Saturday, 27 March 2010

Trolling

Yes, guys, I used to be a troll. I hope I can say I used to be a troll, because I don’t really know if my trolling days are over yet. Sometimes you just have to do a lot of something in order to learn how pointless it is. Like a lot of people who did a lot of crazy stuff when they were teenagers - vandalism, shoplifting, taking recreational drugs – and then went on to lead perfectly normal adult lives.

Of course trolling had to do with the internet. Flaming was a new phenomenon, since the internet allows you to say stuff to people you wouldn’t necessarily say to their face.

It began during my 4th year at the uni. You guys know by now that I’m a social camel – I can go without human contact for long stretches. But by the 4th year it had begun to grate on me a lot. I had come to the limits of what books could teach me. I hadn’t been disciplined in getting to know people – you do have to stay in the same place for a long time, and establish some kind of a routine. I was bad at that. Or else I felt like I had much to lose from staying in the same place for too long.

The Singapore I knew, and had left 3 years earlier had been a place that was quite closed to itself, and very conservative. People were always afraid of speaking out. There was very little contact with the outside world. I was thoroughly sick and tired of it by the time I left for the US.

What I found online was a great eye-opener. Before I elaborate on this, I should make very brief generalisations about different versions of Singapore that I had encountered. The first version I saw in my school days. The fact that I came from a school which had pretensions to not being elitist partially blinded me to the fact that it, in fact was. I went through school with blinkers on, thinking that just because not everybody lived in a big house, and just because not everybody was chauffeured to school, and not everybody had music lessons, I did know something about the average Singaporean. Well guess again!

The second version was what I saw in NS – some hooligans, not very happy at being slighted all their lives, being generally hostile to what they saw as upper-class people. They had a different ethos – I was actually, for the first time in my life, surrounded by people who didn’t feel that it was necessary to scamper for the best grades. Everybody lived in 3 room flats, everybody was short of money, and there was a general sense of despair.

All the same, in the first 2 versions, everybody was very careful about what they said. Nobody ever was very frank about what they thought about the government. Nobody criticised the government openly. I knew about a few instances of bureaucratic silliness, of course, but nobody was completely unhappy about the Singapore government, nobody expressed it openly.

There were a few online people who were virulently against the policies of the Singapore government. For the first time in my life, I saw a lot of honest debate going back and forth. I thought, great! Finally! The moment I had been waiting for was here, Singapore was a free country! Well, yes and no.

I admit that I was sufficiently fascinated by these chat boards that I spent 3 or 4 weeks at a go spending much of my waking hours looking through them. Partially I was bored and homesick.

Later on, I began writing some pieces of my own. I thought that it was extremely reckless of me to do so, but I wrote a lot of politically incorrect stuff. At first a lot of the stuff came from the essays I was doing in school – I had taken a lot of history / political science courses, and there was a lot of deep thinking going on. But it was also a lot of getting the facts wrong. I hadn’t been involved in this stuff for a long time and I wasn’t too good with the background knowledge.

There were some tactics that people used when trolling. I generally held forth but didn’t go out to upset people if they didn’t upset me. Then again I didn’t bite my tongue when commenting and inevitably somebody would get upset. And when I hit back, I didn’t spare them. There was the potential for things to get ugly quickly.

There were a few factors on my side. I was a rigorous thinker (but not perfectly rigorous – I made mistakes now and then). I knew sarcasm. It helped that you had a sense of humour, because it helps win people over – even, in some cases, when you did not deserve it.

One of the first things I had debated on was an incident that took place in Singapore right after 9/11. At that time there was a struggle to understand the meaning of terrorism, and there was still a lot of sympathy towards America. It was the issue of whether Malay girls were allowed to wear tudungs to school. I argued that it was OK, even though even though the Ministry of Education banned it in the end. You had to allow the Malays their own space, people needed to be equal, everybody had to have their rights, and anyway Sikhs get to wear their turbans. You didn’t want to discriminate against the Malays, because if you did that, they would get pissed off, and at that time, I subscribed to the idea that terrorism took place because Muslims felt they were slighted. More important, I didn’t see why the tudung could be made part of the uniform in a madrassa, and you banned it in mainstream schools.

Most of the people felt that the tudung was a symbol of Islamism, and that it would be best if we didn’t encourage that movement. There was something to that argument, that I didn’t consider at that time. You could cut down on Malays being singled out at school because they dressed funny. You wanted people to practice Islam, but at the same time you wanted them to think of themselves as Singaporeans first and Malays second.

The funny thing now is that I’m not so sure about the situation. I would have been totally indifferent to the issue, and yet at that time I was so passionate about it to take up (verbal) arms with others.

I actually interacted with people much more on that level than in person. I learnt a lot about people that way. There was a bit of nastiness sometimes – when I detected that somebody I didn’t like was getting carried away and possibly getting emotional, I nudged the guy a little towards the edge. It was possible to understand the buttons that would make a guy worked up.

Sometimes it was funny, and once there was even a time when I simulated sex with another person in a public forum. I certainly hope that person is a female. Anyway, there are unconscious differences in the way that men and women talk, and if you want to impersonate a girl, you need to do it the right way. Then there is the fun of taking on another person when you’re online. My persona most of the time here has been the nerdy professor. But at other times I can be the foul mouthed ah beng. There were a lot of people who speculated that the short- lived but popular blog rockson was actually authored by a well educated guy with social status. I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

There was a particularly nasty incident when this person just came up to insult the victims of a natural disaster. I put him down on a website that used to have a lot of traffic. Later on, he transpired to launch a prolonged campaign against me to smear my name (or at least smear my blog, since he didn’t know the identity.) At that time, I had to make a decision. I could just disappear and give up, or I could just keep on showing up and piss him off. I ended up choosing the latter. I thought that it was the most effective way to punish him, to show up every now and then and force him to keep on attacking me. (It’s entirely his choice whether or not to quit. But in another way it’s a trap because I know he hates losing face so much that he will keep on attacking me, even though he’s sick of it.) Then he turns to a life of crime. Well, I quit, eventually, but not before really pissing him off. I only regret that I spent so much time and effort on that myself.

I wasn't sure of his identity, and he came to my old website to make amends. I wasn't going to forgive him easily, so I pretended to play along, until a check on my site counter convinced me that my impersonator was him. (it's quite obvious - he was the only guy visiting my blog who was visiting from Santa Clara). I ended up closing down my blog, and giving an excuse that I had stopped blogging. But in the end, I just ended up setting up this blog. I suppose all announcements of the death of this blog (or the previous blog) are premature.

Of course I had to ask myself, why did I bait people? There were things to learn. I think you just have to pick up skills in defending yourself, in getting along with people. In delivering comebacks. Whether it’s the right sort of skill to learn is something else altogether.

I suppose a lot of it is paradoxical. I’m not crazy about human company. But I still like to debate a lot.

Is a lot of it worth it? I now look back on that part of my life when I was doing this more often (actually I don’t recall flaming anybody for around 2 years) and then I thought, I wouldn’t have been bothered with this if I had been engaged in something more useful. At the beginning it was useful practice. But I guess it’s outlived its use, which is why I don’t do it anymore.

It is a great coincidence that I had written this entry, some of which concerns -ben, around this time. Because just this week, I got news - from Nat, of all people, that -ben is dead. This means that I don't have to worry about him anymore, I don't have to think about getting my back on him anymore. A lot of problems disappear with time. The only reason why I retired the sieteocho name is also dead. And since I much prefer the name of my old blog, I will revert back to it. Also, for the first time, I will acknowledge that the author of these 2 blogs are the same person. So this is the last entry on this blog.

Wednesday, 24 March 2010

Dinosaur Jr

You know that you are going into a Dinosaur Jr concert when some lady at the door is handing out earplugs to all of you. On stage, we had not 1 but 2 indie legends, J Mascis and Lou Barlow. This was the classic incarnation of Dinosaur Jr who released “Bug” and “You’re Living All Over Me”, 2 albums which established them as indie rock legends. Their style of rock was plenty of guitar (courtesy of J Mascis) done Neil Young style, on top of lazy drawling vocals. It was called slacker rock (in case you’re wondering, “slacker” is a near synonym for “bochap”), because everything was done in a sloppy way. But make no mistake, J Mascis was – and is – one of the best guitar players around still. I think he’s even better with Neil Young. Their enduring influence on music was to combine the DIY style indie music with impressive amounts of guitar. Sonic Youth once had a song which had plenty of guitar on it, with the working title “J Mascis for President”. Eventually it got renamed “Teenage Riot” and became their most famous song.

Lou Barlow, the bassist was more the sensitive, lo-fi indie type. Most of the songs from the band came from J Mascis. Barlow’s songs were simpler and low key, and in a way he was also influential on the indie scene. After he left Dinosaur Jr, he formed Sebadoh, and had various projects.

Dinosaur was formed somewhere in Massachusetts. Because another band had a claim on the name Dinosaur, they changed their name to Dinosaur Jr. After “Bug”, some friction developed between Barlow and J Mascis. If I remember correctly, J Mascis fired the whole band, and then reformed it, minus Lou Barlow. Lou Barlow then formed Sebadoh. With Sebadoh, he wrote “The Freed Pig”, one of the most sarcastic and bitter songs ever directed at a former bandmate (check out the lyrics).

Dinosaur Jr continued, essentially as a J Mascis solo project. His output was consistent, but the formula was very much the same: a mix of very loud rock music with a dash of country, verse chorus verse, and then an extended guitar solo. (J Mascis is one of the best guitar soloists out there.) As I remember, I hardly listened to Dinosaur Jr for more than 30 mins at a time because I would get bored of it. So in a way the concerts can be a bit trying.

The reformation of the band a few years ago came as a surprise to all concerned except maybe J Mascis. He probably needed his old partner to revitalise him. One of the most pleasant surprises of the last few years is that old indie bands retain much of their mojo when they reform 10 years after they break up, and when they perform as middle aged old farts. Like the Pixies and Mission of Burma before them, their recent form is comparable to their peak. And check out their video which is a very strong message that the band have put their differences behind them.

