The Watusi. The Twist. El Dorado.

Trolling

2010-03-27T22:52:00.000+08:00

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.

Dinosaur Jr

2010-03-24T00:50:00.003+08:00

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.

Football Betting Season 2 Weeks 11

2010-03-23T00:44:00.004+08:00

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.

Up in the Air

2010-03-20T13:25:00.002+08:00

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.

Water girl outed

2010-03-17T21:27:00.000+08:00

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.

Earning Stripes

2010-03-16T00:29:00.002+08:00

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.

Jack Neo

2010-03-13T08:10:00.003+08:00

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.

Football Betting Season 2 Weeks 10

2010-03-08T21:07:00.004+08:00

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.

Cock ups

2010-03-06T20:57:00.002+08:00

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.

Humpback Oak

2010-02-28T12:36:00.005+08:00

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.

Facilitation

2010-02-23T12:11:00.002+08:00

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.

JC2

2010-02-20T00:21:00.002+08:00

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.

Bunions

2010-02-15T16:32:00.002+08:00

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.”

Songwriting

2010-02-13T15:00:00.002+08:00

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

2010-02-13T10:43:00.004+08:00

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.

This is My Story

2010-02-06T12:58:00.002+08:00

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.

Why numbernine is single part 2

2010-02-01T20:18:00.005+08:00

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.

A New Decade

2010-01-30T23:24:00.003+08:00

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.

Rebel Rebel

2010-01-28T23:46:00.002+08:00

In 1968, there were a lot of student rebellions all over the world. In Czechoslovakia, in the US, in Mexico, in France. To a lot of people, it was a curious sight. These were the baby boomers in their teens, and especially in the US, they were the most pampered and indulged generation in history (although I think that succeeding generations were even more indulged.) Suddenly they thought that life wasn’t good enough for them?

The late 60s were a time for the counter culture. The postwar boom had created a standard of living that was higher than anything else you ever saw in human history (in the West anyway). But it also brought with it a stifling conformity. So counterculture was born. It was about young, idealistic teenagers rebelling against strict social codes (long hair, smoking pot, love and peace). Some of it was a rebellion against capitalism, against the Vietnam War, against the “straights” – the nerdy, conservative, square types.

Hippie culture has some enduring legacies. Body shop, with its emphasis on sustainable development and care for the earth, embodies some hippie culture values. A lot of the computer industry was founded on hippie values. The internet was designed to be democratic, so that no large organisation, or no government was able to control it. It’s not a surprise that much of Silicon Valley is located on the outskirts of San Francisco, which was the capital of the hippies. Steve Jobs was a hippie. Ben and Jerry’s was founded by 2 hippies. Although, considering that a lot of hippie culture was virulently anti-corporation in nature, you could say that at least some of the hippie values were betrayed in the process.

The green movement was also greatly connected to the hippies. They rightly saw that man was destroying his environment, and even though they met with varying degrees of resistance, people are finally realising that humans on this planet are living a basically unsustainable lifestyle. But people are selfish, and you cannot preach to them by saying, “look, you are destroying all these plants and animals.” They’ll tell you, “we have a right to our way of life”. So instead we call it Climate Change now, because the message now is, “you can destroy the plants and animals and pump poisonous gases into the sky. But after that you will suffer because the sea level will rise and life on this planet will be less livable.” This is also a reason why, when I hear the words “climate change”, it is with a sense of shame.

The hippie culture has also spawned a free love culture, where people were much less restrained when it came to sex. Pre-marital sex became much more common. It lasted around 15-20 years, and that lifestyle ended (or at least became much less widespread) when people started hearing about AIDS.

I’m thinking about the nature of rebellion, now from the vantage point of somebody well into adulthood.

Yes, I don’t like conformity. I’ve said it. I know I work in a place which values it above just about anything else. I know that to a large extent, you need to have common standards in order to make the organisation gel together. And I know that there are many workplaces which have an even stifling culture than mine. I still have to grapple with that problem.

My instinct has always tended towards rebellion. I was tardy about work at school, (although, when I did do my work, I always gave it my best shot). I made goofy comments in class. I often detested people for the simple reason that they followed the crowd, and took on the values of “society”.

During my film buff phase, I always had a weakness for films about teenage rebellion. OK, “Rebel Without a Cause” is too obvious. But I liked “400 Blows”, “And Your Mother Too”, “Dreamlife of Angels”, “Brighter Summer Day”. There were others about people making their way in this world, in the face of adversity, like “The Crowd”.

Ultimately, though, what does rebellion mean? On some levels, it is absolutely necessary. Revolutions were borne of rebellion. You just felt that you had to have a better life, and then you destroyed the old way of life, simply because anything else would be better. Sometimes this was true, but often it was not. The Russian Revolution was largely a tragedy for all concerned (except maybe a few top-ranking Communist Party cadres). Mao Zedong had a dictum, “we must destroy before we build”. A lot of his actions have turned out to be totally disastrous.

Rebellions were often an expression of democracy. The French Revolution was something that ushered in the modern democracy, even though people hardly commemorate the Terror that followed: you didn’t know who else would be guillotined in the morning. (Well maybe a few nutty people like Pol Pot thought it was a good thing.) It is a very useful check and balance against tyranny, and something that I feel could have been used a bit more.

I used to feel ashamed that people of my generation did not stage rebellions, and often deferred to the government. Then again, it is not always true that people in my generation are less rebellious. I wondered why the Vietnam War protests were so much more famous than the Iraq war protests. In a way a great amount of discredit has to go to the US public for allowing the Iraq war to happen. I don’t really know how much they are ashamed of themselves, or the torture of Iraqis that took place by the US Army. But later on I found out that there was a big protest in the UK, and a record turn-out, to demonstrate against the Iraq war. I can’t remember the figure – half a million? That was a great thing. But it scarcely went reported, because, unlike 1 generation ago, news broadcasters have become very wary of giving credence to that sort of thing. The Iraq war destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair, who had up til then been a hugely popular prime minister.

So what are rebels? Do people rebel just so that they felt good about themselves? Rebels do their work under very dangerous circumstances, and a lot of the great rebels of the past have attained great stature, simply for standing up against a system that was morally wrong. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Mandela. And to a lesser extent, Aung San Suu Kyii and the Dalai Lama.

But my tendency towards rebellion is probably now tempered with some hard-nosed conservative thinking, and after all, you have to understand the system before you try to change it.

Does rebellion build anything? No. Rebellion is destructive. Destructive does not mean no good, because in many cultures, we understand that creation and destruction are both part of the great plan. Hinduism has a god for creation and another for destruction, even though I can’t remember their names offhand. Taoism has yin and yang, the cycle of life, where one begets the other. Even in the West, harvest is often equated to death, a tacit acknowledgement that some yield is gained from the destruction.

But rebellion alone does not build anything. Some of the regimes that came about as a result of a rebellion would be worse than what they replaced. There was ZANU-PF, which replaced the white rule in Zimbabwe. Living standards have plummeted since then. There is South Africa, which may or may not be faring better than under Apartheid. The feminist movement promised a better world for all, but at this point, the gains are quite modest compared to the promises, and for that matter, the ladies are beginning to realise that men live quite a shitty life (even if they don’t bitch about it as much as women.) And then there was communism in Russia – enough said.
It was the luck of the draw when it comes to changing regimes. Sometimes you will get LKY – a pain in the ass, but he makes life better for all. Sometimes you get Ferdinand Marcos.

The other thing about rebels – there are rebels who rebel because they want to shake things up and change. Then there are others who are merely dissatisfied with the current system, but offer no solutions. You’ve seen them before, those people who throw spanners for the sake of throwing them. And they talk vaguely about making things better. They offer no solutions. In fact, they are the people who just prefer to stew in their own juices all the time, and enjoy the benefits of being part of the system, and yet reserve for themselves the right to complain about things they don’t like. Most of us are like that some of the time, and that is not unusual. However it becomes really grating when that person starts to assume the heroic mantle of the rebel leader, and that’s when he starts being laughable.

Of course, it could be that half-baked ideas eventually evolve into works of genius, but more often, they end up as nothing.

And there are other rebels, who have ideas which work well on paper but when it comes to the implementation, they are let down either by faulty execution, or the idea wasn’t very good at all. In the end, though, if ideas don’t work, there’s usually a part of the theory that the originator of the idea didn’t want to consider. And that person would usually be quite stubborn about brushing away that part of the theory, because that would mean he had to throw away his ideas.

Because ultimately you have to look at the big picture. Rebels are celebrated in our culture for various reasons. One of them is that the act of destruction is more spectacular and dramatic than constructive acts. You get more publicity, more airspace. Another one is that when people around you are pissed off with a certain regime for certain reasons, you can be a focal point for their collective voice by speaking out against the injustices of the incumbent system. That is easy. You are the popular voice, and you cannot be wrong. But talk is cheap, and what would happen when you are actually the one elected into office, you’re the one who’s in charge? Can you reform the system? Can you make the changes you promised, without making the system substantially worse as a result?

I’ve seen my being rebellious for at least as many wrong reasons as well as right ones. I think that you cannot be a rebel your whole life. You cannot be a rebel without a cause, it doesn’t make sense in the long run. Even Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was circumspect enough to admit, “I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.” It shows that he acknowledges the limits of rebellion. In the end, it’s just a means to an end, and you have to figure out what you’re really getting into, what you’re really doing all that for.

Gary Neville vs Carlos Tevez

2010-01-24T00:59:00.003+08:00

Wayne Rooney misses a goal. Wayne Rooney says fuck. Nobody says anything.

David James concedes a goal. David James says fuck. Nobody says anything.

Fernando Torres powers past Nemanja Vidic and scores. Vidic says fuck. Nobody says anything.

Gary Neville shows his middle finger. The horror! The horror!

Joo Chiat

2010-01-16T18:16:00.003+08:00

If you asked me what years were very good years for me, I would unhesitatingly tell you, 1992 and 1999. I don’t really want to elaborate, or maybe I may have blogged about this before. That’s why, when 2006 came around I was wondering if the time was ripe for a change. (ie every 7 years I get a year which is amazing)

When you look back upon it, it was a gradual change. It was nowhere as important to me as what happened during 92 or 99. But there was something there. I felt that it was easier for me to talk to people. I no longer had the knots in my stomach when approaching others, as I did in my earlier days. Whether or not that made me a better person, though, is something that’s highly open to debate.

In January of that year, my maternal grandmother died. It was actually a good thing, because she had been in a coma for 3.5 years. At the risk of sounding heartless I’m glad that her suffering was over. I met the cousins from the maternal side of the family, many of whom I had not seen regularly over the last 10 years. It turned out that we did get along. It was OK.

Around May of that year, Basketball Jones (I’m calling him that, but you guys should be able to guess who he is) asked me to join Harry Redknapp (ditto) and him at dinner. I thought, that’s a bit funny, but I did join in.

Basketball Jones was about to leave the department. He had just broken up. After a while I realized that he was in a state and he just needed people to go help him cheer up. I didn’t go, “hey that’s not fair people never do that kind of stuff for me”. I just thought, OK, let’s go.

After dinner, we ended up in a sleazy club in Joo Chiat. Harry Redknapp brought us there. Most of the bar girls were Vietnamese. Most were smart enough to have picked up Chinese, but a few of them didn’t know the language. I cynically thought, “well, I’m not going to waste time in here, am I?” So I grabbed somebody. It was OK, but it felt really strange to be groping a complete stranger, no matter how well-proportioned she was. I was looking a little enviously at Basketball Jones, because he got somebody I kinda fancied. But on subsequent visits I never saw her, and anyway we made it a point not to get girls that any other of us had been close to before.

On the second visit, another girl came up to me and started fondling me. I told her to go away, but I took a second look at her, and said, “you’re OK”. Well there was this hanky panky. Let’s call her Winnie. At the same time, Basketball Jones had this girl, called her Apple, and he said that Apple reminded him of Fiona Xie. I don’t really know if that was healthy. He wasn’t having his way with Apple, wasn’t treating her like a sex object, the way that I was treating those who came up to me. I think that he had rebound-itis. (Rebound is a basketball term, is it not?) By then, Harry Redknapp had already found his regular, Peach, and was making her his mistress.

There was another trip, to Sentosa. Harry Redknapp got 4 girls (including to meet us there. It was very weird, what if people saw me? There was Winnie. There was Peach. Then there was this ah-nine (not to be confused with numbernine). I thought that ah-nine was really hot, but I couldn’t possibly be having two at one go, could I? We had dinner in one of the hotel restaurants. It was a nice balmy night. And after a long walk, they had to go to work. It was embarrassing for Basketball Jones and me, but Harry Redknapp seemed to enjoy making us flustered. (In fact I was so flustered that after this was over, I spent 1-2 hours sitting in Coffee Bean, reading a book, doing things that I felt were normal, in order to exorcise away that feeling of being unclean.)

I don’t really know if people at work suspected anything, other than us going for lunch together and discussing the night before. My mother was getting upset, asking me why I stayed out so late at night, and so often. I asked her if she ever worried about that when I was not at home for 4 years.

A lot of them, you had your way with them, and at the end of the night, you gave them “tips”. It would maybe amount to $20, $30? The girls would go fondle a few male customers per night. I don’t know what the mathematics would be like. Did they have to give a cut to the owner, did they have to pay rents on their crowded apartments? I don’t know how often they had to go back home before they overstayed their visitor’s visa. One of the pubs that we went to brazenly called itself the “U-turn” pub. The beer was often expensive - $40 a jug. But you got different kinds of jugs there as well.

