the ability to trust someone, although the consequences of betraying that trust are fairly catastrophic.
And it's the ability for that trust to turn itself into a form of guidance, a sense of direction in life that stops it from being walking in circles in a forest.

I'm wondering if life is really going to be as bleak as I thought it'd be.
I'm wondering if things are going to be as insane, intense and unstable as it was the last time.
I'm wondering if I'm really capable of being liked. Of being attractive.

I'm not thinking about a single person. I'm thinking about the prospect of someone in my life. Anyone, just someone.

Everybody struggles, some people just struggle a bit more.

And that's why books have suddenly become boring.

Edit: Might have to start behaving like a nice person again, a bit more like myself before I started work.

Faith

After alighting from a friend’s car (he gave me a lift home) I walked up to the bridge over that road. I stared out at the traffic for 15 minutes. Why do big things come together? Why does work have to get a little more stressful at a time when my personal life does likewise?

Later that night I ended up taking a long walk through my HDB town. Eventually I realized I was walking towards the cinema, which is like a half an hour walk, even at a brisk pace, because it’s on the other end of the HDB town. I had watched all the Potter films at the neighbourhood Eng Wah cinema (except for the first 1, which I watched in America), and I had decided to continue with tradition.

It’s like meditating, and things become a little clearer. The movie was ho hum but at least it took my mind off worrying. I just realized: my personal problems don’t mean shit. There are no problems whichever way this thing goes. If you miss a train you just catch the next one. You can miss 10 trains, and if you catch the 11th, you're still doing fine.

Having something real to worry about is a novelty. Maybe even a privilege. What a relief it is to be worried about something real. There are only good things to come out of this, since you can always bail out before the bad parts start being really bad.

Being strong means being reassuring rather than seeking reassurance. Being the one to be leaned upon rather than the one doing the leaning. Being the one, putting a smile on your face, telling people that everything is alright, rather than behaving like a kid and wondering why people aren't doing the same for you.

My Finest Hour

I read an interview with Paddy McAloon. I’m a great fan of his music. He said, most of your favourite music, you will hear them between the ages of 15 and 23. That’s remarkably true. But also very sad, because you could come across new music for the rest of your life after that, and it would no longer have the impact that the old music did. I first listened to Prefab Sprout in sec 4. I think I’m lucky. From 21-23 I managed to pack in a jazz education. And it’s true, I’ve lost touch. I can hardly name any music from the 21st century that’s caught my attention. OK, “Promiscuous” is catchy as hell. There’s “Beep” by the Pussycat Dolls. Maybe a few Franz Ferdinand songs. Beyond that, nothing. Or maybe nothing new. Or maybe you have to dig really deep before you find something special.

My music collection is still dominated by music that I bought when I was 15 or 16. I may have been spending too much money buying music those days, my parents might have nagged and nagged and nagged at me, but I don’t think so. You have, say $15 in your hand, and you spend it on a CD. If you’re 15, it leaves its imprint on you, and maybe it’s something you love and remember for the rest of your life. When you’re the wrong side of 30, jaded, busy all the time, it just doesn’t have that effect on you. Best spend it on something else. I’d say that money was well spent.

It goes without saying that I hardly spend money on buying new music these days.

2 of the bands I liked in sec 4 were the Sundays and the Lemonheads. The Sundays were very heavily influenced by the Smiths, who had a rabid following in the 80s, and now, 20 years later, they are recognised as one of the all time greats. In contrast, the Sundays, almost as soon as they were formed, were fairly hyped by the press who liked them. They released 3 albums. Although the first, “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic” was the best, the other 2 were fairly decent. They’ve been a cult band with a small but devoted following, and destined to remain that way for a long time.

I’m listening to RRR now. First thing you notice is that Harriet Wheeler’s voice is amazing. She can go from a whisper to a ... well not a scream, since the music is always gentle, but the voice soars. It’s a seductive voice, and if anybody sounds like a lover whispering in your ear, she can. She comes across as a person who’s a devoted daughter, wife, mother, whatever. As it is right now, she and Dave Gavurin, the main songwriter of the band and guitarist, have quit the Sundays and are raising their kids. It’s as domestic as can be.

The dynamics of her voice - this is the classic example of how the way you say things can matter more than what you say. The girl next door. No glamour queen, no party goer. Not the model on the catwalk, the red carpet or the centrefold. (But I tell you there’s so much bare meat on the centrefolds these days it’s beginning to look like a butcher’s shop.)