On this site, you can see a picture of what they looked like in 1988, compared to their post reformation. So it was a little startling to see what J Mascis looked like, post reformation. I always thought of him as a skinny kid with long brunette hair. Now they call him Gandalf.

I suppose it’s always bittersweet when you sit down at a nice place like the Esplanade and listen to the music that you liked as a teenager, reflecting probably that you are now almost twice as old as when you were listening to that music back then. I listened as that angry, noisy, abrasive, joyful noise came out at me. I was sitting at a circle seat, and the band was at just the right amount of loudness for me. It was great. Those guys below, just under the stage, I don’t know how they could take it. J Mascis said that his concerts usually last a little more than an hour, because after that he’s tired. Probably true, for various reasons: 1. He solos on every song. 2. He needs to go before his ears start bleeding and most likely 3. He’s a slacker.

The crowd was oddly passive. There was no moshing below. I suppose maybe the Esplanade is a very well behaved crowd. Equally likely everybody was aping J Mascis who hardly moved (but of course, he’s the guy who has to think of all the solos). Lou Barlow, in contrast, was head banging away all the time. I suppose it’s not really danceable rock, it’s not heavy metal head banging. But very good driving music all the same.

There were a few jokers who invaded the stage. One was chased down by the security guard. The second hugged Lou Barlow before he went off. Shortly after that, the silhouette of a policeman in a peak cap appeared briefly on stage right. Stupid motherfucker, why spoil our fun like that? I suppose Singapore is not Singapore when you take away the anally retentive over-policing. Lou Barlow bitchily asked why we guys are so interested in his socks, and reminded me for a moment that he was after all the author of “The Freed Pig”.

Out of 5 rows on the circle, only one was taken. I suppose everybody else decided to take the seats downstairs because you could get up close with them. No matter, for me it was great to listen to Dinosaur Jr without going deaf. I only wish I brought the binos because I’m too far to see the faces of those three.

Later on comes the dreaded moment when the band makes an obligatory speech about how great Singapore is. I remember that in the Lovano/ Scofield concert they just muttered that it was a “nice place”. Sonic Youth performed at the Harbour Pavillion 14 years ago before it was torn down to make way for Vivo City. Back then, Thurston Moore said, “We’ve always wanted to come to Singapore, so now we’re here”. Well that was inspiring. Lou Barlow said it was an incredible place. Well I suppose for many of them this would be their introduction to the Far East (of course Australia does not count as the “Far East”). I think this is the first time you’re face to face with so many English-speaking Easterners in the same room so just enjoy it, white boy.

There was some hack yelling out for “Show Me The Way”, whereupon J Mascis strummed the first 4 chords and started playing another song, as if to say “I heard you, but I’m not complying”. Good old J Mascis.

Dinosaur Jr is as sloppy with naming their songs as they are with their singing. So I don’t know their song titles very well. Below are some songs I think they performed.

Songs: Lung, Raisans, Just Like Heaven, Get Me, Back To Your Heart.

Edit: I saw the article about them in the todayonline blog. It’s true that there are quite a few youngsters who are curious about them and turn up. But most of the people in there are about my age group, people who enjoyed their music when they were teenagers. Well in a large way, alternative music is for teenagers, no matter how much more sophisticated and “mature” it is compared to mainstream music.

You don’t have to guess the setlist anymore. It’s up there on the blog.

One irony was that a lot of people in front of Lou Barlow were complaining to him that they couldn’t hear the vocals. He replied, that’s because the guitars are coming out of the Marshall stacks on stage and the vocals are coming out of the PA at the back. That means if I were to have been one of those crowding around the stage, I would have missed out on the vocals, whereas sitting where I was at that time, I got probably the best sound. A shame about being so far away from the stage that you can’t see the band.

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

Football Betting Season 2 Weeks 11

In real life, things have been a little tough. First I was sentenced to RT (that means you have failed your IPPT in reservist and you have to go in for - what 30 hours of training?) That was the first time I had failed my IPPT. In truth, I had asked for it - I was always forgetting to do my push-ups. Does it get harder to keep fit this side of 30? I always felt, after I staggered over the finishing line of that marathon more than a year ago, that that was the true end of my 20s.

Worst thing is that I thought I had passed my IPPT. I just had to do 4 chin-ups. But somehow it got recorded as 3, I don't know why. Maybe they didn't want to let me pass. They didn't post up the scores and so I didn't get to protest. The ICT was conducted at a fast pace.

Then there was another time somebody put up a very long list of CDs for sale. I thought - now here's the opportunity to get a lot of CDs - I hadn't been keeping up with music much for the last 10 years - untypical for a music freak like myself. Then I dithered along, going through amazon.com samples for the whole list (a big chore since we are talking about 500 CDs) and trying to learn about the great bands. In the end, out of the 20 CDs that I wanted the most, 10 of them are gone. Fantastically stupid.

Then there was knowing that an episode of unrequited love in the past was a little bit more unrequited than I realised.

However some good things make up for it, for example, knowing that the painful lessons I learnt since the middle of last year have been learnt. OK. So Arsenal are playing West Ham, bet on Arsenal, since West Ham are weak. (Case in point, Arsenal still managed to beat West Ham in spite of playing the second half with 10 men.) Real Madrid are playing a team fighting against relegation? Bet on Real Madrid. Chelsea are playing Blackburn? Bet on Chelsea. Barcelona are playing Real Zaragosa? Bet on Barcelona. Don't bother about the rest, no matter how tempting. Get your money back, that's important.

Saturday, 20 March 2010

Up in the Air

Yesterday was not feeling very good when I got back from work. I don’t know where all that feeling of sleep deprivation came from. Anyway this morning I woke up and I felt a flu coming on. So I told my boss I’m on leave. He actually asked me what the reason was. That’s the thing – if I get treated like a kid when I’m 25 I grin and bear it, but I’m much older now so I was pretty mad.

Let’s put it this way: it’s Friday. You wake up and feel a flu coming on.

Option 1: you go to work. You boss is happy (actually, more like “happy” because your boss is never happy), you’re not happy, you get sick on Saturday, and spend the weekend feeling miserable.

Option 2: You go to a doctor, and get hard evidence that you shouldn’t go to work. But you feel bad, because you’ve just spent $20+, of which some of it is company’s money. It’s basically like taking a lie detector test. You can only do it so many times before you feel like you’re being treated like a kid.

Option 3: You take leave. At the most your boss will complain about how you took last minute leave. But you’re actually paying this out of your leave entitlement, so why is he going to complain? (And anyway I always have a lot left over by the end of the year, so I’m also doing myself a favour).

Most of the time I would have taken option 2, but today I just hated going to the family doctor, and just paying him money to write me a sicknote. So I just paid with my leave. So technically you have a pretty solid excuse about why you want to take urgent leave. Which makes me wonder why my boss would bother to ask me for a reason to take urgent leave, since I can always tell him that I’m not feeling well.

So at the beginning of my day off, I always thought about the plans that I was going to do. Go to the office and pick up some work and feel less guilty, sit in a café and study, swim. But I was sick and sleep deprived, so in the end I slept until the afternoon, then I went swimming, and after that it was time to meet my friends for a movie.

So I watched “Up in the Air” with Shingo, Nat and Crazy Frog. (OK I know that Crazy Frog is not a nice name but gimme some suggestions and I will rename him.)

This movie in a way reminded me of another movie that I watched, that generated a great amount of acclaim: “About Schmidt”. And I can imagine why: because they lay bare the great amount of loneliness that exists at the heart of American life. Not something that’s universal by any means, but it means quite a lot to an American.

Without giving away too much about the movie, it’s about an executive which clocks up an incredible amount of flyer miles, going from city to city as a consultant. He’s chosen a life up in the air, going from hotel to hotel, clocking up mileage points. He’s good at his job, and it’s a stable career. The meaning of his life is getting as many miles as is possible. He keeps his emotional distance from other people, and goes to a different room all the time.

Well all that suddenly brought back memories of my student life, when I was basically a nomad. Turning up in a different classroom all the time, studying stuff I basically wouldn’t have much to do with. Not really knowing a lot of people. Travelling light. I remember that: the permanent impermanence. Brushing past strangers. I’m wondering where the 4 years went. Actually I know, I had been filling up my head with new ideas and knowledge. Just that – later on you find out that it would have been better if you had built up something more organic - expertise in a few areas, not all – and had some deeper experiences instead of just – like the Chinese saying, qing ting dian shui (skimming the water like a dragonfly).

But what he called this experience is something that I did identify with: self-negation. Like I did want to disappear for 4 years and I did. I even went to a uni that was in the middle of nowhere. (Not my first choice, but I didn’t complain about it being in the middle of nowhere. I thought that being in the middle of nowhere was romantic.) But we’re from Singapore, and that’s like in the middle of everywhere, so it was a great switch for me.

So the movie was good, but not as excellent as the reviews made it out to be. (Agreed with Nat on that one) I’m not a movie fanatic. There was a period of 2-3 years when I went to the movies because I believed that it taught me things about life. In a way they did, but I’ve come to realize that even though you can read a lot of little nuances into situations, even though you can analyse characters in such a way that you get “A”s for your essays, what are you going to do with your life is a different thing. And since then, movies have lost quite a bit of shine for me.

There was this time when Crazy Frog reminded me that the movie did say that the difference between boys and men is that men know what they want in life. Take that sentiment to the extreme, you choose your path in life, and follow it down to the exclusion of everything else, that’s maturity. It’s a viewpoint I have little sympathy with, even though nowadays I would think about it a little, as opposed to when I was younger, I would just very rudely brush it off.