I felt that I hardly connected with the people around there. I didn’t really identify with them. Winnie seemed to like me. And she got upset when I played with more than 1 girl. She seemed like a nice girl, and I might have considered hooking up with her, but for the fact that we met under such circumstances. It’s true that when you know somebody likes you, that person immediately becomes more attractive. Well, at least she made me start to think about what I wanted my girlfriend to be like. I want to believe that she’s a nice person, but like that old saying, what’s a nice person like you doing in a place like this?

Harry Redknapp carried on his affair with Peach during this period. She wasn’t that pretty, and her face reminded me of Patricia Mok. But she had a good body. And sometimes Harry Redknapp would disappear just to carry on his tryst with her. I never really understood what happened to her after this whole episode was over, but I suppose we all understood that these things didn’t last forever.

I suppose it was nice to be able to shed your inhibitions in an environment like this. I kinda enjoyed the feeling that Harry Redknapp, Basketball Jones and I were buddies, we were quite literally partners in crime. Now I know where that term comes from. It was around the time of the World Cup, so we just had extra excuses to stay out late, we could say it was the World Cup. It wasn’t a good World Cup, though – the matches were quite boring.

I didn’t feel a thing. I didn’t think that much about Winnie. I sometimes wondered why she was so nice. Maybe she felt that deep down I wasn’t the sleazy type? Maybe I was a little unpredictable when playing with her, and she liked it? Most probably she saw that Harry Redknapp was so nice to Peach, and thought that I was possibly cut from the same cloth. Well she was wrong. And I have to say that Harry Redknapp has his way with the ladies. Basketball Jones kept on calling him his “idol”. But I wondered if it wasn’t at the same time a form of emotional manipulation, so that Harry Redknapp would still want to bring us out.

There’s nothing wrong with having an episode like this in your life. You watched those coming of age movies (one example is HHH’s “A Time to Live, a Time To Die”) and you had those teenage boys visiting prostitutes to be schooled in these sort of things. Well these were not prostitutes (and I did not shag anybody throughout these 2 months that these things were going on). But I was grateful to Harry Redknapp for showing me a different side of life in Singapore.

But much as I was grateful to him, I wasn’t completely eager for these things. I drew the line – after Basketball Jones returned to his homeland, all this was over. Joo Chiat, the Geylang tours, the late nights watching football. There was the small matter that Harry Redknapp was married with kids. One time, we even had lunch with his wife so that he could show her that what was going on was completely innocuous. The conversation was forced and stilted, I don’t think she was completely convinced.

And there was this thought at the back of my mind that I was never the sort of person who did this sort of things regularly. I enjoyed the fact that I was breaking convention like this. I always wanted to do naughty things. But was this a lifestyle? No way. I remember, there was once we went out, had a lot of hanky panky. The next evening, I was at the wedding dinner of one of my school friends, all straight-laced, civil servant types. The juxtaposition was just too glaring.

So I promised myself, this was the end. And it was. There were 1 or 2 trips after Basketball Jones was gone, and that was it. It’s not sinful to have a short period of time where you did all this stuff, but once you made a habit of it, you’ve crossed the line. And as much as this had to teach me about girls, sometimes it teaches you all the wrong lessons. Girls are never this submissive in real life. Things don’t work this way in real life. A lot of it wasn’t pleasant. It was a little distasteful towards the end. I only went with it because I felt that I had to.

Anyway, back to 2006. Shortly after Basketball Jones left, I got my act together and organized a department gathering. We had everybody go to East Coast Park. It was a nice, sunny day. I think I was also going through a period at work, where I was getting along fine. (Well I never got along that fantastically, but around that time was as good as it ever got.) A lot of barriers that had existed when I first started work were starting to crumble. I got to the point where I was comfortable going to work. This was not the same as saying that I was the model employee – I still fell short of that. But a lot of things that had seemed impossible now seemed possible. There were possibilities in the future.

The bunch of colleagues I had then, they were my favourite bunch. You could pick other colleagues who were there at different times, and say, some were smarter, some were more hard-working. But that batch was my favourite bunch. Maybe there was just a very high concentration of friendly people. By 2007, many of them were gone. By now, of course, most of them are gone, except 1 or 2 bosses.

However, just as in 92 or 99, I felt that I did not entirely fulfill the possibilities that were opened up during that year. After moving 2 steps forward, I often felt like there was the inevitable step back. 2006 marked the time when I started feeling comfortable with my job. Before that I was emphatically not comfortable in it. I was pissing off a lot of people and they returned the favour. It was a gradual process but 2006 was a watershed. In case you’re wondering, it was more the being part of a gang with Harry Redknapp and Basketball Jones than the hanky panky with the ladies, although it was the latter that made us a gang for a short period of time. I became comfortable with my job, but that was the danger: I became too comfortable in it, and that explains why, of this writing, I’m still in that job.

I’m only starting to come to terms with what I should have done after that, after losing a great deal of my emotional inhibitions in dealing with people. I’m wondering how I could have capitalized. I still don’t know the way forward. It’s all a blur.

A lot of times in America, I told myself, wouldn’t it be nice if I had the maturity of an older person, I could just go up to people and then work things out, make things happen. A lot of the times, I wanted to do that but something just stopped me. I ended up being a passive observer a lot. Well even as a passive observer I learnt an incredible amount of stuff. But I knew that the next step would be getting rid of my teenage awkwardness. Well it’s finally happened. Very late, but it’s happened.

Cubicles

2010-01-16T13:25:00.003+08:00

I’ve sat in 2 different cubicles. I don’t believe in Fengshui, but I believe that your cubicle influences your fate. Actually I sat in a 3rd cubicle for a few weeks before I was kicked out by some other guy who had to expand his office, and what do you know, he himself eventually got kicked out of his office too.

The fate of the first cubicle that I sat in is that they are not suited for work at my company. The first person who sat in that seat left before long. I languished in that cubicle for 3 years before earning the right to move out. Honest face took over my seat that the cubicle, and he did well in his job. But he left the company before he could get rotated. Then a 3rd guy went there, got rotated, but he got in over his head, so he came back.

What I believe is that the fate of my second cubicle is this: people who move on from this cubicle will move into better things. That cubicle was occupied by people whose intelligence and drive I respect. So I’m glad to be amongst their number. One of them is now a professor, and the other two are managers. This is wishful thinking, that I’ll do well if and when I leave my company, I suppose.

The cubicle that was occupied by ghost - . The first one there was Water tap, who you know is doing pretty well right now in another department. The second one was another guy who went to another department and also did well. Then there was ghost, and I can’t tell how well he did in that other department because he didn’t stay long. And now, it is occupied by somebody who’s actually in that other department – call him solar power.

(btw I was in solar power’s cubicle the other day, and on the white board, were written 2 large words. “Listen. Understand.” Those are very wise words. I have always felt that the other department people (yes I’m using “other department” as a code word and you should know the meaning of that code word by now) have a kind of wisdom, a keen grasp and understanding of how things are going to work in real life. Some abilities I wish my own bosses had.)

I was thinking about the people who sat in Shingot’s cubicle. The first one moved out soon, and shingot took his place. Then shingot had a long stay in that cubicle, and now he’s replaced by somebody else. Not sure what these 3 people have in common, but I think they do work that is well regarded in the company.

Nat’s old cubicle, the one where he stayed for the longest time – I can’t tell what that cubicle means, since the last one who occupied his cubicle was somebody who was a rising star until an unfortunate incident curtailed his rise. Then he had to leave the company and he prospered outside.

His new cubicle was unoccupied for a long time, but the only other person who used that one on a permanent basis was a chick who left the company for a lucrative job.

Anyway, that other day I was doing a tarot reading on various things. So I decided to do a tarot reading about my current work. It was sufficiently accurate that I’m including it here (although some parts are wrong.) I especially like the chariot part – success through hard work.

The card not shown but at the center of the cross, represents the atmosphere surrounding the central issue. Four of Swords, when reversed.

The card visible at the center of the cross represents the obstacle that stands in your way - it may even be something that sounds good but is not actually to your benefit. The Tower

The card at the top of the cross represents your goal, or the best you can achieve without a dramatic change of priorities. The Chariot.

The card at the bottom of the cross represents the foundation on which the situation is based. The Moon.

The card at the left of the cross represents a passing influence or something to be released. Two of Wands, when reversed.

The card at the right of the cross represents an approaching influence or something to be embraced. Seven of Swords .

The card at the base of the staff represents your role or attitude. Queen of Cups.

The card second from the bottom of the staff represents your environment and the people you are interacting with. Knight of Swords, when reversed.

The card second from the top of the staff represents your hopes, fears, or an unexpected element that will come into play. Five of Swords.

The card at the top of the staff represents the ultimate outcome should you continue on this course. Five of Cups .

Tryout: comeback band.

2010-01-10T01:00:00.000+08:00

This was a case of somebody actually coming up to me and asking me if I was interested in helping her out for something. She actually was one of the indie bands in the 90s (when there were much fewer such bands than as now). Now she’s trying to make a comeback, and wanted a music arranger. She thought that I was qualified. I didn’t know. But I said yes anyway just to see what would happen.

She sent me a composition. I was quite “meh” about it. OK, I’m quite ego about my abilities but it’s really not that easy to write a song that’s interesting to listen to. That’s why when you claim to be a songwriter, people are immediately sceptical – it’s one of the most difficult skills to master. I know because I spent years (on and off) trying to figure it out.

She didn’t look like a star. I suppose you could say this about most indie rock people. We were in a studio (directly opposite the road from where I jammed with the post-rock guys). As usual, everybody’s either Chinese or Malay.

The song had an Arabic flavour to it, but I didn’t know much about Arabic music other than the call to prayer. I tried to play stuff. I’m a little sneaky so I usually try to bury my parts in the mix. Keyboards shouldn’t be louder than the guitars anyway. I played something that they said sounded like a horror soundtrack. Like the 2nd tryout, I’m never certain whether I passed the audition.

The last run-through got taped, and unfortunately that’s when I goofed up the most. The drummer left early. Later on, I learnt that he was a Berklee grad and knew the leader of the fusion band. And that he was drumming for some other band that I had never heard of but nevertheless had a really snazzy looking site.

We took the MRT. This was the first time I heard of the term “bouncing”, which means you take the MRT to Marina Bay so that you can get all the empty seats there. The 2 guitarists were taking the train all the way to Woodlands and Jurong East. The guy asked me if I was planning on getting a keyboard soon, I was non-commital. I think I have to do the job.

One thing that disturbed me that night came when they were about to pay up for the studio. The studio had gone through 5 or 6 owners over the last few years, and now, it was owned by a gang of 6 siblings. Apparently they were barely making enough to cover the costs of rental. It made me feel a bit bad because I know of a friend who owned a shophouse. He rented it out to a dance school, and when the dance school did not succeed financially, there were a lot of problems with the tenant, who didn’t (and couldn’t) pay up. You are supposed to pay the rent every month but I knew that the tenant was being bled dry.

It will be the same story everywhere. Creative types are always struggling to make ends meet. It's the cold, soulless work that's really lucrative in life.

I’m actually much less bullish now about my prospects of a musical career. What can I do that will still allow me to balance with my work? At least by trying out with a few bands, I actually have a feel of what the music scene is like. But I'm not doing this full time. I'm actually balancing this against having a job, at least 1 other ECA, and, if I were to go down this path, attempting to find a chick. I don't think I have time for more than 1 band. And it increasingly looks as though that band would be the first band I tried out for (ie the fusion band).

And furthermore, that band might not necessarily allow me to do my own music. (either because they might not ask me to write for them, or because my stuff is not going to fit in with their stuff.) In that case I might as well increase my capabilities of how to make music with my computer.

The Fall

2010-01-08T22:34:00.004+08:00

On impulse I picked up a book the other day. I actually considered buying a few other books, but they were thin enough that I could read them by borrowing them from the library. But this one caught my eye, “Savage Grace”, which was about how a really rich family met its downfall. It involved the incest between a mother and a son. Kinda perverse, which was why I wondered what the hell I was thinking. This will inspire me to write another blog entry about the meaning of being rich and famous, but for now, this entry is about peoples’ downfalls.

I never had a Christian name. When I was born, I was registered almost immediately, which explains why I have a really low NRIC number. My mother told my father the English name that she wanted to give me (It was “Jeremy”) but my father was half deaf, and went ahead to register me without the English name. (Now my father’s one good ear is beginning to fail him, and this is a source of friction in the family because everybody needs to raise their voice to make sure that he gets heard.)

There was another time when I thought I would get an English name. This time I chose Fred, as in Frederic Chopin, or Fred Flintstone, or George William Frederick Hegel (OK, I made that one up, because I was 8 at that time, I didn’t know Hegel).

However, that name did not suit me either. I felt uncomfortable with it. In fact, I feel uncomfortable with a lot of names because I don’t think they capture my personality very well. As you can see, in this blog, I actually named myself after a number. That’s OK, because we all know that numbers mean nothing. I don’t really like my real name either because I think it’s too egoistic. (Now the fact that I can be egoistic in real life does not mean that I like to have an egoistic name, and moreover all those of you who know me well understand that I am only egoistic half of the time, and the other half I am quite happy to remain anonymous.)

The last straw came when I had somebody in my class whose name was Frederick. I looked at myself, I looked at that guy, I didn’t dislike that guy, but he and I absolutely do not have anything in common with each other. That was the last I heard of that name. By secondary school, nobody knew that I ever used that name.

Well the other Frederick has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. I heard a few rumours a few years back concerning a messy divorce. But nothing very much, nothing substantial, and I cannot say anything for sure.

