Singapore was dumped out of the competition-formerly-known-as-the-Tiger-Cup. I went to the Kallang stadium thinking that I would watch what I suspected to be the last match at the Kallang stadium featuring the Singapore national football team. This is probably the last match, at least until the next time.
Singapore had played against Indonesia, played not so well and they won thanks to 2 free kicks. In the match against Vietnam at Hanoi, they played not so well too but held them to a goalless draw, which was sorda a good result. Except that not scoring in Vietnam meant no away goals.
Now in the match at Kallang against Vietnam Singapore dominated but kept on firing blanks. I got a bad feeling when they keep on whacking the ball forward but couldn't score after 25 minutes. Vietnam broke away and scored, and that was the end, because the away goals rule means Singapore had to score 2.
No big deal because Singapore would have lost against Thailand if it had gotten to the final. Some people were muttering that maybe this was payback for that match in Vietnam 10 years ago where Vietnam dominated, and Singapore won by a lucky goal, and won its first ASEAN cup. I think people saw that Singapore played properly after having scraped a goalless draw in Hanoi, and was not that sad.
There was crowd trouble at the match. There was the away stand, and the security guards who manned the stand adamantly refused to admit Singaporeans, and just as well. During the match, the viets were falling over like bowling pins, especially when it seemed that Singapore had a good attack going. We weren’t very impressed, and there was a lot of booing of the Vietnamese side. Lots of booing when somebody fell over, because it meant that he was faking it. Lots of booing when one of our guys fell over, because it meant that the Viet cheats were fouling him. Lots of booing when they went in or out of the dressing room, when they were substituted. When, after they had scored the goal, the Vietnamese made the most of a time wasting substitution by strolling off the pitch.
The Viets had a confrontation with the home stand on their right, I found out later that there were bottles thrown at them over the fence that separated them from the Singaporean side. After 5 minutes, they had a confrontation with the fans on the left. I thought at that time: you fight the French, then you fight the Americans, you fight the Chinese, the Cambodians. With all due respect to Fiji, if you were in a desert island in the middle of nowhere you would be fighting yourself. (Actually the American Vietnam war was also a civil war too.)
The Viets are in this match by dint of their having beaten the Malaysians. I sometimes wonder what a Singapore vs Malaysia semi-final would have been like. It would be like the Malaysia Cup once again, although I dare say that the Malaysia Cup has lost quite a bit of its sparkle when Singapore’s not around. I once compared Singapore to Barcelona in La Liga. There’s no more “el classico”. People don’t care about the Malaysia Cup anymore. People probably don’t even care that in the more than 10 years since Singapore left the competition Brunei won it once (!), Perlis twice (!!) and Terranganu once. What is the world coming to…
There’s always been problems in this competition. First was the fiasco of Thailand and Malaysia both in the position of wanting to lose a match against each other, so that they would play Singapore instead of Vietnam. That was 1998, and as it turned out, both got dumped out of the semis after all.
Then there was the tempestuous knock out matches in 2004, which I started following because I sensed that Singapore had a real chance of winning that match. (I was right). It was a terrible semi-final against Myanmar because they kept on fouling Singapore like nobody’s business, and Myanmar ended the match with 8 men (!). The third Myanmese who got sent off got sent off because he kicked mud into the referee for sending off the 2nd Myanmese player. That’s great.
And there was also crowd trouble after the match: there was fighting with the Myanmese workers who turned up at Kallang stadium to watch. But that time it was the Myanmese who were the hooligans.
The victories in 2005 and 2007 were legendary. After 2007 the incredible record is that Singapore and Thailand were the only people who won this competition since it started in 1996, with 3 each. The fact that we are one of two all time great teams in this competition is simply staggering. People don’t mention this because it’s almost embarrassing, almost disrespectful to all the other countries who have populations 10 or 50 times of us. The first win was a shock, but the other two were less so. It’s understandable that people get upset that we won it for the last 2 times, as can be seen from how Thailand walked off the pitch in protest 2 years ago when Singapore won a penalty (which in fairness was a dubious one).
But I liked how in 2005 and 2007 Singapore played 4 different opponents in the knockout phase: Myanmar and Indonesia in 2005, and then Malaysia and Thailand in 2007. There’s a bit more legitimacy to your winning if you knock everybody out.
In this match against Vietnam, Singaporeans were the hooligans too, both sides were to blame. Other than the obvious mistakes in not keeping the Singaporeans in while the Vietnamese left the stadium, there is tension. First was the obvious injustice of the match. Singapore finally lost for the first time in this competition in a long while: never mind that we had been lucky to not lose in Hanoi. I would say that based on both legs, both teams deserved to qualify, but the fact is that only one of them can.
There is also the obvious tension with the migrant workers. Vietnamese people are your fast food servers, hawker centre attendants, bargirls, uni students. There is always tension between the foreigners and the host country, I know because I’ve been a foreign student before. Singaporeans think that the Viets play dirty. The Viets think that Singaporeans are minnows who win too much, that putting Englishmen, Nigerians, Bosnians and PRCs in your team is not completely fair.
But I think that part of the problem is that not a lot of matches get staged in the Kallang Stadium, so there is quite a lot of pent up aggression in the Singaporean audience. When I walked towards Kallang I didn’t see myself as anything other than a Roman going to a gladiator match. People who watch live football in a stadium are always bloodthirsty to some extent.
I would want Vietnam to beat Thailand, for the reason that I don’t want Thailand having more Tiger cups than Singapore. It was easy to suppose that Thailand would just win this competition every year, until Singapore started their amazing winning streak. Let Vietnam win it this time because we once took a Tiger cup that should have been theirs if not for Sasikumar’s legendary shoulder blade. I thought that Thailand was unbeatable, because they have Peter Reid who came very close to leading Sunderland into Europe. As it turns out, Vietnam have just beaten Thailand in Bangkok, and all they have to do is protect this lead in Hanoi and they can win. Yess!!