It says a lot of him as a person, I think he’s of the mentality that bearing a great weight on your shoulders makes you a better person. It might be true, although I were to think a great deal about it. Which should explain why, when Nat was going on and on about what he could do with a life with a lot of freedom and no responsibilities, Crazy Frog was pretty quiet.

What I say, though, is that in a way I’m not a person with a lot of commitment. I think my miserliness goes a long way. I tend to do things which give quick gains for not much effort. At the beginning things are great, but as you progress, you do need to do the difficult things too. And I probably have neglected that. Suppose I were to say, I want to build a financial life. I need to do that amount of work and research before it gets done. Suppose I were to say, I want to get a girlfriend, I need to spend time and energy, hunting for food. Whereas some of the time, I would just say, look at all those books. I can just pick them up and learn life’s lessons at not very much expense, all of that time being comfortable and cosy. I suppose that’s how I ended up being a bookworm.

And it does go back to what George Clooney’s character does. When companies don’t see much of a profit, they take the easy way out and fire people. George Clooney himself doesn’t like commitment and being tied down, so he just keeps his distance away from other people. That’s one view. But the other view is that you measure your life in terms of distance. OK, George Clooney takes it to the extreme, and it’s a grotesque parody, he measures his life in miles. But you can measure your life in the number of interesting experiences you have. That is also a valid metric.

Wednesday, 17 March 2010

Water girl outed

Something very strange happened the other day. I was looking at somebody’s facebook page when I saw a very familiar face among his list of friends. It was Water Girl! It was a one in a thousand event, something that could only have happened by chance. That guy had 400 friends, and out of those 400 friends, why should that particular person come up?

Well, it turned out that she has a very wide network. Not surprising for somebody who’s

Some of the inferences I made about her seem to be confirmed by the blog.

1. She’s very religious and serious about Christianity. Whatever the reasons are that she turned me down, religion is definitely one of them.
2. She’s quite emotional, and has problems keeping a lid on her emotions.
3. She doesn’t get along well with her father. (I inferred this because I have never seen her outside with her father.) I know she’s not happy with her family.
4. Her gang is the poly people. And the church people.
5. This is also inferred from the blog: I could never be her boyfriend, nor she my girlfriend. We would drive each other nuts because our wavelengths are completely different.
6. She’s an aspiring musician. She told me she wanted to be a singer or a DJ. She’s still interested in that.
7. She’s a water sign. A Scorpio, in fact. I have not named her wrongly. Well I should have gathered. Scorpios are usually physically attractive, even though they may be screwed up.
8. She keeps a lot of things to herself. But she can’t hide that she’s not always happy with life.

She only gave me a short version of her name, and I always wondered if it was her real name. Well, at least I know now that it is her real name. So that’s good.

I went to the relevant sections. It was extremely unflattering for me. I now know that she only went out on that date with me in order to tell me not to go after her any more, and that the first date actually went well: she didn’t think I was so bad after all, except that I pressed my case by asking her over SMS if she missed me. That was when she blew her top and decided to make it really plain to me that I shouldn’t be going after her.

She called me a nerd. I got so fed up reading that that it took me 2 hours to get to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I suddenly remembered that I’m not completely ashamed of being a nerd. But I’m still angry because I know she meant it in a bad way. And I wonder if I should give her a really big surprise the next time I see her. Probably not.

I think about all the times I was racking my head to think of something to say to her, when all the answers were out in the open all this time. (Well except I didn’t know where it was.) But I could have read what was written and stopped wasting my time on her.

Well there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t understand in her blog. Her English was good enough, but a lot of … ‘s and references to “brothers”, “sisters” and her church friends. She’s social and all that, but I don’t really know if her friendships are deep. It’s not for me to judge but maybe they are. But she’s a sheep. I don’t like the church, even more than that, I don’t like the mega-church. And if she’s with one, I couldn’t ever understand what’s up with all that being a sheep. Maybe life is very fair, because I probably am going to read her blog and laugh at her for being so dumb and confused about life, the same way she wrote me off as a nerd.

Probably not going to link to her blog. But I can’t resist reading it now that in it are all the questions that I’ve always wanted to know about her. Well that’s what blogs are for, right? You get to know everything about a guy, stuff he might not tell you, without having to approach him and ask him yourself. Isn’t that right, dear readers?

I don’t really know what attracted me to her. No, actually I know what attracted me to her. I was attracted to codfish because she was a chiobu that I actually could talk to. I was attracted to her, because I was back in Singapore for a break, freshly dumped by codfish, and I saw her downstairs. She looked very quiet, spooky. I started to think, maybe here’s a deep thinker, a gloomy, broody character. Maybe this will be my next girlfriend. But it’s nothing deeper than that. I criticise her for being shallow, dismissing me as a nerd without knowing more about me, but I was equally shallow.

After I cool down, I might have thought about what might have happened. I've not thought about this incident for a long time because it took place so long ago, but it's a little unusual that you will ever get the answers to these type of questions. I went on a date with her. The date actually went OK. We talked for quite some time, even though I was starting to feel that we were not completely connecting. From her account, she said that she was sick and tired of lying and dodging me, and she wanted to put things straight with me. But that date went OK, and she just couldn't bear to tell me. It was only on the second day, when I pushed my luck, and asked her whether or not she was missing me, she decided to make it clear to me that it was over.

There are different schools of thought to all this. One is that I could have played my cards right, and we could have been friends. I could have just decided to take things slow, and we could have been friends. It's possible to overcome the initial impression that I'm a nerd. Being a nerd is but a small price to pay for my being a maths genius, a musical genius and a literary genius. I suspect that every one of my friendships have overcome the initial impression of my being a nerd. The other school of thought was that I had given up and thrown away something that was in any case of no value. I could never change her. A sheep is a sheep, I would have found out that she was a sheep, and I would have lost respect for her. In both these versions, though, the chances of my ever having a relationship with her is close to zero, and since I was primarily interested in a relationship instead of a friendship, there's nothing in it.

I’ve seen a little of what chiobus are like. I think I went after my fair share of them. I learnt a few things about them. First, like people say, there are no such things as ugly women, only lazy ones. It’s a little harsh but mostly true. So they are people who take pains in their appearance. Second, they act with grace. I’m a little graceless. A little known fact about me is that when I was one of the cutest kids around when I was 5. Then a few years later, the cuteness completely disappeared. I sometimes wondered why it happened, but here are my guesses. I’m graceless. I don’t always yearn for people to like me. I don’t care, most of the time. Maybe I was emotionally avoidant. Maybe I’ll never be completely tuned in to people. It was easier to push people away than to draw them to you. This need for human companionship changes your appearance in at least 2 ways. First, you get used to more physically attractive expressions on your face, like smiling. (But models who pout end up making more men want to fuck them.) Second, when you get along with people better, you also tend to smile more, and it lifts your mood. For me, I keep people at an arm’s length (even though, paradoxically I get upset when they get more than 1 arm’s length away from me.) So you can imagine, a lot of the sneering and grimacing has changed the shape of my face. I’m not handsome anymore.

So when you see chiobus, they have a combination of these traits. It’s really not true that beauty is skin deep. It’s that people have this mistaken notion that beautiful people are good hearted. Well needing human companionship and vanity are not the same as being good hearted. So you do have to understand what beauty really means, not what you want it to mean.

Maybe I don’t have many close friends and I’m not really able to tell what I’d want in a friend. I stalled for too long. I’ve fought for my independence. But I’ve become too independent. I rely too much on it, that I don’t really think of myself existing as a part of a gang. It’s made me really bad at understanding what I’m like as a friend.

And at the same time I need a better understanding of what relationships mean, and not just simply reach for some people who are not that suitable, just because they look cute.

On another note, I’m a little sore that teapot called it off with me. (Yeh I know that I still owe you guys teapot part 2 I’ll get it out someday.) Even after I wrote a song for her. Well there’s this cute chick that I saw on a dating website who says that she wants somebody to write songs so that she can write lyrics to them. I’m thinking of giving her teapot’s song. (My song actually, the one I wrote for teapot). Am I evil?

Anyway, what I do think is that since I’m in my less horny 30s I should look around for ladies who are not so attractive. Or at least, find better reasons to like chicks.

Tuesday, 16 March 2010

Earning Stripes

I took a very unusual route in NS. I was supposed to get trained as an non commissioned officer, and I was doing a trade course, when a very bad accident happened, and I worried for a while that I would never play the piano again. I was supposed to spend 6 months being a clerk, or being sidelined. But I stalled for time, and it was more like 16 months. 16 months of doing not very much, going home at 5. In a way, that was the least stressful time in my life. In another way, that was a time when I felt I could have done much with my life, but didn’t.

I went back into training, became an NCO, and after that, I somehow managed to convince them to continue being a clerk, because I only had 4 months left on my national service balance. They warned me, “you’re going to find it very tough when you’re on reservist training.” Well, reservist training is reservist training, and it was supposed to be easy, isn’t it?

The first few times, it was difficult for me to come to terms with what was happening. And I don’t know if I looked at it in a very immature way, but I did a lot of head scratching and sulking during the first few times. Some sessions were better, others were worse. I spent a lot of time hiding somewhere and reading a book, and somehow I don’t regret that. However, after 1 exercise where I screwed up, an officer pulled me aside and said, “do you want to do this seriously, or do you want me to have you transferred to another company?” I said, OK, I’ll give it a shot.

Later on, I got into a big argument with another corporal who was on that exercise, and I have since suspected that he was the one who badmouthed me to the officers. But he wasn’t around this time.

This ICT, I thought a bit about what it means to earn your stripes. One of the reasons is this: things look a lot like they did during the year that I became an NCO. We also had El Nino, and with that, a drought and a haze. There was a financial crisis going on (but since the 90s this happened all the time). And there was a feeling that possibly in the near future, something would happen that would substantially change my life. There was the waiting at home for the possibility of a recall. There was the world cup. Back then, I was finally becoming an NCO, at a time when people had almost finished serving their national service. Now, I’m finally coming to terms with being an NCO at a time when most of my 10 years of reservist training were going to be over.