But based on what I have pieced together: the charge is believed to be about making advances to a female subordinate. It could be "sexual harrassment". Somebody had been mean enough to blag to the whole world about it, so people knew. I'm sure SAF officers commit indiscretions all the time, but as long as they can be kept silent, they will. Not for this guy, I suppose.

I knew the guy in primary school. We went to different secondary schools, so that’s the extent of my knowledge. He was a prefect back then, and he clearly had leadership potential. We always made fun of him because he always used to give a lot of speeches in class, and he was the one who always seemed to be a future politician. (Now you know why I say I have almost nothing in common with him.) In some ways, we were not wrong.

Yet there were quite a few people who detected something rather smarmy about him, some tendency to be too polished and insincere to people. I didn’t feel that, but what did I know in those days? So he was both widely liked and widely disliked. There was a lot of “Frederick, you know…” and then a rolling of eyes. And I knew that he was quite the lady's man, this was apparent right from the onset of puberty.

I wasn’t close friends with him. So I didn’t know him that well. But it’s not fun to see these sort of things happen to people you used to know from more than 20 years ago.

Edit:

An update on what I now know about the Frederick Teo incident. He was sentenced to a fine of $6000. Some ppl I was with felt that he got away with it lightly, but I think, given that people would be surprised to see him being charged for what is after all his own private business, that on balance, that is probably fair. I don't think that he's got a long term future in the SAF. I think they didn't punish him too much partly because this affair was a consensual affair.

Same Old Shit

2010-01-02T03:02:00.001+08:00

My workplace was once featured in a documentary. For convenience, I will call it “the factory”. It was an exciting place, for a half hour documentary. It was a very complex place with plenty of complex systems in it. The amount of effort that went into the work at that factory was tremendous. You had hardworking and dedicated people, all striving to meet deadlines in a really intricate dance with each other.

But one sentence sums up the existential truth of our situation. It was this one line: “The shift ends, and next shift takes over. The process begins all over again.”

This story is not new. The Greeks had a character called Sisyphus, who was punished by the Gods by having to push a boulder up a slope every day, only to have it roll down to the bottom at the end. That is our existential situation. That's life. That's adult life.

Happy new year guys.

Crude But Effective

2010-01-01T17:48:00.002+08:00

The bookshelf I bought 3 years ago is looking to be quite filmsy. Within a year one of the shelves had already broken up. The material that they used to make this shelf is quite remarkable, it's very light and very strong, and this is probably the biggest bookshelf I've ever seen. But the bookshelf is only as good as its weakest point, and in this case some of the weakest points are the pins that are holding the bookshelf together.

It may have been due to my pushing that bookshelf 20 cm to the right in order to rearrange my room 1 month back, but some of the pins were no longer holding up the bookshelves, and they were now resting on the lower shelves. The pins are intact, but the holes where the pins were resting were sagging and were no longer holding the pins in their proper place.

I tried to match the broken pins to the broken shelf, and change the positions of the shelves, so that the pins were placed in fresh holes. In this way I got to salvage all but 1 shelf. This operation involved moving out 3 shelves of books. I was about to finish the operation, when one of the shelves got stuck when I tried to move it out. After yanking out the shelf forcefully, I found out that one of the pins was missing.

Afterwards I tore my hair out trying to locate the missing pin. Without the pin, it seemed that I would not be able to put the shelf back. After messing up half of my room in the process, I gave up and tried to look for other solutions. I found that we had other pins, and they belonged to the other type of bookshelf. But these pins were larger and fatter than those for this bookshelf. Eventually, I found a solution. The ruptured holes were bigger, and using a hammer, I forced the larger pin into the hole. (I know this sounds like kinky sex but bear with me. This is like an Asian woman having sex with a black man.) Turns out that the bookshelf is made of soft plywood, which allowed me to do crazy stuff like that. So I bashed the large pins all the way in. To my immense surprise, the whole thing worked.

This has confirmed in my mind that there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved by violence. Using a hammer and bashing your way through is truly the way to solve all problems. When they knighted Sir Alex Ferguson, they gave him a CBE, and I always thought that it refers to his methods of man-management: crude but effective.

So I have a properly functioning bookshelf again. Which is good. But now my room is in a mess.

Edit: found the !@#$ missing pin but I still think the CBE fix was necessary.

Computer game walkthroughs

2010-01-01T13:18:00.001+08:00

I played computer games as a kid. Not very many of them, only a few. I stopped playing them when I was 15. Actually I still play PC games like solitaire, minesweeper, freecell etc but I only restrict myself to them. I thought that there are a lot of other things you can do with your real life other than play games.

It was never a straightforward thing where I just enjoyed playing computer games. I always had at least some guilt about playing them. Maybe they detracted from my spending every possible hour studying, or maybe it was just my having a little more fun than my parents thought I had a right to. Whatever. To give a sense of perspective, I feel less guilt jerking off nowadays than I did in those days playing computer games.

It used to be that my mother would give me a hard time for playing computer games too much, yet at the same time she is one of the most compulsive players of computer games I have ever seen. She would play bridge with people online until 2 in the morning, and yet when I come back in the wee hours of the morning, after finishing off 100 pages of books (you may laugh but I’m a slow reader) she says that I’m not living a decent life. In another day and age I might have taken her comments to heart but I’m old enough to see those comments as what they are – absolute nonsense.

Anyway I have since concluded that computer games don’t really do very much for you. They shut you away from people. (But those were the pre-internet days, so I’m not sure now.) They take up your time. You don’t really accomplish much. A game does suck you in. The colourful graphics seduce you. It’s called “adventure” even though you are being holed up in your room as you play.

I play platform games, even though my hand co-ordination is not very good – people out there can finish 3 or 4 games in the time I take to finish one. But it’s the discovery of secrets that fascinate me. (This is one reason why I still believe today that I should be a scientist.) Hidden trapdoors. What happens when you pull this lever? Secret rooms. Secret weaknesses of powerful monsters.

Sometimes I suspect: is my preparation for the marathon nothing more than a glorified computer game? I finish level 1 (half marathon), I try level 2. If I finish level 2 I win a medal, and then I have this medal to brag about for the rest of my life. That’s pretty much it. I think about what I have achieved when finishing a computer game. The end of the game scenes for computer games are notoriously disappointing. You spend hours – 30? 40? – of your precious time and energy trying to get to the end, and all you get is Mario Plumber getting the princess. OK, you know that Mario is a plumber and will inevitably end up checking out her pipes but it is a letdown. The only reward for finishing a game, is the getting there. Is this the same for my attempt to run a marathon?

I seldom date people. But there was one time on the afternoon before I was to meet Teapot, I finished playing one computer game. My reasoning was this: even if nothing further took place because of our encounter, at least I could claim to have saved the world. I felt good about myself.

A blogger friend of mine (actually he’s my old classmate) wanted to fulfill an old dream of his and started a game software company. I wonder how he’s doing now.

When you play world of warcraft (and there were a bunch of guys who used to play WOW during lunchtime at my place even though I wasn’t one of them) you will see a lot of gold miners. If you study history, then you might find that when Columbus discovered the New World, and subsequent Spanish discoverers found that those lands had plenty of gold, all the Indians were enslaved and made to work full time mining gold. In a way, the quest for gold in computer games can be considered a celebration of genocide. But I digress…

I found a new hobby: when you go looking through youtube, for many computer games you will find “walkthrough” where most computer games are solved, and the action recorded down. It’s a crazy feeling, seeing all those puzzles you agonized over – 10, 20 years ago solved in front of you, just like that. It is a wonderful feeling. There is a lot of closure, as though something, somewhere clicked, and you feel like you can move on.

I think that once you have finished with something you must turn away and never go back. Old computer games. Old girlfriends. Old hobbies. (I will never write another play, or run another marathon.) You will have the memories, but they have to remain as memories.

Conan Volta
A shitty little game but I liked this one. Always wanted to know what lay beyond level 3. Who would have guessed that Conan is now the Governor of California?

Rick Dangerous
I have a colleague whose name is Ricky and when I first saw him I was like, "wow, he looks just like Rick Dangerous.

Rick Dangerous 2

Immortal

Maniac Mansion
This is a great game. I'm showing you the sickest part of the game, which involves a hamster.

Lost Vikings
A good thinking game.

Next: Jet Grind Radio, Gods, Leisure Suit Larry, Heretic, Rampage, Castle of Illusion.

Tryout - Post Rock

2009-12-28T09:09:00.001+08:00

10 years ago, I was a college freshman. I responded to an ad for band members. I wrote that I played piano, I played anything, had perfect pitch, had good hearing. I suppose saying stuff like that is a bit like going on a personals page and saying that you are 36-24-36. It does not guarantee that you are the perfect girlfriend, but people will sit up and take notice.

One Saturday, at the beginning of the month, I responded to a few advertisements for people who were looking for keyboardists. Until now, I am still dealing with the responses. There have been around 8 interested parties, I’m following up with around 4. That’s probably too many for me to handle. But until I meet up with a dead end on all these leads, I won’t need to look for advertisements.

When was it possible for me to do this? I think, as early as beginning 2007, around the time when Shingot was dragging me out to salsa lessons. After a while, I quit, and turned to long distance running instead. 2 half marathons and 1 marathon later, I quit. Just wanted a finisher’s medal. Finally I’m doing something that I always wanted to do since I was a teenager. How did I not know that it was so easy for me to find people to jam with? The opportunity cost is unconscionable.

The only difference between then and now is that since the beginning of 2007, I have written 20-30 songs, ever since I found out how cakewalk could let me record down my stuff.

OK, I have actually played keyboards for around 4 hours today. But not really played, because a lot of it was just gawking at people going around doing their own stuff.

First jamming session was with the band I tried out with last week. I’m still going to follow that leader because I want to see what he can teach me, and I’m also in the company of 3 guys who are even more talented than myself. But I was a little irritated that the leader’s conception of “chim” music was funky time signatures. Not that I should complain, since my last incarnation was named after a funky time signature (it is 7/8 in Spanish).

We ran through 1 or 2 of the leader’s compositions. He brought a laptop, and played his stuff. On one hand his stuff is not too bad even though he’s not as good a composer as I am (I’m not going to brag about this to him anyway, I’m perfectly happy being a sideman for now.) There was a truce between the drummer and the leader, and whereas there were some arguments about who was right or wrong during the 7/8 section he was perfectly OK to go drum along. The way that they played off each other was quite great, and I was just happy to play under the radar.

Later on, he said, I have 15 originals, and we will be playing with them. He intends to gig. And if I can still keep up with them after that, you guys might just find yourselves in a nightclub listening to the 4 of us entertaining you for the evening. He was even talking about performing at jazz festivals overseas. God, no, pls help me…

The leader is also a devout Muslim, and was undergoing voluntary fasting. He was explaining to me that it had to do with some birthday of some prophet or something. How he reconciles this with naming one of his compositions, “Withdr awal Techn ique”, I don’t really understand it.

There were 4 hours between the 2 jamming sessions. Time for a nap, and then dinner.
The second jamming session I had was a tryout for a post-rock band. A lot of bands will tell you which age group they are in in advertisements, so they don’t have generational problems. This was – take away me, and the average age of those people I played with today is around 10 years younger than me.

But they played post rock, and I liked that. In fact, it was such an obscure genre, that I was surprised that Singaporeans were doing this. I also like the fact that now, 10 years later, is when people are starting to catch up to the stuff I was listening to 10 years ago.

I was initially enthusiastic about this, because my point of contact was with a chick 10 years my junior. I got to the studio, and then found myself talking to a young 21 year old drummer. Then I found out that everybody else in the band was male. Well, no problem I guess. But surely less fun than being the only male member of an all-girl’s band. Her name was Kim, and I wonder if important indie bands have bass players named Kim. (Kim Deal from the Pixies, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.)

This gig didn’t go down very well. I sense they are unsure about adding a keyboardist to the line-up. Post rock doesn’t have a lot of keyboardist, and the stuff they played didn’t really feature keyboards. Also you could tell things from the length of time it took for any 1 of them to respond to me (1 week). But I always believe that there is an extra room in any band for a musical genius like myself. The band was putting together a composition. I didn’t know what to write because I wasn’t used to writing post-rock.

Some of them had a few smokes after the session. It’s a hazard in this line that you will come across more than your fair share of smokers. I asked if this was the only post-rock band in Singapore. They said that the genre was gaining strength in Singapore, even though it’s always been a marginal scene. One of the guitarists was a stand-in for the regular, and he was in a progressive rock band with Kim as well.

The drummer sounded like he was having a great time bashing his sticks out in the original. He asked if he was going to far, but we all felt it was fine. I talked to him about post-rock, and he told me that he hated the term. Music is music, etc. But that’s what we’re doing in the band, right? Post rock is what we’ve been doing. But we should be free to spearhead in other directions, of course.

Sample conversation in the band. "So, uh, how long you been playing keyboards?" "Since before you were born."

Seems like both the bands have much in common. Both have Malays and Chinese. With 1 exception, the Malays play the guitars and drums, the Chinese play the keyboards and bass. Both have capable guitarists and drummers. Both have members living all over the island, in Woodlands, Bukit Batok, Pasir Ris, Tampines, Thompson Rd.

I have 2 more engagements. One of them is with a former frontwoman of an all girl band who released 1 or 2 albums in the 1990s. She’s thinking of a comeback. We talked over the phone, and she sent me a demo. It’s scary, completely different from what I like. But I just have to do some arrangement for her. It will be a plus if we get our stuff recorded.