The song that everybody knows is “Here’s Where the Story Ends”. But my favourite Sundays song is “My Finest Hour”. The Smiths said that shyness is nice. This song is shyness personified. The title harks back to Winston Churchill’s heroic words. This is your finest hour, he said, as the British were the last domino to remain standing in the face of the Nazis. Your finest hour. Never mind that you once had an empire on which the sun never set. Never mind that you were the country who led the world into the industrial age. Never mind that half the world speaks your language. Your finest hour is now, when the Nazis are almost upon you. Those were glorious and romantic words. Even for people who aren’t English. Even for people who know that the British in our part of the world were wankers who couldn’t even keep their 2 battleships afloat on the South China Sea, who were about to get their asses whipped by the Japs and starved at Changi. “My Finest Hour” is a profoundly evocative phrase.

But with great irony, the song tells of a prosaic existence, of a person almost completely overwhelmed by her own inadequacy. Her finest hour, she tells us, was finding a pound in the underground.

Yet she gives a stunning vocal performance. The voice swoops and soars. You’d think that maybe what she’s conveying is that beneath that prosaic existence there is a rich sensitive inner life which amplifies all the experiences into a big tangle of emotions under the surface. Yes, it’s indie music, not known for being technically difficult, but you try singing that song - if the high notes don’t kill you, there is the angular melody, where the tune jumps intervals of octaves. Wheeler gives a flawless performance. I’m guessing that she has perfect pitch. Just like limpeh.

The Sundays and the Smiths are known as 2 of the most English bands ever. The attitudes are English, they borrow liberally from folk music. But you know. Morrissey is a star, and Harriet Wheeler, lovely person though she may be, is a most profoundly ordinary person.

I think that both bands are equally capable of making beautiful music. So why is it that the Smiths are great and the Sundays are merely a cult band?

I think it's because they never really wanted to be special. They're far too introverted. They don't reach out. Their lyrics don't really say that much - it's clear that while Harriet Wheeler has a better voice, Morrissey has the better lyrics, lyrics that stand out, are iconic, and purport to speak for a generation of disaffected youth. Much better than "my words keep stumbling out, then I went tumbling out" in any case.

A lot of music from the indie scene of the 80s were about people who talked about how inadequate they were, about how they wore their limitations almost as a badge of pride. The world treats them roughly and they wear their scars with pride. Could you call it an acute lack of ambition? Evan Dando sings "I want a bit part in your life". Kurt Cobain talks of being a mosquito. Dinosaur Jr is a little furry thing in a jar who wants to "know what you're nice to me for". All of them are cousins of Kafka who finds himself turned into a giant insect.

Ultimately in this song they come across much like those people we saw in "4 Weddings and a Funeral". Attractive, pretty to look at, shy, good company. But perhaps too retiring to make much of impression.

I think you can guess why I'm revisiting the music of my teenage years. I want to see more closely the stuff that I've been influenced by. I want to know what are the values that got fed into my head. I still like the Sundays. But I don't want to be uncritical of them. I hope I don't come across as calling them weak: I think Wheeler and Gavurin are raising their kids right now and I think they're living quite sensible lives. But I want to think about what I used to listen to.

One attraction of indie music was that maybe I needed to know that somebody out there to accepted me for who I was, warts and all. But would I think like that anymore? I think I should have been more ambitious, driven. I should have thought that it would mean something. I guess Singaporeans don't get taught ambition very well. Maybe I needed somebody to tell me that at one point, that things are alright, whatever happens.

I don't think I need that now. I think I seriously need my butt kicked these days.

Footnote. You won’t believe what happened 1 week after I wrote this entry. I was at the SAM machine at an MRT station, where I get rid of my small change (typically by buying stamps - I need a lot of them for my Yahoo auctions.) After a lot of pressing buttons, it came to the stage where I was to put in my coins. To my intense annoyance, I saw that the coin jam button was (irony of ironies) jammed in, and all the coins I put in immediately came out through the coin return. I punched the machine in disgust, at which point, miraculously, the coin jam button came unstuck, and a coin popped out with a “clink!” It was a $1! No pound in the underground, but a dollar in the MRT station! Fancy that! Thank you, the Sundays!

Music production

I'm getting off my ass. I guess that I can write my music on Cakewalk without really learning how MIDI works. Better still, now that I can write my stuff down, I can more or less clear the cache in my head and start working on new stuff.




(Yes, your eyes do not deceive you - in this day and age, a Windows 98 system.) If you write the notes down, I guess it's simpler to just change the instruments, and get something worthy out of it.

Composing is one of those activity which does not require any physical movement at all. You can be zoning out when people are talking to you because you're trying to figure out whether to use option A or B in a melody. You can write a song while fucking* or masturbating, or, most commonly, bathing. But the downside is that writing them down and getting them right is much more trouble than getting the concept in your head. (I'm sure that's also the case with writing programs, where it takes seconds to get that flash of inspiration to make your code work, and hours of debugging and testing to make sure that you've done everything correctly.)