There were a few rules that you just had to understand. First of all, some of your most important relationships are with your peers. I had hung out with a lot of the corporals at first, because a lot of them were nearer my age. The sergeants were younger. But a lot of them were looking at me funny, like “how come this sergeant is asking me for a lot of stuff?” I decided, go hang out with the sergeants instead. I started to hang out more at the mess than at the canteen. And while they didn’t exactly teach me how to do my job properly, I got some news from them, I saw how they interacted with the corporals, and I learnt a few things from them.

Things became easier when I started acting like a boss, when I asked them for small things that it was well within their power to do. When I asked them how to do stuff that somebody had taught me long ago but I later forgot, most of them would give me a tip or two. Of course, there was the freedom that you had of being a free agent, you didn’t belong to a clique, or a gang. And that is the position I have found myself in for much of my life: never completely a member of any one gang, but somebody who drifts around and tries to be on a first-name basis with people from different backgrounds.

One of the more interesting things took place when we were preparing for the exercises. I was one of the very few sergeants who was not a section commander. They were about to make me a section commander when I told them, no, I was not up to the task yet. But there was an exercise preparation that took place outside of the camp, for the section commanders. And I was left behind to prepare a lot of the vehicles. I had to learn quickly how to do a system check. I decided that this was a chance to learn a lot of stuff. I went walking around a lot, plugging in cables here, answering questions there, walking between section and platoon headquarters, trying to troubleshoot. I was the only guy around with 3 stripes instead of 2, and naturally people assumed I knew everything when I didn’t. In the end, the problems were all solved, and I didn’t have anything to do with the solution, except to help make sure that the people who solved the problem were notified, but I think I did my part.

For the week leading up to the exercise, I was apprehensive about the weather, because of the great drought which made the papers. People were always complaining about the sweltering heat. We all prayed that it would not be too hot, and our prayers were answered. Unfortunately we got the only thing that was worse than sweltering heat: rain.

From the moment that we reached the exercise ground, we could see lightning flashes on the horizons. But there were false alarms before, and we didn’t think that it was going to rain. We reached the ground at midnight. Not long after, there was a drizzle. We went on sleeping in our safari beds, until the drizzle turned heavier. The instructors said that we were going to be tested on this and that, but I think none of us counted on the weather. We set up the system, and ended up sleeping the whole time. This was reservist training, and I think we forgot about the sentry, because I don’t think that people want you to spend 1 hour in the rain with your finger on a rusting machine gun (no bullets of course). We went through the night unmolested because, in trying to get a proper night’s sleep in the rain in an armoured personnel carrier, with the water seeping through the hatches and everything, was tough enough. In the end, I designed one of the best weather shelters, by taking 2 safari beds (which are useless because it’s raining) and leaning them against a monster truck tyre, and I slept in the little space, sitting up against a tyre. Those in the tank were less lucky, it was stuffy, there was even less room than economy class flights, and people got stiff backs. We were lucky: other APCs were practically sitting in puddles, and the option of setting up impromptu tents did not exist. So in the end, there was almost no exercise, except for the occupation of the exercise site. And I didn’t do very much in the actual exercise. But all this experience was enough to make me think a bit about being a section commander for my next in camp training – assuming that we were going to have in camp training again.

I had said before that we had the ultimate SUV. I said before that the prime mover was the king of the road. In many respects, that is true, especially in the Transformers. But the prime mover has nothing on the armoured personnel carrier. We didn’t take to the roads very often, but it was pretty cool when we did. People would gawk at us. Of course, this does not happen in most places, only areas near military bases. There was this incident, we were on an expressway, and we were on the left most lane. Then this taxi chose to drive on the road shoulder just to be next to us. I was wondering at this baffling behaviour for a while before I saw the passenger whip out a handphone and start to take pictures of us. Now, many other people have served in the military before, and they know that in Singapore in peacetime (which is basically all the time) weapons are not loaded when vehicles are on the move. But we were carrying machine guns and M16s and scary things and I wondered why people wanted to go and fuck with us.

Sometimes the route will go through a HDB estate. A few schoolgirls were gawking at the tank. I gave them a Nazi salute. Life's great.

A lot of things in the army happen very slowly because a lot of precautions are taken, in order to minimise risks, and make sure that citizens did not chaff at doing national service. But because doing stuff in the SAF involves a lot of idling and waiting (unless you’re an officer, in which case you’re really busy because everything revolves around you). One of the guys in my section came up with a moniker for the SAF: slow and fucked up.

When you're in the camp, you somehow become more aware of time passing. Considering how late in the game I became familiar with everything, it doesn't feel like I have done more than half of my ICTs, and that I will finish my training cycle in only a few more years. And after that I will most probably never step into an army camp again. I'll think about how I spent 2.5 years (probably all my ICT cycles will add up to another 3 months) preparing myself for a role that I will never fill. When I work in the hangar, drenched with sweat, I will remember how some of my sergeants (some of them are now warrant officers) were briefing me about how which thing went into which part of the APC. I will think about the options available to me at that point in time when I was only 20, and what else I could have done with my life. (Actually frankly, I lack the imagination to think about how my life could be better. And that's why I don't spend my life regretting things.) I will think about other exercises in the past and the other training grounds. About other peers whose batteries I should have joined instead of my current one where I don't know anybody.

(Actually I don't have very much nostalgia for the past, especially for my active NS days because, if anything I was a much more gloomy person than I am now, if that is actually possible.)

And when you're in various camps in Singapore, you go to a lot of obscure housing estates that you otherwise would not go to. Like Choa Chu Kang, Yishun, Jurong and Pasir Ris. Singapore is a small country but it is also a large city. When you confine yourself to the CBD and the Orchard area, Singapore seems to be very small. But when you go to the outskirts, and when you find that you can drive around for 1 entire hour, and see nothing but HDB flats interspersed with the occasional industrial zones, it does seem to be very big. There just seems to be the same thing over and over again.

It shouldn’t surprise you that people in the SAF are involved in counter-terrorism operations. But I was a little surprised when they called counter-terrorism measures “unconventional operations” and making war with another country is “conventional operations”. The old 20th century kind of war is getting obsolete. Most wars of the 21st century are guerrilla wars. The former Yugoslavia was a war against militias. One of the biggest blunders of the 2nd Iraq war was that it was a war against Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was really easy to deal with. It’s the guerrillas and the terrorists that the US was finding so difficult to deal with. So I was thinking: the SAF was designed to deal with another country’s military. What did this mean, in a day and age when people changed their nationalities they way they changed underwear? What did this mean when nations rarely fought wars against each other?

The answer that I arrived at after a bit of thinking was this: no matter what, you just had to have a national army. You didn’t want to leave a country undefended, no matter what. You just had to keep the knowledge and the expertise current and updated. Wars between nations are very rare these days because they were extremely costly in terms of lives. (This was also true in the days of WWI and WWII but back then a lot of people didn’t fully grasp this). And it was our job to make sure that this is true.

But all this does nothing to change my impression that our country is spending way too much money on national defence.

Saturday, 13 March 2010

Jack Neo

I don’t love or hate his movies. There is a crassness to his movies, but they are targeted at the HDB folk. I’m generally willing to overlook their crassness (after all I’m mostly guilty of the same.)

About his affairs, it was a shock all the same. But a movie director has the great temptation to stray. He’s the alpha male, and he has access to a lot of ass. But we didn’t think of that sort. Then again, it’s like making the same mistake that most people make, that nerds are not human beings.

It's true that he looks a little bit pathetic now, because as opposed to Tiger Woods, who has been up to his neck in deep shit but nevertheless praised as an excellent lover, only one person has admitted to being Jack Neo's mistress. He looks a lot like a loser now. I remember that in college somebody said that if you're a professor hitting on his students, that is one of the most pathetic things because you're using your power over them to get your way with her. Well you could say that about Jack Neo.

Then came the infamous press conference, where he read a very short statement, his wife read a short statement, and then she collapsed, and then Ah Nan screamed at all the journalists to go away.

What was very interesting was the Life report on that press. They were universally condemnatory. One article on life, curiously said "Jack Neo didn't say sorry". Well he admitted that he was wrong, and that's almost the same thing. Another article said that he should have said sorry to the public as well, contravening a more common- sensical notion, expressed on a few forums, that he owes his wife and family the apology, not the public. Brian Miller wrote that he packed the 60 strong press pack into a small room, and further more got his people to occupy the first row.

I suppose the press released was staged managed to some extent. But I believe that Jack Neo already said exactly what he needed to say: I'm sorry. That was all he owed the press. It was very unfortunate that his wife had to be dragged along, and many people said that it was the most distasteful aspect of the press conference. What if it was deliberately distasteful? The only rational purpose for the wife to be there is to say what she said, which was: could the media please leave me alone. That was simple enough. In fact, the whole affair of that press conference seems to have one consistent message: fuck you, media scum. The trooping out the wife to show everybody how much she has suffered. The making her faint in order to make the media look bad.

The psychology of the wife was interesting. I think she probably thought, you just close one eye if he has the occasional affair, so long as the family is not compromised. Hardly ideal, but not a disaster. It's true that what you don't know can't hurt you. But what you know but not everybody knows, can't hurt you very much either. It's totally different if this thing gets publicised, and you suddenly become the talk of the town. It's that much more unbearable.

As for the press, I think they decided to play up Jack Neo's abhorrent behaviour in order to deflect from the main message, which is that they are harrassing Jack Neo at least as badly as how Jack Neo harrassed the young chicks. But do they want to keep on demonising him? Well, they would. Because in the Chinese entertainment scene, nobody fucks with the press. The press maintains its God given ability to make or break stars. Jack wanted to upset the prevailing order, so they had to fix him.

Another rumour going all around is that somebody told the press to deflect attention away from the Silviu Ionescu case. Maybe, but it would be a 180 degree turn from the massive amounts of media coverage that the case has been getting.