Another one is a guy who’s trying to get a band together, and he claims to have written pop songs. That’s the vehicle I have to show my compositions. But how will I balance that against what I’m doing for the other 2? Well, at least I know that I would have freed up a lot of time I used to spend on books. It’s a lot of time.

There are a few immediate tasks to do following the belated start of my music career. 1 – learn how to play jazz on the piano. 2 – learn more about how to use the synthesizer, at least make the demos more professional sounding. 3- learn a rock instrument. What will it be, the bass? The drums?

Well, guys, you know that I don’t really go out and enjoy myself for the heck of it. Everything is work. Even my hobbies are work. They aren’t even hobbies, since if you were to consider that a lot of these things are on my “things to do before you die” list, then it is work. It’s something that has to be done. Even my reading was all on the “things to do” list.

Teapot part 1

2009-12-26T23:15:00.000+08:00

Teapot

When she joined our office I hardly took notice of her. But she was already quite distinctive looking: short, stout (for want of a better word) but with a flowing lock of hair all the way down to her waist. I still remember being squeezed with her at the back of a car on the way to the company recreation centre.

After a few fire drills, I found myself unable to keep my eyes off her. She was hardly somebody who you would call beautiful at first sight, but she had a way of growing on you. I liked that she looked so unusual – I’m usually drawn to people who dare to be different.

It probably was discomforting for her, she noticed me. I tried to chat her up, and emailed her. The initial attempts at conversation were stilted, and it was not easy to find stuff to talk about, we didn’t know that many people in common.

One Valentine’s day, I decided to be cheeky and send her a Valentine in the form of a poem. I can’t really remember much of what happened after that. She thought it was funny. I didn’t expect anything else to come out of it, other than it planting a seed in her head.

A few months passed, and soon Shingot was about to get married. At around the same time, she was transferred to another building. Shingot knew I was after her, so he invited her to his wedding (I was there too of course) and then arranged to have her sat at my table. When she asked him if there was anyone to pick her up, he forwarded the email to me. I don’t know what turn the conversation was taking, but she said that she was happy to eat anything that had meat in it, even human meat. I wrote right back to me: “you can eat my meat anytime baby.” According to LC, she choked on a drink when she wrote that.

Thereafter began our first date. At Shingot’s wedding, in full view of a lot of people from the office. She dressed in a red dress which looked really good (she said that wasn’t her best dress but I don’t believe it 100%). I brought out my new red shirt. It was a coincidence. But we did look a lot like a real couple that night, except that she barely reached up to my shoulder.

We talked for a bit, but I can’t remember much about the conversation. She laughed at my inability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, but I was a novice driver, and nervous. We found that we were both music lovers (but that meant not that much, because we listened to totally different kinds of music.) She was being animated and telling me about how much she loved this or that music when it played. She had decent taste. But she thought that the Sly Stone I had on the car player was crazy music and preferred to listen to her 933. I remember her raving about Jay Chou’s “secret”. She sang in a choir. It was an OK date, neither fantastic nor disastrous.

At the end of the evening, she took pictures of us. I don’t know why, but probably to remember one time when she went out with a guy 1 foot taller than she was. We passed by some of her colleagues, who asked her if she wanted a ride. She said that she was going to her aunt’s place in Geylang to spend the weekend. I said that I stayed in Bedok, and I was going to send her home because it was on the way. She spoke the truth; I lied. But later on she told me she thought the white lie was quick thinking.

We had a follow up date a week later. It was just me and a colleague and her, we played tennis. I remember that she brought a very cute back pack. We laughed and played tennis. I didn’t have the car that day because I didn’t have the pass to drive in. After the games, though, she took a long shower. I, customarily didn’t bathe. Ghost offered to drive us to dinner after the game, but she asked to be taken home instead. I was upset at that, but later on it occurred to me that she was probably disgusted.

She did ask me for help on a few things, and we did exchange some more SMSs. I asked her out one more time for dinner, but she made an excuse at the last minute. Thus ended the first phase of my attempts to win her over.

There was some banter, and she did tell me that she liked some of my funny comments at work.

1 year later I showed her photos of my trip to the US. She liked some of the funny pictures. Also claimed to know immediately that the other chick in my photos was my sister. Then she sent me a photo of herself. Sounded like a good sign, but I never followed up on that. I didn’t think that I was ready yet.

(to be continued)

Dumbfuck bimbo MILF

2009-12-23T23:57:00.000+08:00

This morning I was walking out to my car. (Or rather, van). I saw, a convoy of 2 cars, both of them nice big cars. The Lexus in front was driving very slowly and pissing off the one behind her, who was probably on his way to work too.

Then, in an act of either colossal stupidity or selfishness, she stopped there, and asked me how to get to a nearby school. In the back seat was her daughter, dressed in a St Nick’s uniform. I think they were preparing for the first day of the school, which was in less than 2 weeks’ time.

Would I tell her to fuck off and stop obstructing traffic in my estate? Would I hurriedly give her instructions? On one hand I didn’t want to compound her sin of being inconsiderate. On the other hand, she was an offending sight, and the earlier she was gone from my housing estate, the better. Eventually what tipped the balance was the fact that she was skimpily dressed, and not that bad looking. So I told the bimbo how to get to the school as fast as I could. (And the short answer is that you use the main road instead of looking for a short cut through my housing estate.) Wham bam thank you ma'am.

How did the daughter get into St Nick’s if the mother was so dumb? But ah, I remembered this was primary school, where you just had to have the right parents, live in the right neighbourhood, and you got into the right school. OK.

Cleaning up

2009-12-19T14:04:00.003+08:00

Blog entries are harder to write this time around. It used to be more fun when I was just whiling time away. I never had to wonder what I was doing - just head out with a sackful of books, and then a trip to nowhere, a few hours in a cafe. Used to be so easy. How did I not realise that my decision making abilities were being impaired by this extremely predictable routine?

I could just read a book, and think about it. It's so much more fun thinking about other peoples' lives. You never have to make a difficult decision about them.

Last week I bought a book. Well I am supposed to have already given up books but this is no ordinary book, this was Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Capital” at less than $10. So I had to have it. It’s like, you may have given up sex, but if one day, some hot Japanese AV soft porn star / Korean race queen turns up at your door with only a towel, are you not going to make an exception?

As an aside, some of you are going to laugh, but a few nights ago I committed the cardinal sin. I surfed porn, and forgot to turn of the computer before turning in. Actually I was so tired that I thought, "I'm going to take a 5 mins nap". I woke up the next morning, and my father was already there. So he saw everything. He saw everything but said nothing. Ah well.

I got a gift from the gift exchange (conducted by the whole building, not the department). I only took part because it was a chance to get rid of one of the 200 books that need to get out of my room in order for me to have some decent living space. In exchange I got a picture frame. I said, "great! All I need to do is get a girlfriend, and I'll have a complete set."

This is not a good festive season for me. For the last 2 years, I had thrown caution to the wind, telling myself, "screw it all, I'm going to leave (current workplace) any time soon and I'm going to think about the future". Well the future hasn't happened yet, even though my days of stalling upon it are over. I am a great procrastinator but I have a limit - 1 year? 6 months? And then after that I will get off my ass and do something. But what the fuck is it going to be?

I remember something that Winston Churchill sarcastically said about the Americans: "you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing - after they have exhausted every other possibility". Am I like that as well?

And this festive season hasn't been very good for me. When at the office I'm rushing out work because I'm also clearing 1 day of leave every week. When I'm on leave, I can't do much other then sleep. I'm tired much of the time. I don't know why, maybe I'm just tired (I'm down with flu.) This is the time of the year you're most susceptible to the flu, and also the time of the year it's the most difficult to recover from it, because every where you go there's always a draft blowing.

I’ve cleaned up my desk. I’m working on my room as well. I suppose that cleaning up was long overdue. For too long I have turned up at work and looked around, and there’s a fog of despondency hanging over my cubicle because there’re papers everywhere.

I suppose this is part of the cycle of life. For every birth, there is a death. In stochastic processes, there is a birth and death process. In computer science, we call garbage collection. This concept is also prevalent in eastern mythology (in fact one of the computer science courses I attended at the uni used the yin-yang symbol as its logo.) The hindus have their god of creation, and another one for destruction. It's all supposed to be all neutral, nothing is better than the other, all part of life. (As opposed to the Christian view where birth is a good thing and death an extremely terrible thing.)

So I'll go through all the papers piled on my desks, the one at home and the one in the office. I'll sift through all that email that I have not filed away for years. (My home account. I normally am quite good about my office mail.) I'll read and throw away bills. Balance my accounts. Sell away my books. Give away my old clothes. My home was renovated while I was in the states - I had an almost empty room when I started work. I'm still wondering how on earth it got entirely filled up with junk over just a couple of years.

All the old files with useless stuff - I'm going to throw them out. I suppose all of this is a start - do something mindless for a while that actually makes my life better. Do it when the weather is cold enough that I won't automatically get drenched in sweat just by standing in my room for 5 minutes. Do it before Chinese New Year.

And then after that, on to the more difficult questions - how do I convince members of the opposite sex that I am not a boring person, how do I convince people that I'm a great songwriter, a great scientist, etc etc etc.

Tryout - Fusion band

2009-12-19T00:55:00.000+08:00

During my 2nd time going to the studio to practice my drums, I found the practicing to have some diminishing returns. Well, I was to find that the “You Can’t Hurry Love” / “Lust For Life” drum pattern was really easy and didn’t really involve the pedals. I found myself being able to do one or two fancy tricks, but still struggling to maintain a steady beat for more than 1 minute at a time. (Well if you have to drum for an 8 minute song then you’re screwed. No “Stairway To Heaven” for you.)

After it was over, the guy behind the counter came and told me that time’s up. Then to my surprise, he gave me an impromptu lesson. Turns out that he’s quite a nifty drummer himself. He taught me a few things:

1. First and last thing about drumming – learn to maintain a steady beat. Nothing much else matters. This is true. Moe Tucker is famous for not doing anything interesting with the drums other than holding a steady beat.
2. Practice with your pedals. You can do this anywhere. His mother used to ask him why he was tapping his feet under the dinner table.
3. Practice your trills with the snare drum. Once you got those basics right, then you can do all your fancy tricks with the other drums.
4. The centre of a cymbal sounds a bit like a cowbell when hit
5. This is not tennis where you have to keep a stiff wrist. Most of the flexibility from drum movements revolves around the wrist. (No wonder Max Weinberg kenna RSI when he was drumming for Bruce Springsteen.)

The other thing is, how do drummers practice in Singapore? The hardest thing when living in a country with no garages is to find a place for drummers to practice. Fortunately he said, just use your pillow. That’s great. So I have an inexpensive way of practicing the drums without blowing $13 per hour.

That week I went on www.soft.com.sg, which is one of the biggest musician’s forums in Singapore. I advertised myself as a keyboard player who has a grade 8 (this is true) who has perfect pitch (true) and who’s a nifty songwriter (also true). I also said that I have 20 years’ experience but that’s misleading – I learnt piano while young, did not very much, and just let 20 years elapse. I have been writing songs on and off for 20 years so I suppose you could count that.

I also looked up advertisements of people looking around for a keyboardist. There weren’t many around. I thought I had better learn how to play the drums or the bass, that way I could have a chance at being in a proper band.

The first tryout was with a guy who, I could tell, was rather proud of his guitar playing skills. He was also giving lessons to people, and I found out that he was a Berklee graduate. (I’m talking about the famous music school, not the famous Bay Area university.) I asked him what sort of stuff to expect to play. Then he gave me the name of 2 Chick Corea and 2 Charlie Parker pieces. I gagged. But I still went out and tried anyway, figuring out that if I screwed it all up (and I believed that I was going to screw it up) at least I took a shot at it.

When I entered the studio, at least it was a familiar area. It was the exact same studio where I twice went down to try out the drum kit. Seated at the drum kit was a portly Malay guy who admitted to having eaten 3 ice creams over the course of 1 afternoon. The guitarist who contacted me was an intense looking Malay, and the bassist was a skinny Chinese whose mannerisms reminded me of Honest Face (so I’ll call him Honest Face 2).

They started out with Chick Corea’s “Spain”. I wasn’t familiar with the chords, and I was desperately trying to keep up, splashing and sinking like a cat in water. The guitarist turned to me and said, “play a solo”, and I couldn’t play. In fact, no matter how much I like jazz, I can’t play it. At least not yet. The second piece was not much better. I was reduced to just playing chords and letting them jam on. Later on the guitarist made it easy for me and played stuff I knew, like “Superstition” and “Autumn Leaves”. Then the guitarist turned to me and said, “play me one of your songs”. I played them the song I wrote for teapot (Maybe I’ll blog about teapot soon) 1 week ago. I didn’t like everything they did to the song, but they caught on and jammed to it. I was a little amazed. Well it’s nice when you hear something you wrote played properly.

Then they moved on to the original compositions. Naturally they aren’t as good as mine, or at least they didn’t perform it properly. I can’t play well but I am after all a really good songwriter.

Incidently, the drummer here knows the nice dude behind the counter who gave me that impromptu drum instruction.

Later on, when we met for prata, I got to know the politics of the band better. The core of the band was the guitarist and the bass player. They knew each other for 10 years, and they were also part of an ensemble that both of them left at the same time. The guitarist was the nominal leader of the pair (and therefore this group). And he was the best musician among us, technically. But I had a premonition about his character when he posted a message on the message board, scolding another electric guitar teacher for undercharging and spoiling the market. Why be so nasty about this in public?

