Asparagus

Met a friend of mine. We went to watch the champion’s league final live at 3 in the morning at the kopitiam. We talked a little, we were college friends. His family was average, which means that when compared to other kids in his school he was poor. He finished his degree in 2 years. He did all summers and was taking up to 6 courses per term. I suppose that college in the US is very expensive if you are really paying your way.

He was always a very scrawny person, I’ll be surprised if he weighs more than 50 kg. But he turned out to be one of the most enterprising people amongst us. He found work in the US immediately after graduation, and worked a number of years, eventually leading a team of engineers. He was not very pretentious and I liked his down to earth attitude (even though my attitude is not always down to earth). Of course you must say that your own attitude is not always down to earth; if you say “I’m the most down to earth person I know”, it is not a down to earth attitude.

Later on, he joined a friend to work in China where he was earning big bucks as a business partner. He bought fancy cars for himself, an SUV and a Maserati, and we were all thinking, wtf is he up to?

I think he knew how to enjoy life in China. He didn’t shy away from nightspots. He took up smoking at one point. I asked him what it was like. He said, you feel good for around 5 minutes, around the duration of the cigarette. But in the end you have problems, your throat gets irritable, there are some breathing problems, and you smell bad. He never got addicted to cigarettes.

He showed me a picture of a good looking girl in a life vest. It was a financial advisor. She said that she wanted to sell him stuff. He was just leading her on, and she sometimes accompanied him to wakeboarding. “There was this time when she was calling me up twice every day near the end of the month because she just had to meet her sales quota. I just kept on saying no because I never believed in buying insurance. But we still keep in touch. She has since been retrenched.”

(Well when I think about wakeboarding these days I somehow associate it with marital infidelity, I don’t know why.)

He then told me about the stuff that goes on in pubs. Girls, even those that are really hot, crowd around you, asking for you to buy a drink. Some poor fresh faced guy gets parted with his money, and eventually the girl doesn’t even speak to him again. The girls just want the guys with money, hopefully they snag a rich guy, and live like a tai tai for the rest of their lives. They’re not the over-educated type. The guys, they just want a bit of fun, and maybe they get a one night stand. Mostly they just leave with empty pockets. But the girls - the sensible guys would understand that you don’t treat them that seriously.

Of course there is every possibility that you’d find Miss Right among the many that you see - but it’s the same as the probability that you’d find her by bumping into her on the street.

Also his experience taking drugs in China : you just inhale the right amount, and then you let yourself free, you let the room spin around you, for a while you are

I was somewhat fascinated. I never thought that he would get hooked onto drugs. He was that sensible guy who would just go through the experience and learn, and then walk away.

We’re geeks, for goodness sake. Nobody else has a firmer grasp on logic than people like us. People from our tribe rule the world: Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Brin and Page. We’re unfuckable. What we say goes, so when we say we’re just trying this out to see what it’s like and then we’ll quit, it’s really like that.

Why did he ask to talk with me? I guess it was to catch up. I wish there was something that I could have told him - well I lead a really boring life. Too fucking boring for me to continue for much longer.

He had always been a little gloomy. In a way I was happy for him, even proud of him. I had vastly underestimated him, took his scrawniness for some kind of a weakness. There was something, in that bony frame of his, more resourceful that I could ever have imagined. But the feeling that I got was that he had searched further and wider than I ever did for something - and somehow still hasn’t found what he was looking for.

Of course I could have been more encouraging of him. I listened to him stone faced, but I usually do that when I don’t always know what to say. There was a tug of war between “well done!” and “what did you do that for?”

Usually when I drive home from the 24 hour kopitiam, the drive is fairly lonely. It was nice at first, I thought of it as gloomy splendour. After a while it just turned into a drag. So when we drove back to my place it was rather a bit of a drag.

I'm calling him asparagus because that was my nickname for him - he was that thin.