I think that he'll take a break from film making for the time being. Any way his shows' quality are going downhill.

Any way, I can cynically say that with this Jack Neo case, I have not been entertained that much in quite a long time.

Monday, 8 March 2010

Football Betting Season 2 Weeks 10

Limpeh's luck has turned. My account was heavily in the red when I quit betting a few weeks ago. Lately, though, I think the results have been more predictable.

You see, one of my principles has been: do not bet in the first half of the season. This was something that I broke many time and I ended up losing money because a lot of upsets take place in the season: weaker teams are very enthusiastic, and stronger teams have yet to find their best form. However towards the end of the season, it's the stronger teams which find their best form, either because their best players are the ones with the strongest characters, or because, having rotated their squad, their players are still fresh, compared to other teams who have had to play their best 11, week in week out.

The other reason why betting nearer the end of the season is best is that you would already have assessed each team's strengths and weaknesses over the course of the season.

So this time, I bought Everton to play well against Hull. Normally Everton is not a strong enough team to be considered more or less certain of winning. But it's a tired and demoralised Hull we're talking about. Ditto Burnley. They are the whipping boys now. I would have bet on Arsenal to beat them, but the odds were too low (1.07) so I didn't punt. Portsmouth is not a whipping boy, because a lot of their players have underperformed at the start of the season, and because they have a good manager. I also bought Aston Villa to beat Reading, because this was a Premiership vs League Championship FA cup tie. However I've had to endure some very nervous moments because Reading was leading 2-0 at one stage, before it ended 2-4.

Chelsea to beat Stoke. I guess I was lucky. This could have been dangerous because we know that John Terry is not at his best. But Stoke are away and therefore not at their best either.

So all 3 of my predictions came to pass. Good for me. I hope that my luck will continue.

Saturday, 6 March 2010

Cock ups

1. The old folks asked me to pump tyres. No problem about that. It was getting flat for a while, and I really didn’t mind learning about these things. So I went down to the petrol kiosk to pump the tyres. I didn’t know what the correct pressure was. I had just come back from sending my grandmother to the eye doctor. There was 1 old woman sitting in the passenger’s seat, 1 maid sitting at the back, in the sweltering heat, 1 guy clowning around with the air pump.

I read the tyre, and it said that the maximum possible pressure was 54 psi. I thought that was much. But the guy before me put in only 30 psi. Was that the standard for cars? In the end, I compromised and I put in 40 psi for all 4 tyres.

So I asked my parents what the correct pressure was. Asked them why they didn’t tell me what it was when they asked me to pump the tyres. My father said, “you got to be more independent in life”. I thought that was pretty rich coming from a person so reliant on me to get his power point slides done.

They said, look at the sticker behind the car door. So I did. Unfortunately I found out that the numbers were in bars, not in psi. I told my mother that I had pumped in 40 psi. She said, that’s too much. You should have followed the sticker, and put in 27 psi for the front and 33 psi for the back. I thought, that doesn’t really correspond with 2.7 bars and 3.3 bars, does it? Anyway, she went to the kiosk and let some air out.

Later on, I went on the web and checked. 2.7 bars is 39.2 psi. 3.3 bars is 47.8 psi. My initial estimate was not far off the mark. (Actually I will put in 39 psi for both front and back because the back is hardly laden.) Luckily we have somebody in the family who’s mathematically literate. Now I have to go back there and pump in more air again.

2. There was another cock up in the family. My aunts bought 2 ducks for CNY. Then my grandmother, who is blind and incapacitated, kept on nagging my father to buy ducks. So he bought another 2. The result now is that we have 2 ducks we don’t need. So if anybody wants a spare duck let me know.

3. There was once I went shopping in IKEA with honest face and a few others. We were each getting a gift for the department gift exchange. There were a few $10 items, and I saw a CD rack that could be mounted on a wall. I thought, great, just what I need. So he agreed to buy it and I would take that during the gift exchange.

After the Christmas party, when I got home, I opened it and found that there wasn’t anything there to mount it on the wall with. Basically you had to drill a few holes in the wall, and then screw the thing on. It was a lot of trouble. So that’s why the thing was lying around doing nothing for the last 2 years.

Finally, I decided to do something about it. I borrowed a power drill from my uncle, and then tried to mount it. It was a sweltering afternoon, and my shirt was already soaked with sweat before I began. In the end I had to shut the door and work without my shirt. It wasn’t difficult knowing how to work the power drill, but the first 10 minutes were extremely difficult, until I found out the function on top of the drill: I had been operating it in screwdriver mode, not drill mode.

But even with the bit in drill mode, getting through the plaster proved to be extremely difficult. In the first place, getting the hole where I wanted it to be was difficult enough. The pencil markings turned out to be a little ambiguous after a while, and I kept on constantly having to bring up the rack to measure against the wall. It was difficult to keep on drilling, and the noise was terrible. I tried using smaller bits to drive the hole in deeper, and then using a larger bit to expand the hole. After a certain point, I wasn’t sure that I was making any headway. And the worst thing was that I was working on 3 different holes at the same time.

1 hour later, I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to drill deep enough to get a hole as deep as the plug. I decided to give up. Moreover the holes didn’t look as though they were the right shape to support the plugs.

Later on, I decided that enough was enough. After 3 ugly holes 2 cm deep. And not quite regular enough to support the plugs. I turned to my second choice of location to put the CD rack: my bed post. Drilling the holes through wood was comparatively a wonderful experience, and within 15 mins, I was done. I went to the HDB estate to buy some nuts and bolts, mounted the rack, and suddenly 75 of my CDs found a new home. So that was nice.

Sunday, 28 February 2010

Humpback Oak

A few weeks ago I heard that Humpback Oak were releasing a limited edition boxed set. That was interesting.

Humpback Oak was one of Singapore’s best loved bands. They came up at a time when Singapore did not have much of a local music scene to talk of. (Actually things are a little better now but still not much. Not in English pop anyway.) There were other bands that were being bandied around like the Oddfellows. I had heard of Opposition Party, but they were metal and I didn’t dig metal.

I had heard of Humpback Oak. It was an interesting name, but they were a lot of bands with strange names. (Astreal? Livonia? Padres?) They were bandied around as one of the best Singapore bands. But it’s relative, I thought. Anything half decent would be considered excellent by our standards.

One day when I was in Tower Records (still remember that place?) I heard “Pained Stained Morning” being played. It was good stuff and I liked it. I’m not going to say they are the best band in the world, but it was streets ahead of what I was accustomed to. Funnily enough once I heard it I knew it had to be Humpback Oak, because of the accent, and because the music matched how it was described in the press. Somber, brooding, haunting. The last adjective is most salient because their second album would be called “Ghostfather”.

I got the album afterwards. I liked it, it was good. Musically they are really not very impressive, but Leslie Low was a good songwriter. I was a little startled at how many good tunes there were on that record.

Second album, “Ghostfather” was equally good. Even though it had fewer obvious pop gems than “Pained Stained Morning”, it was a more unified album, dealing with loss, restlessness and anomie. It’s probably one of the gloomiest albums that I’ve heard, in any case.

I don’t know why Leslie Low picked the name Humpback Oak. They are large, heavy objects. Probably archaic as well. I think Humpback Oak’s music is very Singaporean, rooted in the Singaporean experience. They may have been compared to American Music Club and REM, they may have started out playing a lot of Bob Dylan. But there was the heaviness, the feeling of being constantly trapped in a comfortable cage, of being a frog in a well. It’s not a surprise that they were on the soundtrack of Eric Khoo’s “12 Storeys”, which deals with similar themes. They are distinctly un-American. Their music is whatever the opposite of “yes we can” is.

Except that in the sense that your polar opposite is your own mirror, there was a lot to borrow from those American bands which chose to highlight the emptiness and futility of the American dream. You could borrow that, and it would sound right at home over here, and I think that is what Humpback Oak have done.

Lyrics, I wouldn’t have much to say about the lyrics. I think they are Leslie Low’s weak point, even though you still roughly get what his music is all about. Every Humpback Oak album has their fair share of clunkers, like “don’t die, don’t kill yourself, it takes too much time”. Or “Turkey you turkey me”.

But there’s a lot that Singaporeans can identify with. Like not having an identity, and not fully knowing what is the meaning of that flag you sing the national anthem to every morning. Like being alienated from your parents who knew so much more hardship than you did. Like the eerie emptiness of a void deck in the afternoon. Like staring 20 storeys down from the back of your HDB flat, feeling smothered and yearning for release. Because unlike most of the bands out there, Humpback Oak lives in HDB flats too. (Caveat: a lot of black music from the UK comes from council housing, which is rather similar to our HDB, except that their version of the HDB is more seedy.)

The third album, “SideASideB” wasn’t as good as the first 2. But if I listened to it, I could have 1 or 2 of those songs growing on me.

Anyway I made my way to Club Street with a bit of trepidation – I was on ICT and I was expecting a recall on that day. So I had to drive my van and all that army stuff down to my office, park it there, and take a bus to Club Street amid all that messy MRT construction.

I should go back a few steps to explain: Humpback Oak were releasing a boxed set of all their works, containing their 3 CDs, as well as a 4th CD, containing some rarities and (this is the most interesting part) MP3s of all their cassette demos that they used to hawk in indie music shops from when they were struggling musicians. They were going to sell the boxed set exclusively on Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 pm, at Polymath & Crust / Books Actually.

So when I got there the queue was snaking down to the first floor. It was a little past 1. The queue went all the way up to the 3rd floor. I bumped into the drummer from the second band. I bumped into Siew Kum Hong. So now you know that the NMP who advocated repealing 377A is also a Humpback Oak fan.
When it was my turn, I wondered whether I should buy 1 or 2. I bought 2, cynically thinking that I could probably sell the second one at an extortionate rate in 5 years’ time, especially since it was autographed by all 4 of them.