The guitarist was in full flow, gleefully documenting his exit from the Previous Ensemble. They had a simmering tensions with the leader of the group, who had given a radio interview earlier that day, in the afternoon. Then the guitarist complained that the rest of the band didn’t get paid their fair share, and that their previous frontman did not have much stage presence. Eventually, on that night, and in the same prata store where we set, the Previous Ensemble broke up.

After that, I remember that the guitarist talked a few things about jazz, probably assuming that I didn’t know that much about it. In a way, I didn’t know the theory but I have listened enough to have a feel for it. OK, I was willing to let him talk. He said some things that were useful (like how important it was to have a mentor, how important it was to keep on exploring and learning new things) and a lot of things that were not.

Like how he used to have a mentor who was the keyboardist of an R+B singer. Or like how he insinuated himself into a band so successfully that they fired the old guitarist and replaced the incumbent with him instead. Or like how a lot of people from Berklee can’t play very well, or like how he passed the audition to get his Berklee scholarship.

Throughout the whole conversation, the other two were comparatively quiet. It was only after the guitarist left that things started getting really interesting. The drummer was a session musician, and hired to play with them. He was a drumming teacher in real life. He started bitching about the guitar player, being too caught up with himself and his ego. The bass player, honest face 2, didn’t mind the guy that much, but he conceded that there were character defects. Then the drummer complained about the original piece that he wrote, said there was a weird time signature. I had to agree with that. I don’t mind listening to difficult pieces if there’s a soul in there, something worth listening to. What I can’t stand up for are technical difficulty for the sake of technical difficulty. In other words, musical masturbation. Well that guy was dangerously close to being a musical masturbator.

Drummer pointed out that this ensemble was dangerously close to being just a vehicle for guitarist’s superior skills. Which would be pretty annoying. I said that players in the band must think about the bigger picture, and they should think about how the whole band works, rather than just accompanying a virtuoso. We agreed on that much.

But then the drummer said something else I wasn’t sure I agreed with. He said that you had to connect with the audience and play what they want. I always believed in being 1 or 2 steps ahead of the audience. But maybe he was a professional musician and he always believed in that. Whereas me, I’m a person with adventurous tastes, and I go for just about anything except for heavy metal. I’m more of a pushing the boundaries kind of thing. I’m more for that “you follow your heart, and the audience follows you”. But in a way we both agreed that maybe the guitarist wasn’t always following his heart.

Apparently I had passed the audition, but I shudder to think what lies in wait for me. Maybe I did OK, and would do fine just being very unspectacular while he did all the soloing. In the event, Guitar player did ask for my contact thereafter.

All of a sudden, though, 2 more people whose ads I replied to showed up in my email inbox. One of them is a post-rock (think Tortoise, Mogwai) band and another one is a Britpop band. Both look interesting propositions, so I guess there are more tryouts ahead. I think I should remember one thing: I don't know where I came across this saying before, responding to band ads is not like ordering pizza, it's not like you send a private message on a forum, and suddenly a band appears before you for you to audition for. I suppose the band members all have to look at the responses and decide who to talk to.

I suppose I am making a bit of headway now.

You see, I have options. I can either hang around matchmaking web sites, and write to women one by one begging to have dates with them so that I can pay the bills at expensive restaurants, or I can become a rock star and have them line up in front of me for the opportunity to suck my dick. I'd very much prefer the latter.

Kennedy Brothers

2009-12-14T00:41:00.000+08:00

This is one of the most famous pictures of Barack Obama, immortalised into a poster. But why did this poster look so familiar when I first saw it? Did it remind me of anybody?

Interesting, eh?

The last of the Kennedy brothers has died. Let’s look at the other Kennedys.

Joseph Kennedy, the father
He was always an ambitious person, who wanted his sons to succeed in politics. He himself was the US ambassador to the UK until just before WWII, although he made the fatal mistake of supporting Adolf Hitler.

Joe Kennedy Jr
He was the star of the family since he was young. Always more hardworking and driven by his brothers. He was the family’s best hope to become the president of the United States. Unfortunately during WWII, he was shot down and he died.

John F Kennedy
He was a very charismatic character. Even though he was an indifferent student at Harvard, and he didn’t pass many bills when he was a congressman or senator, there was no doubting that he was very intelligent and hungry for knowledge. He ran for president against Nixon, and won a very narrow victory. As with the victory of Bush 2 40 years later, it was achieved by some voting impropriety, although this wasn’t revealed until much later.

He had his flaws, as is revealed later: he was a serial womaniser, and he also had a whole list of health problems which suggested that even if he wasn’t shot, he would have died young. The fact that he was able to conceal these flaws from the public indicates that the US presidency is very different today from what it used to be like in the past.

But at that time he was a shining hope to millions. He lived in a moment where a lot of Americans were very idealistic about the future. A big generation of baby boomers were young people then, and they identified with the president.

His performance as a president was decidedly mixed: there are people who blamed him for the failure of his attempt to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The USSR leader, Khrushchev thought he was a weakling and put up the Berlin wall. During the Cuban missile crisis, rash Soviet leaders lead the US and the USSR closer to World War III than any point before or since. But he managed to lead the US out of the crisis, and further moved to improve the relationship with the USSR.

Kennedy was known to have fought for the rights of black people, although it was Johnson who signed the Civil Rights act after the death of JFK.

It’s impossible to tell what he would have done with the Vietnam War. He was president when it could have gone any way. He promised to support the South Vietnam leader, but did not follow through enough on his promise, and the South Vietnam leader was murdered. As it turned out, Johnson, who took over for him, was instrumental in escalating the conflict into a full blown war. But some people suggest that if Kennedy had lived, he might have found some better way to deal with Vietnam.

His death is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the USA. The official explanation, that he was killed by a lone gunman operating alone, is not believed by most people. There were reports that people heard gunshots from a few different places. They caught the only gunman caught, Lee Harvey Ostwald, but soon after that, and live on national television a policeman, purportedly angry about JFK being killed, shot Lee Harvey Ostwald. They never got the chance to question Ostwald about his motives, or who, if anybody, set him up.

JFK had enemies. His brother, Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General, and a great enemy of the mafia. Even more so, since they actually enlisted the help of the mafia

There also exists great controversy about Kennedy about his attitude towards the Cold War, because there is no consensus about whether he is a hawk or a dove. There are some who said that Lee Harvey Ostwald was pro-Castro, and he was shooting JFK to pay back for the Bay of Pigs. There are others who said that JFK was making a tentative rapproachment with other countries in South America, and was planning to seek warmer ties with Castro. The CIA didn’t like that, and they got involved in a conspiracy to have JFK murdered.

The fact that there is no one convincing explanation for JFK’s murder left a sour taste in the mouths of a generation of Americans. They said that the 1960s began with a lot of hope, but for them the death of a leader they loved was the beginning of the disappointment of these hopes.

It was generally felt that Kennedy was still in the phase where he was learning how to become a good president. He did not have very clear objectives, but he had the political skill to overcome a lot of his opponents. But not a sniper’s bullet.

Robert F Kennedy
He was a very strange person. He had two sides, one of them was the angel, who was very idealistic about destroying the mafia. He was one of the toughest prosecutors around. But he was also very vengeful towards his enemies, and for some reason, one of his enemies was LBJ, the vice president and next president of the US.

I had just read the story of Bobby. There are plenty of people out there who believe that there was a conspiracy out there who murdered JFK, and in that book, Bobby was one of them. But he was going to keep quiet about his beliefs until he got elected president, and then he got all the power to do whatever he wanted to do.

He was close to being elected president. He more or less secured the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president by the time he was murdered. If he ran against Nixon, he might have defeated him, instead of Nixon defeating Humphrey. A lot of things could have been different. Nixon was president because RFK died, and Johnson was president because JFK died. Both of them were responsible, more than anybody else, for the Vietnam war being what it was.

If you believe some accounts, he was reaching out to the communist countries. He wanted to make peace with Castro, and with the Soviet Union. After all, his brother had almost stumbled onto nuclear war with the Soviets. You just wonder if the world would have been very much different, and the cold war ended very differently, if he got to be president.

Ted Kennedy
Ted Kennedy, the one who died recently, was probably somebody they thought could become a president. But there was a scandal which put an end to all that: he drove somebody home late at night, while drunk, and killed her in a road accident.

Still, he managed to be a long-serving member of the Senate, and managed to make a big impact. There were even some people who proclaimed him to be the most important of the Kennedys. I don’t know about that.

Well, that’s the end of them brothers, I suppose. It’s been a great ride.

Noughties

2009-12-13T17:41:00.003+08:00

The noughties are over, but this is the first time I’ve come across an instance where there was so much apathy towards the end of the decade. I’m not old enough to remember the end of the 70s.

At the end of the 80s, there was a lot of excitement in the air, because the Berlin Wall had just fallen, and everybody felt that the world was never going to be the same again (they were right) but they just didn’t know how. Plenty of social theories about how the Western liberal democratic system had triumph, and how communism was on the ash heap of history, were bandied about.

At the end of the 90s, there was another mood of excitement. This time it was because it was the dawn of the internet age. (OK, it was 5 years after 1995, which was the year that most people had first heard of the internet.) The tech stock bubble was at its height – it would burst shortly after. We looked back at the end of a century, indeed the end of a millennium. Although nobody really talked very much about what the year 1000 was like.

Now? I saw an article from Time magazine, proclaiming the noughties to be one of the worst decades in recent memory. It probably is, from a western perspective. At the beginning of the decade, the US was the undisputed masters of the world. At the end, they are still the strongest country in the world, but it’s become inevitable that other countries will catch up. They’ve had 9/11, and then they blundered into Afghanistan and Iraq. Closer to home, they’ve had plenty of job losses and layoffs (these started in the 90s, but they continued on). China was either stealing everybody’s jobs or driving down the price of unskilled labour in the world. They had their Hurricane Katrina, and the trauma of seeing one of their most culturally significant cities become a third world disaster zone.

World wide, it was not a great place to be. We had the threat of terrorist attacks, although the threat is more overstated than real. I think you don’t really have to be worried about terrorist attacks unless you’re in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent or Xinjiang. Most of the developed world is safe. (A few attacks on London, Madrid or even Moscow doesn’t change this.)

There were plenty of natural disasters. We had that Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, which more or less wiped out Aceh. We had earthquakes in Sichuan and several in Indonesia.

We didn't have a lot of the financial crises that had taken place during the late 90s - Mexico, then Asia, then Russia, then Argentina then Brazil. But in 2008, we had one big blow-up, in the US and in Europe. That was serious.

Musically this was not a great decade. I had regarded 80s pop as a low point in music, and this is a decade which looks back favourably at 80s synth pop. There was the death of the album, courtesy of the MP3 / iPod revolution. I’m sure there’s some great stuff out there but it’s not getting out to the masses.

The fact that there were so many band reunions in the 00s just serves to show that a lot of older bands sensed that there was a vacuum to fill. A Guardian writer opined that he didn’t know what was more depressing, seeing the Pixies reform, and being a shadow of their former days (this is an exaggeration, but you probably understand that punk musicians are not at their best in their 40s and 50s), or seeing that they’re still better than all the new bands out there.

This hasn't been terrible for everybody. There are a lot of things happening in Asia - it was a pretty good time to be in Asia - rising standard of living and everything. But still...

The future? We more or less know the score. There's a combination of rising middle class, hungry for resources. Running out of food, running out of water, running out of oil. Climate change. Ecological disasters. Islands disappearing. Temperature's rising. Nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists. Liberal democracy on the wane.

They've all talked about how they hoped that the next decade was going to be better - we'll see...

Procrastination

2009-12-13T17:31:00.000+08:00

England is not famous for producing skilled footballers. But there was Matthew Le Tissier. He had no pace, but he was extremely skilled, strong, and scored many goals. He played for a club called Southampton who was always one of the weaker sides in the top flight of English football, yet he comfortably kept them in the Premier League year after year. Recently, their financial troubles has been one of the sad stories of English football.

In Southampton, during his time, he was regarded as God. He was the captain of the side. He scored spectacular goals. He took around 50 penalties over his career and only ever missed one. But invariably his name has the adjective “enigmatic”. You never knew whether he was going to be the man of the match, or whether he was going to fade away and be an anonymous watcher. No matter, for somebody of his caliber to be playing for one club, a minor one at that, for most of his career, was extremely rare.

In contrast, when he was a youngster, there was another young striker playing alongside him at Southampton. He was considerably less talented all round, but he had a very forceful personality, and he always gave his best no matter what. He moved to Blackburn where he won the league, and then to Newcastle, his hometown club, where he was their biggest player. He came closer than anybody before or since to winning the European championship on home soil in 1996. There were a few good years, where they qualified for the Champion’s league, even though they never actually won anything. He was Alan Shearer.

And while Alan Shearer was almost always in the England team, the same was not true of Matt Le Tissier. He only had less than 10 caps. There were coaches who tried to sign him away from Southampton, Glenn Hoddle for Chelsea and Terry Venables for Tottenham. But later on when both were England managers, neither gave Le Tissier many chances to wear the England shirt.

It probably is the case that both of them recognised that Le Tissier was a talented person, no more. He didn’t have the fire or the ambition. If he didn’t want to get to the next level, then he shouldn’t represent England either.

I was first called a procrastinator in primary school. I think back then my mother had great ambitions for me. At least, much more than she had for herself. Maybe I never got into the habit of liking what I did. But I took my time to do things, and never ever pounced into it whole heartedly. I suppose that was my nature.

The central issue of my life had already been articulated for me at a very young age, by a teacher: “it’s never about what you’re capable of. It’s about whether or not you’re ever going to use your gifts.”