Update: Vietnam have won the title for the first time.
Saturday, 27 December 2008
Saturday, 20 December 2008
Why the long face
Somebody came up to me and asked me “why the long face?”. Yes I have a gruff disposition. But that line came from a comedy where somebody asked a horse that question. Of course the horse can’t help having a long face. I suppose the assumption is that it would have been the same for me.
Actually it’s not true. When I was a teenager, I had 2 very miserable years where my life was crashing down all around me. Before that I was still relatively well adjusted, probably didn’t have too many friends and didn’t care for them. But I was the genius in the class and that probably made up for everything else. Then one day, came a large crisis in confidence, and that made my schoolwork go down. People around me thought that I was being my usual cocky self, so they decided to “bring me down to earth”. Needless to say, the effect was disastrous, it just made everything worse and started a vicious cycle. I spent 2 years being miserable.
I read somebody’s description of Princess Diana: when you see her up close, you find that her head is a little big in proportion to her body, as you might expect from somebody who’s been in the spotlight constantly for the better part of more than 10 years. I suppose external circumstances happen to shape the way you turn out. So for me, 2 of my formative years were completely miserable. At the beginning of those 2 years, I had a more squarish face. Not as long as now. At the end, I had a longer face. Thank goodness there were better days to come, but I’ve always believed that those 2 tough years in my early teenagehood were the cause of my long face.
Likewise I always had plenty of white hair. I think it came from studying, thinking and worrying too much. I still study and think a lot, but worry much less. There’s a lot that I worried about when I was younger, that I don’t really give a shit about anymore. The peak of my white hair was at the end of the first year in the uni. I think something changed in that second year of uni, and after that my hair slowly turned black again.
Actually it’s not true. When I was a teenager, I had 2 very miserable years where my life was crashing down all around me. Before that I was still relatively well adjusted, probably didn’t have too many friends and didn’t care for them. But I was the genius in the class and that probably made up for everything else. Then one day, came a large crisis in confidence, and that made my schoolwork go down. People around me thought that I was being my usual cocky self, so they decided to “bring me down to earth”. Needless to say, the effect was disastrous, it just made everything worse and started a vicious cycle. I spent 2 years being miserable.
I read somebody’s description of Princess Diana: when you see her up close, you find that her head is a little big in proportion to her body, as you might expect from somebody who’s been in the spotlight constantly for the better part of more than 10 years. I suppose external circumstances happen to shape the way you turn out. So for me, 2 of my formative years were completely miserable. At the beginning of those 2 years, I had a more squarish face. Not as long as now. At the end, I had a longer face. Thank goodness there were better days to come, but I’ve always believed that those 2 tough years in my early teenagehood were the cause of my long face.
Likewise I always had plenty of white hair. I think it came from studying, thinking and worrying too much. I still study and think a lot, but worry much less. There’s a lot that I worried about when I was younger, that I don’t really give a shit about anymore. The peak of my white hair was at the end of the first year in the uni. I think something changed in that second year of uni, and after that my hair slowly turned black again.
Saturday, 13 December 2008
4 roads
This was the year I travelled 4 roads, or rather came to the end of 4 long roads.
First road was one that I had not intended to travel at the start of the year. At Chinese New Year my sis, towards the end of her final year as a med student, asked me to go along with her, over land, across the USA. The road trip did not encompass the East Coast. We did transit in Philadelphia, but that was away from the Atlantic, I think. We started in Durham NC which is a few hundred miles from the Atlantic, went to DC, so it wasn’t coast to coast, strictly speaking. I didn’t go to the Pacific either, even though I went up to the San Fran Bay. But it doesn’t matter, a trip across the US is still a trip across the US.
We used to measure our successes and failure against each other. It was inevitable that we would take each other as a point of reference. Other than my sister I renewed my links with the “cultural learnings of USA” for make benefit glorious person of numbernine. I told my sister that I had grown up in the USA more than I had in Singapore. She said, how? What did you do? It wasn’t anything concrete. But being in the US marked the beginning of my judging and analysing of people. I had always been considered a drifter up till my NS. After that I became a zealous, if not exactly keen student of human nature. I also began to read anything I could lay my hands on.
I didn’t get along with my sister as well as I had hoped. Years of having to scrape and fight in a foreign country had hardened her. I tell ppl: it’s tough being a medical student, right? Yeh. It’s also tough being a foreigner in a profession as protected as medical school, right? Yeh. It’s also tough being a foreign student who has basically to do everything herself, right? Yeh. (But you must remember that almost all US college students are also de facto “foreign students” because home and college are usually hundreds of miles away.) OK, imagine that my sister has to deal with all 3.
My father had wanted to go along and was quite disappointed that my sis hadn’t asked him along. There were practical reasons, like how there was only room for 2 people in the car. He did tell me that he would hold me responsible for anything that went wrong on our trip. It made me more apprehensive about the trip that I should have been. Most of the time you’d just go to the same boring type of motel over and over again. Don’t visit sleazy large cities. I wanted to check out the Kansas City barbeques but my sis refused to drive into that place. I had even thought of going to visit Indian reservations but on hindsight, we shouldn’t do a lot of crazy things when most of my sister’s possessions are in that Honda Civic of hers.
During the trip we talked about a few things. Not as many things as I had hoped for - I was hoping for that trip to get some clarity on my outlook but I didn’t get it. But we did talk about our future. Actually more of her future, since I didn’t have any plans.
