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 .