I had always been an above average student when teachers had this opinion I could have been one of the best. But you never know, perhaps my talent was merely being able to appear intelligent. Some people look like owls although when you scratch under the surface they are pretty empty inside. I’m not one to trust anybody’s judgement completely.

I got things done, though. There were a few things, but they were things that weren’t competitive in nature. Creative endeavours, being the class clown, invention competitions. Stuff like that. There were wonderful things that happened during my school days, that were the result of daydreaming. I suppose I never told my parents what I really wanted to do, and after hearing them nag at me about why I never did A, in the end I could still show them B, C and D, which they never asked for. A classmate once said to me, “why are you bitching about how crappy your record is? You’ve still got a whole lot of things”. Yes, but no leadership positions, mind.

The Myers Briggs test indicator has this axis of whether you are a “perceiving” or a “judging” type. I was firmly in the perceiving area. I never liked simple explanations when the truth was more complex. I often got irritated when my boss told me to water down the story for an audience. I got annoyed when some people are always so sure of themselves, although I do notice something: first, they will be right a great number of the time, and second, when they are wrong people seem more willing to forgive them. But people like that, people who act on their first impulses, aren’t generally the creative types. The creative types are the ones who are willing to entertain crazy ideas and make them work, or are willing to wait and do nothing until the perfect idea or the perfect opportunity comes along.

I ended up taking on a job that I wasn’t 100% sure that I enjoyed. There were people who were always telling me that since Maths was my best subject, I should do something that was related to it, and this job had a lot of Maths. But somewhere I knew that it wasn’t true that Maths was my best subject: I was good at a whole lot of other things too, it was merely the first subject that I took to. It was horrifying to discover that perhaps I wasn’t going to enjoy it that much. But I didn’t do much to look elsewhere.

I “majored” in Maths at school. I think it was lazy thinking, after all it was the subject that I could do, that was very well respected. I could have done something more useful, or something that I liked more. But I got lazy or stubborn and didn’t want to change. I could have been a computer science major instead.

I couldn’t decide what I liked best either, so I just tried a bit of everything. It was very disorientating, even though I was sorda glad that I had a very varied education. Although sometimes I wondered whether I was putting in a lot of effort at trying to master a discipline that I would never see again in my life. Perhaps it could have been a bit more focused. Still it is very amusing when people point at me and say, “maths guy”.

Some people have judged me and said that I’m a wanderer, a drifter. It’s not entirely false. But it’s a little unfair when they always think that this is a weakness rather than a strength. Eventually, I learnt: you can only do one thing at a time. So at any one time, you should decide what you’re going to do, give it your best, concentrate, and do well so that even though you never have to do it again, there will be no regrets.

I could have gone around and immersed myself in American culture instead of holing myself up in books. But I just felt that books had more to teach you than popular culture, most of which was junk anyway. Unfortunately it’s popular culture, rather than books that makes it easier for you got earn friends.

There were always things that people were going to do in a lifetime: grow up, earn money, start a family, settle down. I have dithered at these things. Financial planning, learning to drive a car, getting your own house, these are things that I did late in life, later than many of my peers. There were things that stood in my way: building the perfect CD collection, downloading MP3s, watching movies, reading books. Especially reading books.

There was this once, when I thought that I would go after a girl. We had 1 or 2 dates, nothing special. I decided to stop for a while while I did other things – I can’t remember the reason I gave myself for procrastinating, but it couldn’t be important because I can’t remember it now. Maybe I wanted to spend the weekends reading books instead of wracking my brains thinking about what to do for the next date? Maybe it was the marathon? But the marathon was 5 months ago. In any case, 6 months passed, a year, and suddenly I get some rumours that she’s going out with somebody else. There’s nothing to blame people for, only myself for being so spectacularly stupid. (Edit: you can read more about this episode when I get down to publishing an entry called “teapot”)

On one hand, it shouldn’t make any difference because, both before and after I wasn’t doing anything. On the other hand, I learnt about this when I was about to go look for her again. It’s very irritating and disruptive of my plans.

There are a lot of things that were fun when I was younger, but I outgrown them. I used to take a stack of books to an all night café on Saturday night and read the whole night, or at least as much as I could. Either that or I would go watch a football match at a coffeeshop and read a book at the same time. Some of the other patrons look at me, bemused. One of them even called me to the face, “our friend with the books” But to me it makes perfect sense to watch matches and read books because you can always have something to do when all the boring stuff is going on, which is 50% of the time.

It was good while it lasted. I’ve blogged about this before, you felt like because you were putting in that much effort, that you were doing something with your life. There are nice places in Singapore that are not overcrowded, even on weekends. You can pick up I-S magazines and there will be cafes in out of the way areas located where lots of wealthy angmohs stay. Some are expensive, some less so, but you will not get hordes of screaming kids and maids like in a suburban mall.

But I think gradually I was doing so much of it that it felt like overkill. In retrospect maybe I wasn’t really enjoying it but rather the placid stresslessness of doing nothing.

In the last few weeks, I had decided to stop my lazy, horizontal lifestyle. There were a few factors. Maybe it was a change of job scope which made me busier. Maybe it was my getting older and realising that time was running out. Maybe my first foray into dating in a long long time forced me to reconsider how I have to live my life so that my dreams for myself don’t remain just that – as dreams. Maybe I just needed to live out a whole era of procrastination in order to learn that it wasn’t really what I should be doing.

Drums

2009-12-09T16:37:00.002+08:00

My sister, who once heard me tap my fingers idly, said that I should learn how to play the drums. I think that I'm finally going to take her up on that suggestion.

10 years ago, when visiting Disneyland, I bought a pair of drumsticks in Orlando hard rock cafe, fully expecting that I would use them one day. I didn't do it.

The student dorm that I was in for my first year in the U was next to a block whose theme was music. They had a jamming studio on the first floor. I had gone down there for a few jamming sessions and that was it. I played the keyboard. The ppl I was with were keen to continue but I decided that I didn't travel halfway around the world just to play some jams. (But if you asked me now what I travelled halfway around the world for, I'd have been hard-pressed to answer you. There's nothing tangible that I could point to.)

When we were young, we had it drummed into our heads that playing music was not a reputable past-time, even though it had already been a tradition in the West, that anyone could start a band, and it was a rite of passage, or at least an attempt at being entrepreneural.

I remember that in the early 90s, there were only a handful of alternative rock bands in Singapore, many of them were heavy metal / hardcore, and I wasn't interested in that at all. I hadn't noticed it very much over the last few years, but the band scene in Singapore had grown a lot. If nothing else, it made it very easy to go looking for band mates.

Any way, I don't think I can handle a guitar, so I would have to look for other people who are good at playing. I can do song writing. It's funny that many song writers out there don't play guitars. Paul McCartney was perfectly happy playing bass (although he played guitar in early versions of the Beatles). Sting played bass. Brian Wilson played bass. Antonio Carlos Jobim didn't play anything. Ian Brown played the tambourine. Stevie Wonder played everything other than the guitar. I'm happy to let other people handle the complicated instruments.

Anyway there are a lot of jamming studios in Singapore. Unfortunately the drums are not something that I would really want in my house right now, firstly because it takes up space, and secondly because it annoys the neighbours (even though I don't have neighbours that I'm afraid of pissing off.) So last weekend I went to a studio, and payed $13 for the privilege of bashing the drums for 1 hour. That is expensive. I wish I could find a cheaper place to practice. But it sure beats shelling up $7 for an expensive cup of coffee, and you have the privilege of doing nothing.

It went OK. At first, my pedalling was so weak, I couldn't even get the bass drum to give me a simple beat. Later, as it went on, I tried to figure out how to do some fancy stuff with the drums. Some of it came off well, others didn't. I was eavesdropping on the neighbours, and the drums sounded funkier than mine. Then there was the hi-hat on the left foot. What does a high hat do? I couldn't co-ordinate 2 hands and 1 leg at the same time, so how on earth was I going to play drums with all 4 limbs at the same time?

Anyway, drummers seem to be a rare commodity in Singapore, judging by the number of advertisements which ask for drummers. I think I really should learn the bass, because drummers are almost never the leaders in rock bands. They could lead jazz combos (think Art Blakey, Buddy Rich) but even then that's rare. OK, there's Lars Urlich from Metallica but that's about it. It's much easier to balance the bass with telling the rest of the band that they're going to play your song, how to play this riff, that riff, etc, how it all fits in together.

Well, that hour passed quite quickly, even though I was trying to be playing the whole time. Sometimes, though, you just have to give your legs a break. It's OK, at least I have 1 more hobby with which to pass my time, so that I can throw out some old hobbies I no longer need. (*cough* basketball *cough*).

So I went on one of Singapore's leading music forum, and advertised myself as a "keyboardist" and a songwriter. I got 3 or 4 replies. We'll see. If I have to play with ppl 10 years younger then so be it.

4 places

2009-12-05T13:19:00.001+08:00

In spite of my promising myself that I wouldn’t go back to a book warehouse sale, I still went anyway. And in a way I’m glad that I went for that sale. First, it was the Penguin book sale, which has the best books of all the warehouse sales. (Second is MPH, and third is a tie between Times and Borders). Second, a few things I saw on the way reminded me of a few things about the life I had been living over the last few years.

(digression start)

This is a digression, but I must tell the story of how I managed to get to that warehouse sale. I had originally intended that I would pop by at the office and get 1 or 2 emails sent out. But after a morning run I found myself sleeping again and only waking up at 5 in the afternoon. In the end, I decided to go get myself some dinner (1 bus trip) and then off to the Toa Payoh Library (1 more bus trip). Then I thought that it would be good to swing by the jamming studio I saw at Thompson Rd and check it out. (1 bus trip).

Here’s where it gets interesting. I was undecided whether or not to go to the office and in the end I decided against it. So I went to the warehouse sale, promising myself that I would only pick up 3 books. The easiest way, it seemed, was to take a bus to the east line, probably Eunos MRT, and take the MRT there. (Damn circle line still not open)

So I grabbed the first bus to McRitchie (1 bus trip). I crossed the road and grabbed a bus to Braddell (another bus trip). From Braddell I could take 59 or 93, even though 93 was preferred because it took me straight to Eunos. Eventually 59 came first, so I took it (another bus trip). I got off the 59 after it got off PIE, and then crossed the road to take a bus to Eunos (1 bus trip) but I overshot, and I had to take another bus back to Eunos (1 bus trip). I overshot again, and had to walk 1 bus stop’s length back to the MRT. But I also found myself near the junction of Joo Chiat Rd and Changi Rd. (One day I will blog about Joo Chiat but this is a historical landmark for me)

Then I took the MRT to the Expo. After the book sale, there was still time to go to the office (it was alright for me, I could dump my books there, no different from lugging them home direct), something that took 2 uses of my ezlink card, and after that back home (another 2 uses). All in all, I used the ez link card 13 times that day.

OK, end of the digression.

At the sale, I ended up buying 10 books, a few of which were books I would have willingly bought at full price, or I would have, of my own accord, borrowed from the library to read, including “Hot, Flat and Crowded” by Thomas Friedman (well there’s a 2nd edition out now but I dun mind the first. There was “The Age of Turbulence” by Alan Greenspan that I read halfway. There was “Gang Leader For a Day”, about a gang leader who infiltrated a gang.

There were some books that I would have snapped up 1 or 2 years ago. There was a history book about the fateful decisions that shaped WWII. There was a book about the screwed up culture of some big Wall Street companies during the heydays. Another one, written by a German, about how his country was both the angel and the devil (esp around WWII). There was that book on the Iraq war by Thomas Ricks which talked about the “surge” strategy which pulled the US from the brink of defeat against Iraq. They even had that famous book by Doris Kearns Goodwin about how Lincoln managed to pull together a cabinet full of the brightest talent, even as these people were

But I could see very clearly – I have tonnes of history books right now. I don’t need to read any more history. I used to have a great thirst to know about the great events of the past, but now a lot of it seems like the same old stories over and over again. I used to look forward to endless hours idling in front of a book, but now I only see the vast expenditure of time, which I don’t really have a lot of. I used to believe that all this contributed to my development as a person, and while it once did, it’s over. The easy part is over.

Because there are 3 ways of learning things, either through people teaching them to you, or experiencing them for yourself, or through books. Of the 3, books is the easiest, and the one that you have the most control over. But you also need the other two. It reminded me of “Waterland” by Graham Swift. Why do you need to learn history? Does explaining the past change anything? Does it even ease the pain? At the best, it can guide you towards your future. At its worst, it will mislead you about your future. Hindsight is 20/20, so the apparent clarity with which history is interpreted can lull you into a complacency that everything will be perfect from now on, and that is perhaps the greatest illusion of all.

A friend mentioned that I read a lot of story books. I thought that sounded derisive, until I realised that there’s not much difference between my reading of fiction books, and reading some obscure history tome. It’s mindless indulgence.

I had a dream the other night, when I pulled a sandwich out of my ear. I didn’t know that my earholes were so large that you could fit all that stuff in. But the meaning is clear – I had been wilfully deaf. (In case you’re wondering, I did not eat that sandwich. That’s disgusting.)

This was the time of the year when they were giving out race packs at the expo. This time last year I had, after months of arduous training, run a marathon, and it was the culmination of 2 years’ worth of long distance running. After that, though, it was time to move on to my other targets in life. So 1 year after the marathon, it’s worthwhile to look back on how my other targets had been faring.

I had been reading a book by Jennifer Michael Hecht – I picked it up in Borders in San Fran, and it intrigued me – about how the meaning of happiness changed over the centuries. There was this insight about what exercise was all about – only in a society where the majority of people lead a sedentary lifestyle, will you ever come across such crazy ideas – physical exertion for its own sake, for the sake of self-fulfilment. Throughout history, physical exertion is all about labour. People worked like slaves, or they hunted. Exercise is such a crazy concept.