The other downside is that you can tell other people that you've written 20 songs, but unless you write it, and perform it, since it also takes time and trouble to sight read, you can't show the fruits of your work.

Lyrics are a concern. I have not written lyrics. If I like a tune I've written, I'd be concerned about messing it up with shit lyrics. Song titles are another concern, so I've given them provisional titles, some of them are names of roads where I was walking on when the song popped into my head. Song titles that I am satisfied with, like "Pigeons on Steroids" or "Dance of the Strange Attractors" require a bit more thought, but I'd now shorten the latter to "Strange Attractors". It will come as no surprise to find that when I named "Strange Attractors" I was taking a course in chaos theory.

This is only step 1 of my grand plan to enter the local music scene in a fine way, become a rock star, and get all the chicks I want. That ain't workin', that's the way you do it. It's been in the works for quite some time. I wanted to be a rock star when I was 15 and started listening to Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie but I think, I'd prefer to do it without the drugs, and prefer to live a long life like David Bowie. I wrote my first song at 8 which means I have more than 20 years of songwriting experience.

We have come a long way from the time when the Oddfellows and Humpback Oak were begging Roxy and Da Da music to stock their tapes, when Opposition Party and Convent Garden were breaking the eardrums of the very few who heard them.

When you write music, you're usually wondering if it's good enough. Something you wrote yourself usually sounds slightly better than how other people would view it, so you got to correct for it. Then there are questions about how hard you want to work to propogate that music.

If you composed it, will you write it down? If you write it down, will you demo it? If you demo it, will you get a band to play it, or at least produce it? Will you record it? Will you perform it? If you perform / record it, will you promote it, and go through all the grind that musicians have to perform? Or do you just sit back and be a career songsmith, and give your music to other people who look better than you to work it? Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Also: One of Singapore's best bands, Humpback Oak has a myspace site. Concave Scream, another great Singapore band, also has one.

* imagine if you will:


her: oooh baby.
her: oooh I'm getting real hot here.
her: oh you're great, pushing all the right buttons here....
him: yeah baby.
her: You could ride me a long time.
him: hold it now.
her: hey, wait! Where are you going?
(he gets up, starts looking for pencil and paper, and then scribbles some notes down.)
her: what the fuck man.
(10 minutes later)
him: honey I'm back.
her: better learn how to masturbate now. (rolls over and goes to sleep.)

Rat race

I recently saw this (read the posts for the first half of the month): a fascinating saga of how an education consultant was approached by 2 fairly well off Filipino Chinese and asked to go install their kids in good Singaporean schools. So far so good. Except that they forged some of the school documents, in order to allow their kids to skip grades. So this EastCoastLife goes on a mega crusade in order make sure that the authorities know that the system is being tampered with.

So I'm a little conflicted about her behaviour. Obviously I'm put off by those Filipinos who think they can come here and just mess around with the system, not giving it the due respect. And I think that the civil servants were being rather stupid (or at least biased) by telling those rich ppl who their whistle blower was. But I wonder why she chose to push the issue. If those kids were not good enough for Sec 1, then eventually they would be found out. Then they wouldn't make it through the "O" levels.

Be that as it may, I think that there is some merit about the issue of who gets into what school. Get into the right school, even if you are dumb, they will find some way to get you to get really good results at the exams. By this I don't mean that you cheat. I mean they will make you study until your backside opens up, a good school gives you the boot up the ass you need, either through peer pressure or from a self consciousness that comes about from being a member of that school. But if you're really not good enough, you might have to leave, or you don't get to the next good school.

Then again, I wonder why eastcoastlife said something like, "it's too late to stop her from entering the school through dishonest means, she would have been promoted to Primary 4". Shouldn't it be the case that if you pass the Pri 3 finals, you get into Primary 4, and this should override whether you got into Primary 3 legitimately or not?

There is always the tension between elitism and egalitarianism in schools. On one hand I'd want to say that regulation is silly. Like the time when my JC teacher said, "no more than 3 of you will be allowed to take 3 'S' papers." I thought that was silly, and I knew that it was an extremely political issue because people who took 3 'S' papers would be in good stead for the President's Scholarship. But then again, if you allow anybody to take 3 'S' papers then it becomes the norm, and eventually everybody would go crazy. I wasn't interested, I settled for 2.

And if you wanted to be strict about it, I shouldn't have taken those 2 'S' papers. You had to get an "A" in the JC1 finals, and I got a "C" for Physics. But my Physics teacher closed 1 eye, because we both knew I was capable of handling that, so she just gave me a bye, a decision that was later vindicated.

But I think that the Filipino parents shouldn't have cheated the system. Anyway, we'll see how this story pans out. Seems like it's on-going.

Actually I have a few former foreign students reading this. I'm fully trust that none of you screwed with the system. So hope we're fine with that.