This trip may have been some kind of a rehash of a trip to New Zealand we had when we were still teenagers. We talked a lot on that trip, it was a long road trip, and plenty of scenery, like this one. But that one was more interesting. We had more “interesting conversations”. When I say “interesting conversations”, I mean that afterwards, most of the things I had to talk to my sis about revolved around the stuff we talked about at that time, like a rehashed version of those “interesting conversations”. I still remember an episode when I had an argument with her in New Zealand, which started when I remarked that I preferred that she was a brother instead. After we had finished quarrelling, I looked up, and ominously I was at the bank of a river, there were cranes on a dock, and a warehouse behind it. Well if there are omens in this trip, I visited 4 universities: Berkeley, Duke, Washington - St Louis and Stanford.
But it was better than our trip in Spain and Portugal in 2000. We quarrelled a lot. We were both in unsuccessful relationships at that point in time.
I remember the last day of the road trip - we were in Yosemite Park, which was in Cali, but near the border with Nevada. My sister had driven through most of the park. We had some fun in the morning, taking pictures of a squirrel that ended up as roadkill, taking pictures of the super long line for the toilet at the base of the waterfall. I was thinking of letting her do most of the driving during the day, and I took over at night. We were walking through the redwoods when she felt unwell and she berated me for not taking over sooner. So I drove. I drove through almost the entirety of California (it's not very far east to west) but handed the wheel back to her so that she could drive it into the Bay Area home. The trip took less than 2 weeks, but there was the incredible feeling that it was over.
The big regret was that there were no pictures of the interior of the fully laden car. We were in such a hurry to unpack that we just forgot. It was crazy stupid.
Around a week later we got up at 4 in the morning and she drove me to the airport, 1 hour away. I said, well this is it. Probably another 4 years of not seeing your sister. Then she said, "you got the chocolates, right?" I said, oh shit, I left the bloody chocolates in the fridge!" So she drive me back to her house, I had to stuff the chocolates into my bag somehow or another, and then it was on the plane back to Singapore.
I don’t travel a lot. I did a lot of travelling as a student because it’s always easier to visit the West when you’re nearer there. Travelling involves travelling companions, and I’ve been a tag-alonger more than a leader. It involves fulfilling objectives I’ve never fully understood. I don’t look very kindly upon enjoying a luxury. You should be on business, or learning something, or visiting friends, or having a nice place to fuck your wife. I counted this trip as “visiting friends” and “learning something”.
Road 2:
It was 27th December 2004, I remember the exact date because this is the day after the terrible tsunami. My friend who had been a BMT platoon mate came back from the US and took us to run around McRitchie reservoir. He had been training in a marathon team while he was in the USA, and suffered the ignominy of running alongside 50 year old women who were more fit than him. It was 1 lap, 10 km, and I felt like dying after that. Not much happened immediately after that. It was Mr Apple (my BMT platoon mate), Mr B and myself, the beginning of a jogging gang.
Around the start of 2007, for some reason we met up weekly and did that route. By that time I also found out that 5 of my colleagues had finished marathons and 2 more were interested in it. That was the beginning of my 2 year plan to conquer the marathon, and weekly bouts of distance running. Mr B and I were involved. Mr Apple didn’t really join. He decided that extreme sports were out for him and anyway he’s happily married and a devoted husband. At the end of the year Mr B and I did a half marathon.
Things go wrong, they inevitably do. 1 month before my half marathon, I slid down a particularly treacherous patch near the SICC golf course, and my knee was bleeding. I was pissed off to find that I had to stop training for 2 weeks while my knee patched up. But that didn’t stop me from finishing the half marathon.
While preparing for the full marathon, we thought it would be enough to run 2 or even 3 laps around the McRitchie reservoir. I lined up a half marathon to prepare for the full marathon. I had a bout of flu before the half marathon, and 1 week before the half marathon I was startled to find that I had problems running 7 km. In midweek I went for a night jog at Bishan park. That was how we discovered a new running route. The half marathon was spent in a slow jog and walking for much of the second half, as opposed to the one in 2007 when I managed to run all the way. It was bad, but I completed it.
There were new routes that I found. We explored the Kallang Park connector which ran from Bishan Park to Nicoll Highway. We also tried to jog from McRitchie to Rifle Range road, although the route there was more suitable for hiking rather than for jogging. I soon discovered that my ankle would start hurting if I were to run on McRitchie’s bumpy terrain for more than 1 lap. So I do my running more on Bishan park / Kallang River these days, where it may be a bit hotter (fewer trees), and the scenery a bit more dreary (concrete jungles / industrial parks) but at least the ground is flatter.
Seems that Kallang park has been taken over by construction workers.
There was the problem of pushing the endurance all the way to 42 km. It was hard enough getting to the 20km mark. But I decided to break my endurance tests in 2, like having a 20 km session in the morning and a 10 km session at night. I’ve never tried 2 20km sessions in the same weekend before but I might have to try that at least once before the big day. And then after that, dinner, or a pint of beer, or vegetating in a kopitiam in front of an EPL match and reading a book if the match gets too boring.
Owing to the problems that we encountered during the preparation for the marathon Mr B and I both agreed that we were in this thing for the male ego thing rather than because we really enjoy long distance running. This is too much of a pain in the ass for me and unless I fuck up and do not complete my marathon in December, this will be our first and last marathons.
Edit: marathon report is here
Road 3:
My mother is a passionate advocate for my education. This is a euphemism for saying she is a pushy parent. Starting from when I was 6, she had this system where every time I completed a book she would write it up on a cardboard and paste it on a wall. I did better than my sister who is almost 2 years younger.
I didn’t really read all of those books. Sometimes I would just read the blurb on the back of the book. When my mother tried to make sure that I had read the book, I just summarised the blurb. She would then check this against the blurb at the back of the book and conclude that I had indeed read the book.