So there was this table with Leslie Low and 3 others. They looked like they have aged, they’re no longer the skinny indie kids you saw in the publicity photos. They look bulky and middle aged. I didn’t know which of them was who. I know what Leslie looked like, but today he was different, wearing a goatee and a moustache, and looking like that mask people wore in “V for Vendetta”.

Very hastily I mentioned to one of them that I was thinking of covering one of their songs. Which one? “Home”. Hey Leslie, this guy wants to cover our song. “Really? That’s interesting”, said Leslie. Well just send us a copy when you’re done with it, OK? So, great. Now I owe Humpback Oak a cover version of “Home”.

It’s true, though, that I thought I was going to radically re-invent that song into something trip hop and drum + bass. But I’m a long long way from completing it. I’m even a long long way from figuring out how to do drum + bass. I hear it in my head, though, and surely that counts for something.

Anyway, so I’m the new proud owner of Oaksongs, serial numbers 58 and 59 out of 500. I dunno if they’ve sold out by now. Maybe and maybe not. The obvious first thing is that they have spent a great amount of effort on the packaging. I think it was designed by one of the more famous designers in Singapore. The outside is designed to look like a worn cardboard box. A bit tricky when the cardboard is new. When you open it, it looks like a house inside, an indie slacker’s room with all those concert posters and stuff. There’s a little cardboard bed, which is actually a small box containing teeny weeny booklets with all their lyrics.

Leslie Low went through a lot of trouble making digital photographs of his lyric sheets. (Which I think is strange because lyrics is the one aspect of Humpback Oak that I’m not a fan of.) But you can see some of his old songs scribbled on SJI stationery (all 4 met at and were from SJI). In one of the lyrics, you can see his 6th form poetry and his “O” levels schedule side by side.

I also have to comprang about the CD packaging. The CDs are wrapped up in paper that is origami folded. Obviously not meant for heavy usage. I had to dig out some plastic jewel boxes to put the CDs into.

Otherwise, you can imagine, I was proud of my newest purchase. Now to list my old Humpback Oak albums on eBay and get my $60 back.

As for the recall, you can see from the news: some ppl from the Police and from Civil Defence got recalled, but not the SAF. So I didn't get recalled.

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

Facilitation

I think that Lee Kuan Yew is the perfect Virgo – super anal retentive.

I think that the Singaporean education system is very much like Virgo – it will be perfect, and you will be good at the details, but you will also very much miss out on the bigger picture.

Why do we have the biggest port in the world? Why do we have the best airport in the world? A great port and a great airport. But they are just means. We have the best facilities in the world. But they are just facilities. They enable great things to be done, but what?

We are a hub, and we hope to be in the centre of everything. We have a great finance sector, but banks are only there for something. What is that something? That’s why we often talk about the Singaporean soul. But what is it?

We seem to exist for other people. People are a cog in the Singaporean machine. And Singapore itself is a cog in an even greater machine. We host events. IOC conferences. WTO talks. APEC forums.

We have the Esplanade. But so many of the shows at the Esplanade are foreign acts, and actually, justifiably so. They deserve it. But what have we got to show for ourselves?

Singapore has a “special relationship” with China. I don’t really know, we’re supposed to be a gateway to China. Do people remember that Singapore gave a lot of money to China when they were fighting the Japs, and when the Japs got to us, they gave us hell? I hope they remember that.

We’re a gateway to the West. And India too, but not really because everybody knows how “well” Singapore treats its Indians.

The one art form which we’re justifiably proud of is food. But food is the pleasure of the flesh, and not the soul. And food is also a facility – it facilitates our being alive.

I’m quite proud of our HDB flats. I always thought that HDBs were unique in Singapore. Actually, they are not. You have public housing in the US, and the UK. They are horrible places. Squalour, crime, drug abuse, prostitution. In a way, they are somewhere in between the shanty / squatter towns in a bad part of town, and a real house of your own. They are high class squatter holes. 99 year lease? It’s just the government telling you that you can squat here for a while, maybe your whole life. But the land will never be yours.

Remember when you were young, you went to the museum and saw how miserable those poor coolies were in their shophouses? You just have to remember that these days, shophouses are considered to be high class real estate.

You just have to remind yourself that being in the middle of everywhere is the same thing as being in the middle of nowhere.

Saturday, 20 February 2010

JC2

When I look back upon the different years of my life, 1 year stands out in 1 respect. It was the year in which I was in JC2.

It was not the year in which I had the most personal growth. It was not the most exciting year. (Actually, in some ways, it was.) It was also the year where I failed a Maths exam for the first time. (I’m counting from primary school – failing maths exams in pre-school doesn’t count, and in any case I don’t remember.)

At the beginning of the year, my father grabbed me by the scruff, and told me, this is the most important year of your life. (For a long time, anyway). That is partially true only – all the years of your life, before you become old and infirm, are important. But he was right in another sense.

A lot of good things happened because I did well in school during that year. In the Singapore school system, you spend 12 years in school, and apparently years 1 to 11 are not that important, but only to let you get to the next level. At the end of your 12th year, in your “A” levels, you will write a series of exams that will determine your fate to a large extent. Which uni you go to, for instance.

I had mostly been a B student. My teachers all saw me as a B student with 1 extra gear that is seldom used. That year, I used that extra gear. I cut back on a lot of my ECAs. I dunno how I managed to clock up a good ECA record, but honestly there was a lot of interesting things, except that when you looked closer, you might notice that it was missing a bit of depth. For example, I did very few things that involved leadership.

I actually started having some structure in my life, which is not really difficult if you’re attempting to do just 1 thing. I don’t remember being exceptionally stressed that year. I was like a farmer. You just did what you were supposed to do every day, and when the autumn comes, you get bountiful harvests.

So that year was the year, I applied for the uni that I got into. (In fact it was only my third choice uni, even though there were many who would gladly study there. My first 2 choices rejected me.) I got a near perfect score for my “A”s. It led to some good things that you guys might know about.

I don’t think that I did anything really meaningful that year. It was a good year, a happy year. For once I didn’t have to feel disappointed about school. There was a peace of mind. Nothing to do but sleep and study. But terribly unexciting. You could say I lived the Singaporean dream.

Monday, 15 February 2010

Bunions

Something funny happened during Chinese New Year. An aunt of mine was showing around her feet. It looked kinda weird, there was a big lump at the base of her large toe, and her large toe was curled towards the other toes. It looked kinda ugly. She said she was going for an operation. She said it was bunions.

That condition of the foot looked familiar, and suddenly I realised that I had a mild version of what she had. I can’t remember how exactly it was but the other 5 or 6 aunts and uncles in my room at that point in time found it extremely funny that I had belatedly realized what was wrong with my feet.

Suddenly a lot of things became clear, like how, around 3 months before my marathon, I couldn’t run more than 15km without getting a sharp pain in that joint. How, if I ran in a way that did not aggravate my bunions, I risked some other part of my leg. And why I retired. (One of the important reasons was my propensity to get injured – now I know why.)

Anyway, my grandmother was there, and she couldn’t understand much of the conversation which was taking place in English. She asked what the hell was going on. I said there was something wrong with my leg. Then she took my leg and felt it, and touched my big toe, and declared, “now, there’s a lump that should be cut off.” The other ppl were laughing their heads off by now.

My father popped in, and looked at the foot, and said, “Well you look at that, it’s not what a normal foot should look like. It’s so obvious.” I sneered, “yeh? You only telling me about that now after more than a year?”

The aunt who had bunions told me, “if you don’t really like your company, you can go for an operation, they’ll give you 4 weeks of MC.”

Saturday, 13 February 2010

Songwriting

Another song popped into my head. It wasn't fantastic or anything. But I thought, what the hell, write it down. One day, you're going to be old, and you're going to be glad to be even writing stuff of that standard. Don't be fussy. Build up a stockpile so that you won't regret it when you grow old.

I don’t really know whether or not to write this. I think I may have grown as a songwriter over the last 2-3 years, or maybe I have not. It’s not a coincidence that many people write their best songs before they’re 30. Songwriting is a process, whereby the best ideas, and also the ones that come most naturally to you, are the ones which get written first. So even if you do get better at it as time goes on, your best ideas are already out there, and you simply have to do something different.

Anyway, I’ll put a header on some of my points.

1. Songwriting is a black art.
When people say they write songs, the reaction is naturally scepticism. Why? Because the number of good songwriters out there is comparatively few. It is difficult. Like Bjork says on “Human Behaviour”: There is no map and a compass won’t do. Music theory teaches you relatively little, or at least it’s only half of the story. Music theory is like grammar. Just because you have mastered grammar, it doesn’t make you a great story teller.

2. Music theory.
Of course, having a music education helps. I have been educated in music almost all my life, and I cannot imagine what it is like to listen to music with an uneducated ear, so I take for granted that you will be able to identify notes when hearing them, you will identify chords.

3. Have an opinion.
The second task of a songwriter is to develop taste. Have an opinion about music. Every song, you like it or you don’t like it. Why does this speak to you? What is it saying? Why do some songs remain in the memory, and why do others fade? Why is this something you want to listen to over and over again, and why is that something that irritates you?

This is very important, almost the first skill you have to learn as a songwriter, because you will be using this skill to assess your own work.

I have learnt as much about music from music critics, as I have from my music teachers. I have read reviews about albums, and often wondered, why some albums get bad reviews and others get good ones. Sometimes, music critics are wrong. More often than that, though, they are right. And 20 years later, the critical opinion about a given piece of music should be secure.

4. Emotional vocabulary
Every chord is a colour. (Actually, some people think that every note is a colour too.) But chords are more important than which key of the scale you are playing. Irving Berlin only knew how to write music in the key of F. It doesn’t really matter.