Well I felt real good about completing my marathon, but I couldn’t just do it year after year. When I went back to office, they were putting up barricades along the route (yah my office is near the route.)

So actually on that day I really passed by 4 of the places which are all associated with my post uni life: Expo (because that’s where I got most of my books), the marathon route, the office and Joo Chiat. I’ve blogged about 2 of them, I can’t blog about the office while I’m still there, so I guess some day I’ll blog about Joo Chiat.

Politics of Personals

2009-12-01T14:28:00.001+08:00

I was looking through craigslist for personals. I don’t know if people respond to personals a lot, but there seems to be 2 or 3 every day.

There was this personal which I responded to it immediately. I didn’t copy and paste it and I regret that because it’s been taken down and I’ve belatedly realized that it was one of the best personals that I’ve read.

1. The title reads “for madmen only”.

Now, this conveys passion. The author is not somebody who’s too stupid to be a good lover. There’s this vague promise of something exciting. She demands an exciting person and she probably is an exciting person herself.

2. Allusions to “Steppenwolf” by Hesse.

She mentioned Hermine and Harry Haller. I googled it. It was about a jaded but sensitive middle aged man given a new lease of life after meeting a younger woman.

It reminded me of codfish. In one of our earlier conversations, she mentioned Hesse. Then Lolita was one of her favourite novels. That has always stuck me as being creepy. Why do women enjoy reading “Lolita”? Do some of them, deep inside relish the thought of themselves being 13 again and lusted over by an older pervert? She is clearly looking for an older man.

It’s not such a coincidence in hindsight, that another person would mention these two novels. But it’s creepy. In fact, if it was really codfish, I can imagine why it was taken down so soon after I sent her an email. But it doesn’t sound like codfish. But what do I know, it’s been more than 3 years since I last talked to her.

3. References to her looks.

She said that she was cute rather than beautiful. That is modesty. You don’t want to be bragging about your looks, even if you do look like Heidi Klum, but if you say that you are good looking, not that good looking, it conveys the perfect impression.

4. Stuff she likes to do.

“Buttermilk over chocolate. Books over movies. Loves sitting in cafes sketching and reading”

Appealing enough. But the very irritating thing is that she also wrote “preferably European”. That’s what you get on craigslist, a lot of SPG wannabes.

I was half expecting her to write back, until I realized that in these sort of personals, you probably only get 1 shot. Either she calls you immediately, and then she sets up something with you, or she doesn’t call. The alternative is that she writes back after a few weeks, in which case she’s blatantly telling you, “you were my second choice. The first didn’t work out”.

That was also when I realized that it was probably a really well written one, that would appeal to people. I like to think that she was being considerate to myself and whoever else wrote back within 1 day, to signal “position filled”.

I’m still learning the game of how to write personals. A book that I am reading right now, “The Political Brain” by Drew Westen, is not a book that comes across as being particularly relevant to dating and personals, but being a political candidate and trying to sell yourself to a potential mate is quite similar.

One of the main points made in the book is that voters think and vote with their hearts, not their brains. Campaigning to the people is a matter of winning their hearts first, and then their minds. They will trust their gut feelings about a party, then the candidate, before they rigorously and logically think through the specific policies that people are putting up. Political arguments should be framed in the form of a story. I had to tell a story that was compelling. I looked back at the email reply that I wrote to that personal and it sounded like a list of points, hardly something to inspire your passions.

What the original personal had was a story. You had this girl who’s a little crazy, a bit of a dreamer, looking for an older guy, just like that one in Steppenwolf. We could do AAA or BBB together. The guy would be experienced but jaded. The girl would still be full of life, and ready to inspire something wonderful in him. That was a story.

And, take note: the “I’m a slightly crazy artistic type” is something that appeals to certain demographics of guys as much as the magical combination of nice legs, nice tits and a sailor school uniform would appeal to others.

Or maybe I should relate the story that codfish sells (rather what I heard): I’m a slightly helpless damsel in distress, you can help me. I’m your student, I’ll listen to you, I’m willing to learn. I’m also extremely hot. I’m evolving into something even better and I’d like you to take that trip with me. For me, a very compelling story, and one that tempted me to take a chance, even though I knew it would be a disaster.

OK so far, but later on, the downside: She can be mean, she doesn’t have control over her life, not very useful, not very disciplined, spoilt, worst of all, unfaithful.

Anyway, that’s their story. What’s my story going to be like? I’m not an easy person to tell a story about. My English teacher once tried to tell a coherent narrative about me. I’m the typical maths geek. I shy away from people and I seek solace in my maths. It resonated. People look at this story and they recognise it immediately. It makes sense and it’s internally consistent. But it’s not true. As good as I was in maths at that point in time, it was not a hobby for me. I was just good at it. I never believed that it was that important, to the extent that 1 or 2 others in my office did. My hobby was music, not maths. I wasn’t aspiring to be a great mathematician, I was aspiring to be a playwright. This was true, regardless of how little I cared for her lit classes, and how sloppy my lit grades were.

What’s heartening, though, are the personals that you get on craigslist for men seeking women. They are crap. They are often variants on “I want somebody to fuck. Like, right now.” The translation: I am selfish, I am self centred. I don’t mention any emotional connection with you, but I have money to spend on you and I am advertising it.

When I looked at the reasons why I stayed single, for a while there I thought to myself, “I could have started this dating stuff a long time ago. It would have been possible 2 or 3 years ago.” I can’t remember why I held back. I wasn’t that shy anymore. But then my enthusiasm about anything varies a lot. I can be totally into something one day and a few hours, be totally bored.

There was a bit of premeditation on my part: Did I want my 30s to be something like, "gee, you've had your fun and it's going to be downhill from here, taking care of little brats and all that shit"? Or did I want it to be what my late 20s were supposed to be like, the days of wine and roses?

When I told myself that dating was a full package and it involved a lifestyle change, I guess I wasn’t giving myself excuses. It is true. When I’m treading water, when I’m living a eat / sleep / work / library lifestyle, even if I were to not find it boring I cannot expect other people to feel the same way. I need to get out of my comfort zone.

There were some things that I thought about doing to increase my chances, but somewhere in my head there is a self-censorship mechanism, which says, “forget about all the things you said, and put your head back up your backside where it belongs”. This is quite unfortunate.

If I remember correctly, I could have gone into music making. I could have had a more interesting life. I could have put my books away and not clung to them. I could have gone for meetings, gatherings. I could have gotten myself a new set of clothes, tried to be more good looking. I haven’t pulled out all the stops.

Actually this happens a lot: I would sometimes start calendar years thinking, “this year I’m finally going to (this this this, that that that) and a few days later, I start clinging on to the old routines again.

Well last few days I also tried to convince myself that women are beautiful, wondrous creatures, and to that length, I have been surfing massive amounts of soft porn. It’s really good that I found a way to download massive numbers of jpgs without having to click on every single picture: This is easy, so long as you know the URLs of every picture you’re going to download. Then you can just publish a blog entry with all the jpgs, and the browser will do all the hard work of downloading all the pictures for you. Save as a complete web page, and everything is done. (warning: after you download too much porn, it gets very very boring.)

Relationships

2009-11-28T23:41:00.000+08:00

http://tofreedomwithlove.blogspot.com

Well well well look at what we find when we’re snooping around on facebook. A former colleague putting up their blog for public consumption – only going to spell the URL because I dowan to link my blog to his blog. Last time Nat unwisely chose to link to my blog and he got outed. (OK maybe not unwisely because it doesn’t matter to him but still…)

On a (*cough cough* unrelated) note, I’m going to talk about what little I know about dealing with women.

What I want in a girl:
1. Intelligence.
2. Not lazy
3. Artistic

Notice that I didn’t mention physical attractiveness. It is not necessary. Any girl who is good enough in these 3 points, and is not physically deformed would be good enough. Remember what people say about “there aren’t any ugly women, only lazy women?” That’s what I mean.

4. Gets along well with girls.

Now this is important. There are a some women out there, especially the chiobus, who always claim they get along better with the guys. This is a red flag. Once somebody admits that, well you should count them out as your girlfriend. These women are trouble. Reason number 1: the main reason why they say they get along better with men than women is because men will give them a wider berth. Men think that they’re cute, and let them get away with a lot of bullshit. Women tend to hold other women to reasonable standards. Reason number 2: these women tend to have a lot of guy friends and it’s too easy for them to replace you. There is a natural mechanism which prevents your woman from having her way with other guys. Women tend to see such women as immoral and at the very least, there will be that “tut tut” of disapproval. Guys will also have that “tut tut” but it will be conflated with the natural thought “maybe I could get a piece of that ass for myself”.

The barometer for reasonable behaviour in a woman is other women.

5. Kindness.

I look at the women I’ve had crushes on (not many I can tell you, I can count them on 2 hands, maybe even 1) and for some reason they don’t really have much in common with each other.

OK, the basics for a relationship.

1. Is there a one and only girl who is the right one for you?

No. There are thousands, even millions of women out there with the right stuff. But you will only need one, and she will only be a right one for you after you’ve gotten to know each other well enough. This is one of the most common questions teenagers ask about relationships and the sooner this is answered, the better.

2. Why can’t women understand me, and see past the surface and get to the real me?

There are usually 2 reasons why women aren’t going to like the real you. First is that you are not expressing yourself well. It is possible to fix this: it is neither easy or hard. Second is that there is something wrong with the real you. Fixing this is hard. But it is worth it.

Another thing that could go wrong is that you may be looking for the wrong kind of women. Don’t go for women who are “out of your league”. A lot of the time, they aren’t worth it. Sensible people can get through life without being drop dead gorgeous. And conversely, if you are drop dead gorgeous, people will want to be with you for all the wrong reasons. If you’re not strong enough to deal with it then too bad for you. Being drop dead gorgeous is like a mild version of being famous. Everybody wants a piece of you.

3. What do women look for in a man?

I don’t know. I can’t answer that. But my guess is: strength, beauty and compatibility.

Physical strength is attractive for obvious reasons. Mental strength, more so. Women want a guy who takes care of her. There is power, which manifests itself as a more active form of strength. But there is also the inner strength, the tensile strengh, how to become calm when a storm is raging all around you, how you handle matters properly. How to not read some remarks wrongly and get upset when

Beauty - that would be aesthetics. The things that you do that appeal to her aesthetically. She might want you for a handsome face, or a sexy body. Or you're just very good at hitting her right spot. Or all sorts of irrational things that she might like in you, like the way that you walk, or your dress sense.

Compatibility is actually the beauty of the couple rather than the beauty of your individual self. You might be on the same wavelength, and she might just be a female version of you. Or you might be total opposites, and you just make up for what's lacking in each other. Your partnership may be a Vieira and Petit, or a Cole and Yorke.

But all that is theory. Practice is another thing.

"Perfect Day"

2009-11-23T23:21:00.002+08:00

It was near the end of my take-home exam. As usual, I only started work on it the 3rd day. But the proofs were more or less sketched out. Yet I, the inveterate procrastinator waited until I had to stay up all night on the 6th night, before I started writing everything down.

On the 6th night, I got home to find codfish online. We had a cyber relationship for a few months, but it was breaking down. For a while, she thought nothing of feeding my insecurities until one day, on Valentine’s day, I tore into her with every insult that I could think of. We made up after that, but things were never really the same.

Things came to a head that night. I can’t remember the exact details, but that night was the night that I knew, in no uncertain terms, that it was over. It was the first time I was heartbroken, and as some of you might know, the first time is the worst.

There was still the take-home exam to do. I was writing it up while curled up in my favourite bathtub. Soon it was dawn. I only slept for 2 hours, and the first class, where I had to hand up my take-home exam, I passed by in a zombie state.

For the second class, I had to make a presentation that covered the whole period. It started OK, then when I was halfway through the proof, I made a mistake, and the professor leapt upon it immediately. I got annoyed with him and answered back. My mind was blank, and he challenged me with a vindictiveness that I found quite unnerving in that mental state – heartbroken and sleep deprived. In the end, I discovered my own mistake, and recovered to finish the rest of my presentation. Some in the class were probably repulsed by the angry, bitter expression etched on my face. For most of them, however, it was just one more higher mathematics class, when you have long since lost the thread of the original argument. They stared ahead in blank boredom.

After the lesson was over, an acquaintance, to whom I hardly spoke to, but who had been my classmate for various courses, came to me, and said, “He’s a PhD. He’s qualified to take your argument apart like that.” I smiled weakly at him. If only he knew the rest of the story!

If people were to ask me, “what is the worst day of your uni days?” I would definitely tell them about that day. But you have to see it in a larger context. The breakup with codfish was inevitable. I even knew it was going to happen from day 1. We stayed friends for a few years after that. For the 2 maths courses, I got an A and an A-. In the larger picture, nothing I did on that day was truly damaging. Except maybe it was very bad for morale.

So why am I telling you this? Because I just went through a minor version of what happened on that day. There were some things I didn't know until the night, and that was when I figured out why ppl were suddenly so nice to me.

When Harry Met Sally

2009-11-22T00:51:00.000+08:00

If nothing else, this is a public service announcement: “When Harry Met Sally” is available on youtube.

I watched “When Harry Met Sally” for the third time, tonight. The first and second times were before 1992, and definitely way before I was experienced at this romantic thing yet. (In fact the 3rd time I’m not much more experienced than the first 2 times.)