This reminds me of a story that my aunts and uncles related once during their talk cock sessions. My grandmother would stash a lot of money in this biscuit tin that she kept hidden away in the corner of the kitchen. She would take a lot of security measure to find out that the children never found out. But she were not successful, and my aunts found out. They would pilfer a little bit here and there and never get caught. Only when they desperately needed it. (They were a poor family at that time.) In time to come some of them would be put in charge of huge sums of money at work so I prefer not to think of them as thieves. Then my aunts would be extremely amused that my grandmother would still be sneakily stashing away money in that biscuit tin, unaware that the cat was already out of the bag, sometimes even spying on her as she did so just for kicks. OK, diversion over.
The tragic aspect of education in Singapore is that even as it drills you well in the core syllabus, you don’t read a lot of books on your own. It is a zero sum game. The more material there is in the official syllabus, the less independent learning Singaporean students will get. Imagine you are married to a porn star, and he comes back from a *hard* day at work. You tell him you’re feeling in the mood and you just gotta have it. Should you be surprised that he tells you to fuck off? Similarly, Singaporean students, after a lot of compulsory study are rather disinclined to relax with a good book.
I’m not a particularly motivated student. I think that exams are odious. They are undignified and they treat students as little more than trained seals. Of course I am smart enough to do well in them if it’s very important. It’s just a shame that we have a system which thinks so highly of exams. But being an above average student does get me in the habit for knowledge. I like knowledge but I hate exams.
I thought that NS had given me a great opportunity to read a lot. But I tried reading a lot of literature and I was a poor reader. I always was a poor reader because I was a science student and never had much practice reading a lot. I only became better at it after 1 or 2 years in the uni. Being in a relatively liberal uni fuelled my lust for knowledge. I didn’t think that knowledge had any boundaries. Subconsciously I knew that I was supposed to do business studies, which is just as well because business studies has no boundaries either. I cooked up some excuse about reading maths and political science but this was just an excuse for me to study whatever happened to catch my fancy. I make no apologies for this. Even in the uni, people want to draw a box around you and frame up the limits of your intellectual endeavours but I resisted that.
I wasn’t done with studying when I graduated. I studied widely, but that was just to lay down a foundation in most of the stuff that’s out there, to learn the basic ideas of each discipline so as to make it easier to further study stuff that’s related. They had book warehouse sales in the Singapore Expo and I just went in and bought books indiscriminately, sometimes boxes at a time.
There were many categories but my books usually belong to these categories:
History
Business
Politics
Science
Complexity theory / evolution
Religion
Pop culture
Philosophy (but this is a little rare)
Some of these books were great bargains, but that’s besides the point. The books were crowding out my living space, so 2 years ago, I began a campaign to get rid of them. Some of them I would sell outright. Others, I would plough through them before selling them. I must have tried to plough through hundreds of books. I would read them in trains, buses, kopitiams, airplanes (rarely), airports, gourmet coffee joints, libraries, fast food restaurants. People tease me about this habit all the time. I’m down to what should be my last 40 books. I have stopped buying books already.
After this my bedroom should be a more livable place.
Road 4:
I have also come to the end of my fourth road. I have mentioned this in passing .
First road was one that I had not intended to travel at the start of the year. At Chinese New Year my sis, towards the end of her final year as a med student, asked me to go along with her, over land, across the USA. The road trip did not encompass the East Coast. We did transit in Philadelphia, but that was away from the Atlantic, I think. We started in Durham NC which is a few hundred miles from the Atlantic, went to DC, so it wasn’t coast to coast, strictly speaking. I didn’t go to the Pacific either, even though I went up to the San Fran Bay. But it doesn’t matter, a trip across the US is still a trip across the US.
We used to measure our successes and failure against each other. It was inevitable that we would take each other as a point of reference. Other than my sister I renewed my links with the “cultural learnings of USA” for make benefit glorious person of numbernine. I told my sister that I had grown up in the USA more than I had in Singapore. She said, how? What did you do? It wasn’t anything concrete. But being in the US marked the beginning of my judging and analysing of people. I had always been considered a drifter up till my NS. After that I became a zealous, if not exactly keen student of human nature. I also began to read anything I could lay my hands on.
I didn’t get along with my sister as well as I had hoped. Years of having to scrape and fight in a foreign country had hardened her. I tell ppl: it’s tough being a medical student, right? Yeh. It’s also tough being a foreigner in a profession as protected as medical school, right? Yeh. It’s also tough being a foreign student who has basically to do everything herself, right? Yeh. (But you must remember that almost all US college students are also de facto “foreign students” because home and college are usually hundreds of miles away.) OK, imagine that my sister has to deal with all 3.
My father had wanted to go along and was quite disappointed that my sis hadn’t asked him along. There were practical reasons, like how there was only room for 2 people in the car. He did tell me that he would hold me responsible for anything that went wrong on our trip. It made me more apprehensive about the trip that I should have been. Most of the time you’d just go to the same boring type of motel over and over again. Don’t visit sleazy large cities. I wanted to check out the Kansas City barbeques but my sis refused to drive into that place. I had even thought of going to visit Indian reservations but on hindsight, we shouldn’t do a lot of crazy things when most of my sister’s possessions are in that Honda Civic of hers.
During the trip we talked about a few things. Not as many things as I had hoped for - I was hoping for that trip to get some clarity on my outlook but I didn’t get it. But we did talk about our future. Actually more of her future, since I didn’t have any plans.