Every chord, relative to the tonic, conveys an emotion. Understand the emotional impact of chords. Simplistically, major chords are happy and minor chords are sad. But not always. From I to IV is like going to a higher plane, and from I to V is going to a lower one. But not always. Inversions (ie changing which note of the chord is used in the bass) change the way the chords sound, and change the emotional shade.

More interesting than the I, IV and V are the relatives of these chords. Sometimes you will have the minor versions, the major versions, the extended chord, your 7s, 9s, 11s, even 13s. Augmented. Diminished. Suspended. Know your chords. This is important.

5. Chord progression
Chord progressions and melody in music are similar to plot and narrative in a story. Like a good maths proof (it is not a coincidence that I learnt how to write a song around the same time I was learning how to write a maths proof) a chord progression is a sequence of ideas which lead, logically to each other. Whether the chord progression makes sense or not, is analogous to whether it is grammatical.

6. Melody
A melody will typically contain certain notes that make up the chord. There will be transitional notes that don’t have much to do with that chord, and they are called passing notes. The melody needs to both be consistent with what’s going on in the chord progression, and at the same time it should be artistically appealing. That’s why writing a song is not easy – it’s like solving a simultaneous equation. You don’t want to have a melody which follows the chord progression like a slave. There’s no tension, and it’s boring. But you don’t want to have a melody that is not related to the chord progression either.

Somebody asked “what is melody” in a music forum. It is a very good question. Our most conventional notion of melody is that it is the part of music which is in the foreground, it is typically linear, with only 1 note at a time (like if 1 person is singing). It is a sequence of notes.

Any of these notions can be violated. The melody can be in the bassline. Counterpoint is what we call it when there are 2 melodies playing against each other at the same time. Harmony is what we call it when 2 or more non-clashing notes are played together. 2 or more voices can make up the same melody, they just sing different parts of it.

7. Form
Almost the first thing people will teach you when you have formal instruction on composition is the form of the music. ABA, AABA, ABABCA, etc. This is important, of course, but it’s like saying that when you write a story, your words must fall on a straight line going from left to right. Although this convention is important, it has very little to do with whether you are writing a good song or not.

There is only 1 thing to learn from the idea of form: big pieces of music are made of smaller pieces of music. How you arrange the smaller pieces is the architecture design.

What’s more important, from my perspective, is how those smaller chunks flow into each other. How everything combines together to form the narrative arc. Always pay attention to the bigger picture, and how the smaller pieces make up the bigger puzzle. Sometimes you can have 2 really spectacular pieces of music, and they sound awful when you put them side by side because the flow is gone. Sometimes you can tolerate having a boring part, because it gives you a break from the exciting part.

8. Hidden melodies
Moving away from our conventional idea of melodies to the bigger picture, we need to understand what is a melody, in a more generic sense. Melodies are narratives. They tell a story. They lead the listener through a series of logically connected moods, and represent an arc through the music for the listener to follow.

If you study the human brain, you will understand that stories are our method of organising information and making sense of them. One favourite technique we have of memorising long lists, is to make up a story where all the items appear in sequence, in the story. The reason why this works is because we are so well adapted to thinking about stories.

Similarly, it is difficult for me to memorise a lot of numbers (musical notes are basically numbers. Sounds inhuman, but deal with it.) But when they are arranged in a catchy melody – miracle of miracles, it’s so easy.

So when you extend the definition of melody, into something like a catchy hook, or a motif, or a drum figure, the definition becomes something like: foreground.

This should explain why hip hop and rap works, even though there are so few chords and melodies. It’s all hidden melodies – the brain still has something to latch onto. Maybe it’s the combination of wordplay, or the rhythm of the words, or catchy slogans.

But the cardinal rule is this: the brain still has to have something to latch onto. Something to think about. Take away chords and melody, maybe you have to make the rhythm interesting. Or maybe you have to make the architecture interesting, like how minimalist music takes away a lot of your points of reference, and instead you pay attention to how the mood shifts and changes very subtly. But music cannot be vacuous.

9. Borrowing ideas
I’m not good enough to come up with my own ideas. Maybe nobody is. I’ve always borrowed from others. It’s like building a nest, all your material is stolen from somewhere else. But the creation, the nest, is yours and yours alone. Unless you steal somebody else’s nest wholesale (or a significant chunk thereof).

So when you are starting to write, just steal. Take a piece here, another piece there, put it together in a way that’s never been done before. Take somebody else’s melody, and harmonise it with different chords. Take somebody else’s chords an put a new melody on it.

Combine genres in a way that has not been done before. Chinese with Indian. Dub with classical. Avant Garde with Gregorian. Whatever.

10. Experience
I started “writing” music when I was 8. I wrote the first song I was happy with when I was 21. Yes, it takes that long. If you start off as an adult, your learning curve will be shorter. But you have to wait a long time and put up with stuff that doesn’t work. Then you learn your lesson from point number 3: assess it like a music critic.

If you can’t finish songs, KIV them. A few songs were stuff I KIV’ed from when I was a teenager, and now I have the experience to complete them, to solve problems I wasn’t able to solve back then.

You might learn some tricks. Like repeating a phrase because it sounds better the second time. Or ending a song abruptly. Or throwing in an unexpected chord.

After a while, the seam that you are mining will be empty. Then branch out, try a different form of music and see what happens. There are a lot of songwriters, they were very good when they were young, and then they lost it. Or rather most of their songs were written and as a consequence they ended up repeating themselves. There wasn't much that was new. Brian Wilson - his last great album was merely to finish a project he abandoned when he was young. Paul McCartney - was never as great a songwriter as when John Lennon was around. Lou Reed - wrote most of his great stuff before he was 30, with the Velvet Underground.

Is songwriting a young man's art? Or is it that people always run out of ideas no matter what? Only a few years ago, when I wrote something good, I'm like, "damn, I never knew I had it in me." Now it's like, "wait, didn't I just write this before? aren't I just piecing together some other stuff that I've done before, and done better?" After your best ideas are out in the open, it just gets more and more difficult.

A random conversation with Harry Redknapp

I thought that maybe fat boy is not such a good moniker, I’ve decided to call him Harry Redknapp instead.

#9: Yeh, I actually had a female housemate for 2 years.
HR: You never got to sleep with her.
#9: Yeh but I was not interested in her.
HR: It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in her or not. Tell me, did you sleep with her? No?
#9: What does it matter if I didn’t sleep with her, of course I didn’t. I wasn’t interested.
HR: Let’s not talk about irrelevant stuff. The fact is that you did not sleep with her.
#9: HR, we’ve been colleagues for years. But you have never fucked me in the ass either.
HR: Er yeh who wants to fuck you in the ass? You’re so ugly.
#9: That’s besides the point. You had more than 7 years to fuck me in the ass and you’ve never done anything.
HR: What does this have to do with what we were talking about?
#9: Enough talking rot. Now tell me, do you want to fuck me in the ass? Because if you want it, I can give it to you right now baby.
HR: What are you doing? Get off me!!!

Oh and happy year of the Tiger to you guys out there.

Saturday, 6 February 2010

This is My Story

Well you know that MPH at Raffles City is going to close down for a while so that they can build a secret tunnel to the Assplanade MRT station. So they are having a crosing down sale. Plenty of books for cheap, so I went down to hoot. It isn’t like warehouse sales, where there are plenty of cheap books, but it’s all shit they don’t want.

I got a few books that I could only find elsewhere at full price. But that’s not the main point about this blog post. It’s that… who else should I find in the store but Kassandra Kong.

Now not all of you will know who K Kong is but late last year there was a book by this Singaporean author who caught my eye. “This is My Story”. Now for a book, that was a dumbfuck title if there ever was one. All books are “my story”. Which book isn’t? To be sure, there are other books which have similar titles. Like Antony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. Or there are great novels which are semi-autobiographical, like “Remembrance of Things Past” or “Dream of Red Mansions”. But it’s easier to forgive them because they are talking about an entire milieu, an entire social setting.

So this is meant to be nothing more than an autobiography. An autobiography written at the ripe old age of 22. My story. And what is my story? I fell in love with a bad boy, I went through 2 abortions because of him, and he fucked my sis as well. How dumb is that? Do you want to walk through the rest of your life carrying a sign saying “I am stupid”? No? Then why would you want to write a book like that? 2 abortions! How does that old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. She thinks that her sister doesn’t want to talk to her anymore because she’s pissed off. I think it’s about the shame of having a dumb sis. If my sister were like that, I’d… actually… OK, never mind.

To be sure, there were other books written by women who complained about their sister sleeping with their boyfriends. One of them was “Hillary and Jackie”, which was actually made into a movie. Now that was scandalous. I think some people thought that the book was written in bad faith.

So she was sitting there, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for people to come, like a teaching assistant at office hours during the first week of class. There were some agents, taking photographs. I don’t think people wanted to go up to her. She wasn’t bad looking. If I were her boyfriend I would be some kind of sex maniac too. But she was being shunned. Very conspicuously, I might add, considering how crowded that place was on Friday night, and I could see her scanning the room with that shit eating grin on her face.

I was thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ has a well-earned reputation as being a great guy because only people like him are thick skinned enough to talk to people like you.” Lepers and prostitutes, that sort of stuff, you know.

Ever since I picked up that book (did you see that book? It has her looking very glum on the cover, all curled up and staring at her feet, like those mediacorp drama series actresses who go to the shower to wash up after being violated) – I had a good mind to talk some sense into her and tell her that while it was no big deal, all the stuff that went on in that book, it was extremely stupid to write it in a book and publish it for the whole world to read. Unless it has great literary value – which I doubt, from what I can see on her personal web page. You just don’t go announce yourself like that to the world. You don’t write your autobiography at the grand age of 22. Just ask Vanilla Ice. Why are you writing a book? Are you trying to tell people something they didn’t already know? Some men are jerks. Wow, what an earth shattering discovery.