This trip may have been some kind of a rehash of a trip to New Zealand we had when we were still teenagers. We talked a lot on that trip, it was a long road trip, and plenty of scenery, like this one. But that one was more interesting. We had more “interesting conversations”. When I say “interesting conversations”, I mean that afterwards, most of the things I had to talk to my sis about revolved around the stuff we talked about at that time, like a rehashed version of those “interesting conversations”. I still remember an episode when I had an argument with her in New Zealand, which started when I remarked that I preferred that she was a brother instead. After we had finished quarrelling, I looked up, and ominously I was at the bank of a river, there were cranes on a dock, and a warehouse behind it. Well if there are omens in this trip, I visited 4 universities: Berkeley, Duke, Washington - St Louis and Stanford.
But it was better than our trip in Spain and Portugal in 2000. We quarrelled a lot. We were both in unsuccessful relationships at that point in time.
I remember the last day of the road trip - we were in Yosemite Park, which was in Cali, but near the border with Nevada. My sister had driven through most of the park. We had some fun in the morning, taking pictures of a squirrel that ended up as roadkill, taking pictures of the super long line for the toilet at the base of the waterfall. I was thinking of letting her do most of the driving during the day, and I took over at night. We were walking through the redwoods when she felt unwell and she berated me for not taking over sooner. So I drove. I drove through almost the entirety of California (it's not very far east to west) but handed the wheel back to her so that she could drive it into the Bay Area home. The trip took less than 2 weeks, but there was the incredible feeling that it was over.
The big regret was that there were no pictures of the interior of the fully laden car. We were in such a hurry to unpack that we just forgot. It was crazy stupid.
Around a week later we got up at 4 in the morning and she drove me to the airport, 1 hour away. I said, well this is it. Probably another 4 years of not seeing your sister. Then she said, "you got the chocolates, right?" I said, oh shit, I left the bloody chocolates in the fridge!" So she drive me back to her house, I had to stuff the chocolates into my bag somehow or another, and then it was on the plane back to Singapore.
I don’t travel a lot. I did a lot of travelling as a student because it’s always easier to visit the West when you’re nearer there. Travelling involves travelling companions, and I’ve been a tag-alonger more than a leader. It involves fulfilling objectives I’ve never fully understood. I don’t look very kindly upon enjoying a luxury. You should be on business, or learning something, or visiting friends, or having a nice place to fuck your wife. I counted this trip as “visiting friends” and “learning something”.
Road 2:
It was 27th December 2004, I remember the exact date because this is the day after the terrible tsunami. My friend who had been a BMT platoon mate came back from the US and took us to run around McRitchie reservoir. He had been training in a marathon team while he was in the USA, and suffered the ignominy of running alongside 50 year old women who were more fit than him. It was 1 lap, 10 km, and I felt like dying after that. Not much happened immediately after that. It was Mr Apple (my BMT platoon mate), Mr B and myself, the beginning of a jogging gang.
Around the start of 2007, for some reason we met up weekly and did that route. By that time I also found out that 5 of my colleagues had finished marathons and 2 more were interested in it. That was the beginning of my 2 year plan to conquer the marathon, and weekly bouts of distance running. Mr B and I were involved. Mr Apple didn’t really join. He decided that extreme sports were out for him and anyway he’s happily married and a devoted husband. At the end of the year Mr B and I did a half marathon.
Things go wrong, they inevitably do. 1 month before my half marathon, I slid down a particularly treacherous patch near the SICC golf course, and my knee was bleeding. I was pissed off to find that I had to stop training for 2 weeks while my knee patched up. But that didn’t stop me from finishing the half marathon.
While preparing for the full marathon, we thought it would be enough to run 2 or even 3 laps around the McRitchie reservoir. I lined up a half marathon to prepare for the full marathon. I had a bout of flu before the half marathon, and 1 week before the half marathon I was startled to find that I had problems running 7 km. In midweek I went for a night jog at Bishan park. That was how we discovered a new running route. The half marathon was spent in a slow jog and walking for much of the second half, as opposed to the one in 2007 when I managed to run all the way. It was bad, but I completed it.
There were new routes that I found. We explored the Kallang Park connector which ran from Bishan Park to Nicoll Highway. We also tried to jog from McRitchie to Rifle Range road, although the route there was more suitable for hiking rather than for jogging. I soon discovered that my ankle would start hurting if I were to run on McRitchie’s bumpy terrain for more than 1 lap. So I do my running more on Bishan park / Kallang River these days, where it may be a bit hotter (fewer trees), and the scenery a bit more dreary (concrete jungles / industrial parks) but at least the ground is flatter.
Seems that Kallang park has been taken over by construction workers.
There was the problem of pushing the endurance all the way to 42 km. It was hard enough getting to the 20km mark. But I decided to break my endurance tests in 2, like having a 20 km session in the morning and a 10 km session at night. I’ve never tried 2 20km sessions in the same weekend before but I might have to try that at least once before the big day. And then after that, dinner, or a pint of beer, or vegetating in a kopitiam in front of an EPL match and reading a book if the match gets too boring.
Owing to the problems that we encountered during the preparation for the marathon Mr B and I both agreed that we were in this thing for the male ego thing rather than because we really enjoy long distance running. This is too much of a pain in the ass for me and unless I fuck up and do not complete my marathon in December, this will be our first and last marathons.
Edit: marathon report is here
Road 3:
My mother is a passionate advocate for my education. This is a euphemism for saying she is a pushy parent. Starting from when I was 6, she had this system where every time I completed a book she would write it up on a cardboard and paste it on a wall. I did better than my sister who is almost 2 years younger.
I didn’t really read all of those books. Sometimes I would just read the blurb on the back of the book. When my mother tried to make sure that I had read the book, I just summarised the blurb. She would then check this against the blurb at the back of the book and conclude that I had indeed read the book.
This reminds me of a story that my aunts and uncles related once during their talk cock sessions. My grandmother would stash a lot of money in this biscuit tin that she kept hidden away in the corner of the kitchen. She would take a lot of security measure to find out that the children never found out. But she were not successful, and my aunts found out. They would pilfer a little bit here and there and never get caught. Only when they desperately needed it. (They were a poor family at that time.) In time to come some of them would be put in charge of huge sums of money at work so I prefer not to think of them as thieves. Then my aunts would be extremely amused that my grandmother would still be sneakily stashing away money in that biscuit tin, unaware that the cat was already out of the bag, sometimes even spying on her as she did so just for kicks. OK, diversion over.
The tragic aspect of education in Singapore is that even as it drills you well in the core syllabus, you don’t read a lot of books on your own. It is a zero sum game. The more material there is in the official syllabus, the less independent learning Singaporean students will get. Imagine you are married to a porn star, and he comes back from a *hard* day at work. You tell him you’re feeling in the mood and you just gotta have it. Should you be surprised that he tells you to fuck off? Similarly, Singaporean students, after a lot of compulsory study are rather disinclined to relax with a good book.
I’m not a particularly motivated student. I think that exams are odious. They are undignified and they treat students as little more than trained seals. Of course I am smart enough to do well in them if it’s very important. It’s just a shame that we have a system which thinks so highly of exams. But being an above average student does get me in the habit for knowledge. I like knowledge but I hate exams.
I thought that NS had given me a great opportunity to read a lot. But I tried reading a lot of literature and I was a poor reader. I always was a poor reader because I was a science student and never had much practice reading a lot. I only became better at it after 1 or 2 years in the uni. Being in a relatively liberal uni fuelled my lust for knowledge. I didn’t think that knowledge had any boundaries. Subconsciously I knew that I was supposed to do business studies, which is just as well because business studies has no boundaries either. I cooked up some excuse about reading maths and political science but this was just an excuse for me to study whatever happened to catch my fancy. I make no apologies for this. Even in the uni, people want to draw a box around you and frame up the limits of your intellectual endeavours but I resisted that.
I wasn’t done with studying when I graduated. I studied widely, but that was just to lay down a foundation in most of the stuff that’s out there, to learn the basic ideas of each discipline so as to make it easier to further study stuff that’s related. They had book warehouse sales in the Singapore Expo and I just went in and bought books indiscriminately, sometimes boxes at a time.
There were many categories but my books usually belong to these categories:
History
Business
Politics
Science
Complexity theory / evolution
Religion
Pop culture
Philosophy (but this is a little rare)
Some of these books were great bargains, but that’s besides the point. The books were crowding out my living space, so 2 years ago, I began a campaign to get rid of them. Some of them I would sell outright. Others, I would plough through them before selling them. I must have tried to plough through hundreds of books. I would read them in trains, buses, kopitiams, airplanes (rarely), airports, gourmet coffee joints, libraries, fast food restaurants. People tease me about this habit all the time. I’m down to what should be my last 40 books. I have stopped buying books already.
After this my bedroom should be a more livable place.
Road 4:
I have also come to the end of my fourth road. I have mentioned this in passing .
Monday, 8 December 2008
Marathon 08
I think it has to be the t shirt. It must be the fucking tshirt because it surely wasn't for anything else.
I have to admit the mistakes on my part. I could have been too cavalier with my preparation. I think I should have been running every day instead of just going for long distances every weekend. I should not have taken my foot off the pedal so completely over the last 2 weeks that I even didn't feel that hyped up for the marathon. Most of all, I should not have been carbo loading the previous day with donuts (!) and nasi lemak (!) and lek tau suang (!).
It started off OK. I was never going to make a spectacular timing, and we calculated that the best we could hope for was 6 hours. Along the way I was even exuberent enough to make rude remarks while running past the building that used to be Lehman brothers, heckle back an angmoh who was heckling us, and cheer for the front leading Africans by going "OWWW!" like Michael Jackson. My usual obnoxious self, in other words.
Even when we slowed down, it was according to schedule. Things started going wobbly around the 25 km mark, and by the 28km mark, I had to start walking.
Then it happened. I couldn't help noticing that even walking was painful. At first I thought that my calf was tight. Then I realised: shit! I was cramping with 14 km to go!
My eventual timing was a little less than 7:30. I think, if I didn't have the cramp, but had to slow down, my timing would be 7:00. But to fully take into account what the last 14 km was like, hobbling through it took me more than 3 hours. Yes, I screwed up my timing big time, not that I really care about the timing because I'm just in this to complete. But when I am limping around (OK, not limping around but every step hurts) for 14 km. I have the right to claim that finishing this marathon was an achievement in itself.
Not that the organisers were particularly helpful. All the drink stations in the last 10 km had run out of 100 plus: quite naturally because we were the stragglers with cramps. Which means those people who need their salt were just not getting it. I was getting really hot under the collar at not getting my 100 plus and finally I had to run - limp, actually - to the nearest petrol kiosk to get it.
3 hours of saying to myself, "you're the man. You can get through this." I looked at all the people lying by the roadside, stretching their leg muscles and told myself, "you're doing something that these people can't do." Hardly fair, because if your cramps are serious enough you just have to stop. There's no way you can continue. But this was going to be my shining moment, I would walk 14 km through agony to reach the end. There were tears - I hadn't gone through as much physical agony since NS. But I knew that it was possible - barely possible for me to complete. I just had to endure the pain.
The fucking MC at the end was saying to us, "this is the end. Why don't you run instead of walking? Walk some more!" Fleeting thoughts of grabbing the mike and offering an expletive ridden explanation of my condition crossed my mind but I thought the better of it. Anyway nobody could accuse me of not having a sense of humour - I could always retort that grabbing the mike was situationist humour.