No big deal if you’re 70, and you just like to tell a saucy tale about the good old days when half the population was after your ass. No big deal if you’ve achieved greater things in life, like, say Tori Amos, then you can go and tell the whole world you were raped and people will still think of you, primarily as a good singer-songwriter, to be loved and respected for something more than what’s between your legs. No big deal if you’re Francoise Sagan, you write “Bonjour Tristesse” and you become a literary sensation at the grand old age of 18. But you need to be talented for that.

I just couldn’t bear to go up there and tell her. I don’t know why. I would have preferred there to be people going up to talk to her, and maybe I would offer a dissenting viewpoint. But I think that mine is actually not a dissenting viewpoint, it is the majority opinion. I look at the forums that come up when you google her name, and they find her creepy. Fellars, this is very Singaporean logic. But I do not want to be the one who has to tell her that she has screwed up, if that’s what everybody thinks. I do not want to be the only one going up to say hi to her. I don’t want to be the creepy pervert to tell her that I open her book up to the page where he does that to her, and then I smell the paper that it’s printed on.

Ultimately, though, I realised that all those objections that I made towards her book, taken one by one, do not really form a solid case for arguing that writing that book was stupid. In the end it was just a question of taste. Something like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And this is a mouth, remember, which is mostly immune to foul odours. It’s very hard to explain to someone why it’s OK to read “Memoirs of a Geisha” and not “Memoirs of a Prostitute”. (Actually I read part of that (geisha) book some time ago. What I find extremely creepy about that book is that it’s written by an ang moh man. If I were writing that book I would be jacking off half of the time.)

OK, a digression. Somebody actually compared this expose to Bonny Hicks. But I think that Bonny Hicks was just being very frank about what the life of models was about. And moreover I don’t think most of it was as sordid as this. I still got her book lying around somewhere. No I don’t jerk off to Bonny Hicks because it’s bad luck to masturbate over dead women. My Bonny lies over the ocean… my Bonny lies over the sea…

I convinced myself that the excuse for inaction is this: she’s dumb. And since she’s that dumb to be writing and promoting stuff like that, it’s futile to try to knock some sense into her, since the only direction you can knock her is up. But most importantly of all, I am a virgin. And I don’t think that virgins should be lecturing people about whether or not they should write about their sexual adventures.

Monday, 1 February 2010

Why numbernine is single part 2

Not a bad weekend for me.

I had dinner with some old friends from colllege, and I bumped into some chick I knew from school back then. Well not some chick I knew from school, but I knew her by face. And suddenly we were talking like old friends. And I'm wondering, all those times when I didn't go out and have a lot of friends in JC, was it because the ladies were more dao, or was it because my head was too far up my ass for me to understand that they weren't going to bite my head off? Well it was funny, so that was somebody who could have been a friend, but wasn't.

On Saturday I spent 2 hours stirring up 2 pots of pineapple pulp. Some of you might see the results of it pretty soon.

I helped my father put together powerpoints for a lesson (actually he did all the content himself, and I was just doing the layout. I also taught him how to use a thumb drive, and how not to put it into the wrong hole.)

In between I had a nap and when I woke up I had a new song playing in my head. While out for dinner, I passed by Borders. They had a few penguin classics that were on sale for pretty cheap, and I was tempted until I remembered my promise to myself: no new books. Think about reading the existing ones first. Anyway there was a book called twitterature, where you had all those old literature masterpieces, rendered through twitter. "Anna Karenina" was a hoot, especially that part about some real hip grinding with Count Vronsky. The last part was also blackly funny, because it ended with "the user account has been deactivated" ("Anna Karenina" ends with the title character committing suicide.)

Then on Sunday I did some programming. I had listed a few books on bookmooch, and 3 or 4 were snatched up immediately. At the same time, somebody else bought a few of my books. In all I'm dispensing of 9 inches of shelf space.

I bumped into my boss while near the library. I read some books. There was a book that I borrowed from my cousin while stirring pots. It was about the new version of Excel. Did you know that the new .xlsx format is simply a few zipped up xml files? Just change the extension to .zip, unzip the whole thing, and then you can see, in plain text, just what your excel file looks like.

I also looked through a textbook on assembly language - understood the difference between stack and heap memory.

I tried out some of the food stalls at Liang Court. Then I rushed back home and swam 1km. While doing that, I came up with another song, bringing my total up to 2. Writing songs is like masturbating. When you haven't been doing it for a while, there's a lot of seed stored up. There were a few people horsing around in the pool and once, a chick landed up right in front of me when I was lapping. (Lapping means swimming laps, no other meaning is to be inferred by this). So that was a happy memory.

I went back upstairs, hung around for a bit, and then I drove to the coffee shop to watch Arsenal vs Man U. It went badly for Arsenal and I drove home after the first half.

All in all, a quite productive weekend. So I was wondering, suppose I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't have had much time for her this week.

But not all weekends are like this.

Saturday, 30 January 2010

A New Decade

Like I said on one of my previous posts, whereas 2008 was the year of the end of long roads, 2009 for me was going to a year I would get off my ass and seek a new life. To what extent have I been successful?

Computer science: the plan was to plough through all my CS textbooks so as to have the same amount of knowledge that a CS undergraduate would have. So far it looks like I won’t get it all done any time soon. I’m half way through compilers, and I’m trying to cram in the most salient concepts of operating systems. Operating systems is easier because there are fewer basics, fewer ideas, and the rest is application. Got through some systems analysis.

Financial planning: I had a few meetings with the fiancé of a long lost friend, who somehow convinced me that I was a potential customer. 3 sessions later, I told her no thanks, and I dunno if she was pissed off at me.

Later on, a friend of mine approached me with a business proposition that was as lucrative as it was shady. I thought about it for a while, thought I would play a small, bit part. It didn’t work out. His old business partner sabotaged his business plan. In the end, he left and joined an insurance policy. He became the second person to (unsuccessfully) sell me a policy this year.

A new job: I took on a new function at my workplace midway through the year, one that’s closer to the front. I’m sick and tired of doing the same old shit which may not have meaning to the larger scheme of things. So far it’s not been a disaster although a lot could have been better. I’m learning and mastering stuff I should have mastered a long time ago. Things are a little more stressful.

Romance: Some of you may recall that the fiancé of my long lost friend had set me up with a friend of hers. It was a disaster that didn’t work at all. Much later in the year, I had a few dates with teapot. Unfortunately it didn’t work out. But I did think that I should go out hunting. Now’s a good time, there won’t be a better time than now.

I have to figure out what's wrong. One complaint I'm getting is that I'm boring. This is true, especially for people who are not on the same wavelength as me.

Music: It was all right. I wrote a few songs that I was quite satisfied with. Some of my compositions are on midi now, but MIDI is a shitty medium. I have the arrangements in my head, some idea of what it’s supposed to sound like, but my demos sound like crap. But at least I have fleshed out all the ideas, written down all the notes. In theory I just have to find the right sounds to match all my stuff.

I've had a few tryouts. I did think that I was quite psyched after that, but a lot of it's not my work. I think there's still some more work to be done before I start advertising myself as a "keyboardist". Still, I'm glad that I actually went to find some people to jam with.

Johor: I’m helping my computer illiterate father with some of his paperwork, but most of the time he does his own thing. He’s an incredibly hard worker. I don’t know why I have such a hardworking father, and such a hardworking sister, but myself, I’m such a passive person.

I’ve also gone on some trips to Malaysia to explore the place, and occasionally help with some shopping. My father and I planted 2 trees, and 1 of them died although the other is still alive. He’s always wanted to teach me how to manage a property and I still have to learn.

Housework: Other than some half-hearted attempts to follow my parents to the wet market on Saturday mornings, I haven’t been able to make much progress on this.

Is this why I’m always feeling tired these days? But I’ve hardly begun to live my life. I’m only doing stuff that I should have started doing 5 years ago. Well 5 years is not a very long time anyway.

Health-wise, things have not been very good. My family members used to marvel at my ability to skip meals and not get gastric problems. Later on, I've realised why this is so: I don't stress myself. I've been living such a horizontal life for so long that I never had any stress. This year, the first time in a long time I've seriously considered my future, is also a year I've had more problems with my stomach than any of the preceding years.

And let's not talk about a really crappy December where I've been laid low by flu and it's taken forever for me to get better. At a time when I was clearing leave and supposed to have some fun times, I'm sick.

I noticed that I have changed my life a lot in the last 2 years that ended with zero. 1990 was the end of the childhood and the beginning of the troubled teenage years (although it should never have been as troubled as it was). 2000 was the first year after I glimpsed at a lot of possibilities that opened up for me in 1999 - although being a big bookworm was the main possibility that was opened up. I'm also due for a big change now. Some of these changes have been for the better, but many have not.

For the last few years, I had been content to bury myself in a lot of books as well as the occasional long distance run. Gone are the days when I can say that a weekend has been meaningful just because I managed a 20 km run (and I doubt I'm going to run such distances anytime soon.) Gone are the days when I would treat 1-2 hour bus rides as an OK thing because I can always read some more, when I would shake legs at a cafe for hours and a book. There was a time, when I thought, give me the warm glow of lights above, a book, and a cup of coffee / tea before me, and I will always be content. I would be reading investor reports, and figure out how to be much richer than I am today. I would be reading computer science and magically become an uber geek. How was I to know that I'd be bored of that within 6 months? It used to be, if I had nothing better to do (and when have I had anything better to do?), I would just pick up a book, and read and read. But now I'll practice not picking up a book for once, and see whether things will take place.

In fact the last few days have felt like what it was like in college, when I just spent hours alternating between useful activity, and fretting about time passing by and getting older. (I was not a bookworm in college - I budgeted my brain power strictly for the stuff I had to read, because it consumed so much mental energy.) Being alone in a dank, dark house, going to bed at 4 in the morning and rising at 9 (afternoon naps have become necessary.)

I will probably not have a mid-life crisis. Mid-life crises are for people who have accomplished what they want in their 20s and 30s, then have nothing else left for them in their 40s. It looks like I’ll be busy for some time.