I suppose my helpful father in the end helped me brainstorm for things that had gone wrong. Today just reinforced my earlier decision that this will be the last time I will ever run a marathon in my life. I just don't have running technique, I'm liable to get myself injured, and I'm rather lucky I ever managed to cross the finishing line. Thank goodness for that.
I thought I would be struggling with my legs after the marathon. It wasn't the worst of my problems. My stomach was bloated from the energy bars I had dumped into it for the marathon. So I decided not to drink water after the thing. I went straight to sleep, and I think I probably got a heat stroke while sleeping. Then I woke up to have dinner, and then my head was spinning and I was shivering all over. I had to pop 2 panadols and sleep the damn thing off. I was constipated for 24 hours after the end of the marathon and couldn't eat much after that.
I have always thought of myself as an old man and I think I just sounded like one.
On another note, I had compared the marathon to the haj so it's suitable that both take place within 1 day of each other. I'm reading a book now, "The Siege of Mecca" by Yaroslav Trofimov, about the haj of 1979 when some Muslim terrorists took over the mosque.
I'm rereading this again after nearly 5 years. I haven't had as great an achievement as this one but I'm on the verge of another achievement. I just want to make a note: shingot said that I did this alone. I didn't do this alone. I had a running partner who trained with me and put up with my shit on an almost weekly basis for almost 2 years, in 2007, leading up to the half marathon. In 2008, leading up to the marathon. We ran the marathon together until the 28km mark, when I realised that I was unable to carry on running. That was when I signalled him to carry on, own time own target. He finished maybe half an hour ahead of me. That partner of mine does not know the existence of this blog but I want to extend my appreciation to him. I couldn't have done it without him.
I have to admit the mistakes on my part. I could have been too cavalier with my preparation. I think I should have been running every day instead of just going for long distances every weekend. I should not have taken my foot off the pedal so completely over the last 2 weeks that I even didn't feel that hyped up for the marathon. Most of all, I should not have been carbo loading the previous day with donuts (!) and nasi lemak (!) and lek tau suang (!).
It started off OK. I was never going to make a spectacular timing, and we calculated that the best we could hope for was 6 hours. Along the way I was even exuberent enough to make rude remarks while running past the building that used to be Lehman brothers, heckle back an angmoh who was heckling us, and cheer for the front leading Africans by going "OWWW!" like Michael Jackson. My usual obnoxious self, in other words.
Even when we slowed down, it was according to schedule. Things started going wobbly around the 25 km mark, and by the 28km mark, I had to start walking.
Then it happened. I couldn't help noticing that even walking was painful. At first I thought that my calf was tight. Then I realised: shit! I was cramping with 14 km to go!
My eventual timing was a little less than 7:30. I think, if I didn't have the cramp, but had to slow down, my timing would be 7:00. But to fully take into account what the last 14 km was like, hobbling through it took me more than 3 hours. Yes, I screwed up my timing big time, not that I really care about the timing because I'm just in this to complete. But when I am limping around (OK, not limping around but every step hurts) for 14 km. I have the right to claim that finishing this marathon was an achievement in itself.
Not that the organisers were particularly helpful. All the drink stations in the last 10 km had run out of 100 plus: quite naturally because we were the stragglers with cramps. Which means those people who need their salt were just not getting it. I was getting really hot under the collar at not getting my 100 plus and finally I had to run - limp, actually - to the nearest petrol kiosk to get it.
3 hours of saying to myself, "you're the man. You can get through this." I looked at all the people lying by the roadside, stretching their leg muscles and told myself, "you're doing something that these people can't do." Hardly fair, because if your cramps are serious enough you just have to stop. There's no way you can continue. But this was going to be my shining moment, I would walk 14 km through agony to reach the end. There were tears - I hadn't gone through as much physical agony since NS. But I knew that it was possible - barely possible for me to complete. I just had to endure the pain.
The fucking MC at the end was saying to us, "this is the end. Why don't you run instead of walking? Walk some more!" Fleeting thoughts of grabbing the mike and offering an expletive ridden explanation of my condition crossed my mind but I thought the better of it. Anyway nobody could accuse me of not having a sense of humour - I could always retort that grabbing the mike was situationist humour.
I suppose my helpful father in the end helped me brainstorm for things that had gone wrong. Today just reinforced my earlier decision that this will be the last time I will ever run a marathon in my life. I just don't have running technique, I'm liable to get myself injured, and I'm rather lucky I ever managed to cross the finishing line. Thank goodness for that.
I thought I would be struggling with my legs after the marathon. It wasn't the worst of my problems. My stomach was bloated from the energy bars I had dumped into it for the marathon. So I decided not to drink water after the thing. I went straight to sleep, and I think I probably got a heat stroke while sleeping. Then I woke up to have dinner, and then my head was spinning and I was shivering all over. I had to pop 2 panadols and sleep the damn thing off. I was constipated for 24 hours after the end of the marathon and couldn't eat much after that.
I have always thought of myself as an old man and I think I just sounded like one.
On another note, I had compared the marathon to the haj so it's suitable that both take place within 1 day of each other. I'm reading a book now, "The Siege of Mecca" by Yaroslav Trofimov, about the haj of 1979 when some Muslim terrorists took over the mosque.
I'm rereading this again after nearly 5 years. I haven't had as great an achievement as this one but I'm on the verge of another achievement. I just want to make a note: shingot said that I did this alone. I didn't do this alone. I had a running partner who trained with me and put up with my shit on an almost weekly basis for almost 2 years, in 2007, leading up to the half marathon. In 2008, leading up to the marathon. We ran the marathon together until the 28km mark, when I realised that I was unable to carry on running. That was when I signalled him to carry on, own time own target. He finished maybe half an hour ahead of me. That partner of mine does not know the existence of this blog but I want to extend my appreciation to him. I couldn't have done it without him.
Saturday, 6 December 2008
3 historical epochs
Interestingly enough, during my first 2 trips to the US, important events took place which changed the world.
I was in the US in winter of 89/90. The Cold War was still going on when I left for the US. By the time I came back, East Germany fell. Poland fell. Czechoslovakia fell. Hungary fell. Yugoslavia fell. Bulgaria and Romania would soon follow. It was a crazy time. History is already judging this to be an epoch, which is to generally say, before this takes place, the world operates on one set of rules. After this even takes place, a lot of the rules have changed. Cold war is over, globalisation is in full gear.
During my first semester in the US, Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Security procedures in the embassy in Singapore was upgraded from anal to super anal. At the start of my last year in the US, 9/11 took place. The age of terror had begun.
During my third trip to the US, there was not much that was new, except that Obama clinched the nomination. I guess what is going on in the USA right now is pretty earth shattering, except that all your sub prime problems only blew up while I was back in Singapore. It seems almost certain that Obama will be the next president. I guess that's historical enough - he will be the first US president who is not a white man. (He's half white but I guess the one drop rule means that he's black.)
In the years to come, Americans will look at 2008 the way that they looked at 1973 - the end of the good times. Or the way we looked at 1997.
1973 was a very bad year for the US - Richard Nixon about to be impeached. The Arabs ganged up to drive the oil prices through the roof (but nothing like US$100 a barrel). US was losing in Vietnam. It was the start of a few more bad years - the economy would recover only 10 years later.
2008 was the year sub prime castrated the credit system and caused a few bank failures. US is about to lose Afghanistan (although things are finally looking up in Iraq). Will the US have a few more bad years for the economy? I suspect so. The size of the US debt will kill it. Their social security systems are going bankrupt just at the point when the baby boomers are growing old. When the dust settles, the US will not be the only superpower in the world - there will be another 2, in China and the EU. Possibly India will be another superpower. It will stop being an exceptional country.
I have heard it being said a few times by different people: we are living in very interesting times. But the phrase - "may you live in interesting times" is meant to be a curse.
Do you know something? The show is not over yet. This is hardly the tip of the iceberg. There are more interesting things lined up for us in the coming decades.
1. Inflation is caused by the number of middle class people in the world expanding by a large number over the last 10 years. People in the former third world countries who are for the first time beginning to enjoy a decent standard of living are bidding up all the prices of raw materials / commodities. This will place a strain on the economy like never before. It is possible that sometime during this century, a famine on the same scale as the "great leap forward" famine will take place.
2. All the shit that we've done to the environment over the last 50-100 years will come and bite us in the back. There will be climate change, sea levels rising, plenty of natural disasters to worry about. You will probably never be able to get yourself insured at a decent price anymore.
3. A lot of the world will be more middle class than ever before. Which is nice in a way and not so nice in others (see point 1).
Hot, flat and crowded. A more exciting world. A more messy world.
I was in the US in winter of 89/90. The Cold War was still going on when I left for the US. By the time I came back, East Germany fell. Poland fell. Czechoslovakia fell. Hungary fell. Yugoslavia fell. Bulgaria and Romania would soon follow. It was a crazy time. History is already judging this to be an epoch, which is to generally say, before this takes place, the world operates on one set of rules. After this even takes place, a lot of the rules have changed. Cold war is over, globalisation is in full gear.
During my first semester in the US, Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Security procedures in the embassy in Singapore was upgraded from anal to super anal. At the start of my last year in the US, 9/11 took place. The age of terror had begun.
During my third trip to the US, there was not much that was new, except that Obama clinched the nomination. I guess what is going on in the USA right now is pretty earth shattering, except that all your sub prime problems only blew up while I was back in Singapore. It seems almost certain that Obama will be the next president. I guess that's historical enough - he will be the first US president who is not a white man. (He's half white but I guess the one drop rule means that he's black.)
In the years to come, Americans will look at 2008 the way that they looked at 1973 - the end of the good times. Or the way we looked at 1997.
1973 was a very bad year for the US - Richard Nixon about to be impeached. The Arabs ganged up to drive the oil prices through the roof (but nothing like US$100 a barrel). US was losing in Vietnam. It was the start of a few more bad years - the economy would recover only 10 years later.
2008 was the year sub prime castrated the credit system and caused a few bank failures. US is about to lose Afghanistan (although things are finally looking up in Iraq). Will the US have a few more bad years for the economy? I suspect so. The size of the US debt will kill it. Their social security systems are going bankrupt just at the point when the baby boomers are growing old. When the dust settles, the US will not be the only superpower in the world - there will be another 2, in China and the EU. Possibly India will be another superpower. It will stop being an exceptional country.
I have heard it being said a few times by different people: we are living in very interesting times. But the phrase - "may you live in interesting times" is meant to be a curse.
Do you know something? The show is not over yet. This is hardly the tip of the iceberg. There are more interesting things lined up for us in the coming decades.
1. Inflation is caused by the number of middle class people in the world expanding by a large number over the last 10 years. People in the former third world countries who are for the first time beginning to enjoy a decent standard of living are bidding up all the prices of raw materials / commodities. This will place a strain on the economy like never before. It is possible that sometime during this century, a famine on the same scale as the "great leap forward" famine will take place.
2. All the shit that we've done to the environment over the last 50-100 years will come and bite us in the back. There will be climate change, sea levels rising, plenty of natural disasters to worry about. You will probably never be able to get yourself insured at a decent price anymore.
3. A lot of the world will be more middle class than ever before. Which is nice in a way and not so nice in others (see point 1).
Hot, flat and crowded. A more exciting world. A more messy world.
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