It is the “Seinfeld” of romantic comedies. It’s less the story of Harry and Sally than it is a repository of wisdom on the mating rituals of human beings. Billy Crystal is the hardened, cynical comic and Meg Ryan is the cutesy little girl.

When I watch the movie, I start to realize that it has some kind of architecture to it that I didn’t appreciate when watching it while younger. Both had just endured sad ends to their previous relationships, and were looking to get hitched. They saw the ugly sides of each other, as friends. There were other misadventures, such as the times when they introduced their best friends to each other and set them up on a double date. Instead of hitting it off with each other’s best friends, the 2 best friends got hitched to each other. That was funny. Eventually though, a sympathy fuck leads to a crisis and a resolution. They get hitched up and their friendship becomes a romantic relationship.

Some of the conversations have been classics. I didn’t know that the term “high maintenance” was popularized by this movie. The concept of the “transitional” relation. Most importantly, given the centrality of the platonic relationship between Harry and Sally, the big question – can a man find a woman attractive and still be platonic friends with her?

Very talky romantic movies have reminded me of Rohmer, who is a favourite of mine, as I have watched more than 10 of his movies. This is different from Rohmer, because in Rohmer films everybody is an unreliable narrator. The people in this movie are extremely canny and intelligent, and always speak the truth. The reason why this film is a classic is because there is so much wisdom in these conversations.

A lot of the earlier reviewers missed out on this aspect, rightly criticizing the relationship between Harry and Sally for being artificial and not convincing. Harry and Sally are at their most compelling when they are friends, telling each other stories about their own misadventures at love. There is almost a lifetime’s worth of good lines about romantic relationships. This is not a great movie about a romantic relationship. It is a great movie about people talking about the interesting things that happen during courtship.

In fact, think about the other movies that have been made about romantic relationships by either Nora Ephron or Rob Reiner. “Sleepless in Seattle”, “You Got Mail”

According to wikipedia, the biggest flaw in the movie is that Sally is merely cute and does not have much of a character, other than her obsessive compulsiveness, and her giving extremely exacting instructions when ordering food. The orgasm scene came about when the scriptwriter realized that Harry had been doing most of the talking, and they needed Sally to tell at least one interesting story.

If you were to ask me, I would say that this is really a movie about friendship, not romance. This movie paints romantic relationships in such a bad light that you wonder why people bother at all. The guy just wants to have sex. He doesn’t want to hold the girl in the morning any more than they have to. A man and a woman cannot have a platonic relationship because in the end he wants to have sex. Harry’s pursuit of Sally early in the movie is somewhat distasteful because he’s so upfront about wanting to have sex with her. Sally, when you take away her cuteness, is quite one-dimensional. Women fake orgasms with men. Considering that this movie was written by a woman it’s surprising that the man is the more fleshed-out character in the movie.

What is more touching is the meaningful relationships that friends have with each other, how they talk through their problems. What was happening in the end, when Harry was going to win back Sally? First and foremost, he was trying to salvage a friendship that was placed in great jeopardy by one night of fucking.

Also, movies like these tend to illustrate one great principle: that the best talky romantic movies come from either France or New York City.

Why Numbernine is Single

2009-11-14T19:24:00.000+08:00

A lot of guys were asking me why I didn’t have a girlfriend. It’s high time you guys got a straight answer.

Reason #1: the last time I tried to have a girlfriend, it didn’t turn out that badly. She was hot. A lot of people were after her. Some said she was out of my league. But I managed to get her to pay attention to me, a person she hitherto hardly knew, and who was staying 12 time zones away, and I held her attention for 3-4 months. She could have anybody she wanted, and we both knew it. What happened?

I’m not calling myself a Casanova. But the conclusion is that “I’m not that bad at this, aren’t I?” So it was complacency. That I could start again when I was older, and it wouldn’t be that much of a problem.

But those of you on this blog who have been following the saga of 7-8 and water girl will recall that some ladies are immune to my charms. That sucked, although I found out much later that she felt that we were incompatible – and she was right.

Reason #2: I’m picky. It is not that I have to have the hottest member of the species for my member. It’s something like, if I were to say, I want to find the female version of numbernine. Hello, guys, have you ever seen the female version of numbernine? Have you seen anybody else who is remotely like me? I have to settle for a close enough approximation.

Personality is also very important. If somebody has got the body, but not the personality, I would ask her for a few nude pictures, and go off somewhere to jerk off. It's just not worth putting up with a bad person just because she looks great. It'd be great if you could show off a trophy girlfriend to all your friends but I don't have a lot of friends.

Reason #3: The last one ended badly. To be sure, I knew it was going to end. I knew it wouldn't last. But I wasn't prepared for the 4 months of depression I went through, having to juggle that with a busy study schedule, running my own household. I wondered if I had given up too much to a cyber-relationship and passing up great opportunities that you only got in a good uni. It's difficult to say if I regretted it, because you cannot discount how, when it was good, it was damn good. The highs were high and the lows were low. I needed some peace.

Reason #4: my sister and my cousins. My sister has been living overseas for 10 years. She's a hardy person, almost a masochist. But I get struck by how she goes from guy to guy around once every year. I never wanted to be like that. Breaking a relationship is just like dislocating your shoulder. If you do it too often, it will keep on popping out at inopportune moments. I never want that until I'm ready. This is a minor reason.

But reason #5 is the most important: I didn't make space for another person in my life. I seldom organised my life around more than 1 person, and that would be the biggest change for me. Accomodating somebody else in my life.

I had an ex-colleague who took it upon himself to push me towards getting a chick. I appreciated that but it's like that gym instructor who tells you 5 more sets when you're ready to give up. I called him mofo, or "manager of fucking operations". He used to tell me, don't be shy. Well if you've read this far, it was never about shyness. It's always about what happens after the first few dates, and you are about to embark on an adventure together. And then what?

I had never believed that I was going to be single forever. But I always wondered if I was old enough. I thought, I'll wait until I'm 30, and it should be easier. And in some sense I'd be right. But it will never be like it was in your 20s when you are really carefree. I thought, it would be just like it was the last time, I was wrong.

And sadly, there's no such thing as bad sex when you're in your 20s. But it doesn't get better after that. And if you didn't take advantage of that, that's unfortunate.

Punk

2009-11-14T15:09:00.000+08:00

I think a lot has been written about punk. What does it mean? Why is it a movement? I’m not a good anthropologist, but punk is obviously something that I identify with. The punk movement became fashionable in Britain, and some parts of the USA in the late 70s, which was coincidently the time when I was born.

The fact that it exists means that the potential for it has always been there. There are always young people around, and some of them will always be rebellious. But probably it would not have been a worldwide movement until the 60s. That was the time when a privileged generation, the baby boomers was growing up in the West, and for the first time a large enough group of people actually had time on their hands to express rebellious attitudes towards society without being thrown into prison.

In 1968 there was a spontaneous wave of student rebellions all over the world. Many unis in the states had riots or had buildings taken over by students, including the one I went to. There were student protests in Mexico, and it ended up with the students getting fired upon. In Paris, where it ended up with Charles De Gaulle being forced out of power. In Prague, and the Russians ended up having to send in the tanks.

It was bizarre. I don’t really know what they were fighting about, but they were probably like young people everywhere, they thought that the older generation were corrupt and too conservative. They were going to build a better and more idealistic world. Sounds familiar isn’t it? They were protesting the Vietnam War. There were a lot of communist sympathisers. Ho Chih Minh, Mao, Castro and Che Guevara were their heroes.

I supposed that was one of the high points of radical leftist politics, because from the 1970s onwards, America slowly became a more and more conservative place, until you had the age of the Reagans and the Bushes.

Anyway, the way I knew about the punk movement was through music. In the beginning there were a few bands who wrote the blueprint of what punk was about. There was the Velvet Underground, who took a lot of minimalist ideas from modern classical music, and fused it with rock music. They used to be more influential than popular. Now they’re influential and popular. There were bands like the MC5 and the Stooges. They played a very abrasive and loud form of rock music, but it was stripped down and simplified. Iggy Pop is still alive and kicking today, even though Dave Alexander and Ron Asheton are not. He is as indestructible as a cartoon character. A heroin habit did not kill him. The propensity to slash himself over and over on stage did not kill him. Rolling around on broken glass in performances did not kill him. You probably wouldn’t know it by looking at him but he topped his high school.

Thereafter, there was a scene in New York, where bands like Blondie, Television, the Talking Heads (David Byrne performed in Singapore recently), the Ramones and the Patti Smith group developed a more arty form of punk. Punk music briefly became popular in 1977, through the music of the bands Sex Pistols and the Clash. Wire. There was a band in Australia called the Saints. Suddenly everybody was forming a band.

Inevitably (because punks are by nature very self destructive) the punk movement burned out. But even though it faded away from the scene, there were a lot of bands that carried on the tradition. There were Sonic Youth, REM and Husker Du, who were very heavily influenced by punk, and would very heavily influence generations of bands that followed them. There were Black Flag, Minor Threat and the Germs, who would be more faithful to the bare, stark angry ravings of the Sex Pistols.

More crucially, punk mutated into New Wave. The simplicity of punk music inspired many to do likewise: you had Duran Duran, Joy Division and U2. It wasn’t around anymore but it had a huge influence on 80s pop.

Suddenly, in the 90s, it took over the world. Around the time I started following music in a big way, a band called Nirvana took over the number 1 spot on the albums chart from Michael Jackson. For a few years after that, many bands which had toiled in the underground movement start putting out albums on major labels. Thus, you had Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees following in its wake. The Smashing Pumpkins. Radiohead. Stuff like that.

After that, numbernine grew up and switched to listening to Jazz, and has not concerned himself with matters of the punk world anymore.

Anyway, what characterises punk music? What’s it all about? In 1977, the first time it became popular, it was a rebellion against the idea of a rock star. The rock stars had become fat and lazy. They were too rich and flaunted their wealth too ostentatiously. Their music went down in quality, and their concerts dragged on for too long. So when punk music came along, it was a rude blast of fresh air.

Punk is anger and rebellion. It is simplicity. It is about revolution, railing against whatever happens to be the current system. Punks like to think of themselves as straightforward and true to their ideas, although sometimes I think they’re just confused. They despise folks who carry themselves in a courtly and aristocratic manner. Those people sometimes have to say things they don’t really mean in order to avoid giving offence. Punks dispense with such formalities. Punks are like guerillas, and they live in an austere environment. Punk is the confused teenage years. Punk is about sex, not love, although one punk love song that comes to mind is “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn’t Have” by the Buzzcocks. Even then it is important to note: punks seldom get the girl.

On the good side, they are energetic, and they signal change. When you hear one of the greatest punk bands, the Clash, you will be amazed at how simple and effective their early music is. They can write simple songs like the Beatles, although the Beatles never took their music to such extremes. Later on, Clash would throw all sorts of influences into their music, even though the main thrust was still punk.

I always thought that good punk music is very methodical and disciplined. You are forced to finish saying everything under 3 minutes, and you are only allowed to use 3 chords. (If you are Wire, then you are only allowed to use 1 chord, and your songs are shorter than 1 minute.) And if, in spite of all these self imposed constraints, you can still come up with something worthy, good for you.

On the bad side, they are lazy, good for nothing, irresponsible and blame “society” for the plight they are in. It is no surprise that they came up in a bad economic environment, as the UK found itself in the last few years before Thatcher took over. Bad punk music is repetitive, uninspired and mediocre. They get drunk and take drugs. Punk is about being defeated by the system. Note that the Clash chose to cover “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”.

Bart and Lisa Simpson are a little too different to be siblings, but in a way they represent two faces of youth culture. Bart is a punk, simple as that. Lisa is the idealistic activist. But there are similarities between the two. Deep within the spirit of punk, under that rebelliousness and love of freedom is an idealism that you can shape the world into your own image. After all, the other face of the coin of cynicism is idealism - in order to be that disappointed with the world, you probably had to have pretty high expectations of it in the first place. And lying deep under the idealism, is the realisation that left on its own, the world does not make itself a better place. Part of wanting to shake things up or turn a bad situation around is to stand and rebel against the status quo.

Punk is not for everybody. I have a cousin who’s fairly open minded about music, but he did not understand punk music. I suppose you need to have it in you to identify with the chaos and rage.

I have something of the punk in me, obviously. People are what they are - you can’t change them. If you put them in a school which is very obsessed with its own image and how it presents itself in public, people like me would spend hours plotting how to rebel against that. I spent 10 years being educated in classical music, but it never feels natural to me. Because classical music is the music of the aristocratic class, which I have no affinity for. I appreciate its intricacy and complexity, but I could not appreciate Mozart or Tchaikovsky or Haydn. Beethoven - he’s the nearest to a punk in those days. And I like modern classical music better because they were starting to do all that edgy, shrill, dissonant stuff.

For me to identify myself with many (not all) of these values, I think I have an innate predilection towards being rebellious. It’s OK, I guess. I have 2 halves sharing a tense co-existence with each other: one of them the rigorous geek. The other the punk rebel. Somebody has to be the bad egg. Somebody must have the chip on his shoulder to be critical. Somebody has to be the poison pen. We can’t all be sheep. A good scientist is also a rebel. Think about Noam Chomsky. Albert Einstein. Charles Darwin. OK, Chomsky is a nutcase when he’s not talking about Linguistics, but I still think his heart is in the right place. Everybody must have something to contribute to society. I contribute my middle finger.

I don’t really know why have these personality characteristics. So very unChinese of me. A lot of the more interesting fellars in all those old Chinese stories were the rebels, because if you were brought up in that kind of environment, and still ended up as a rebel, you really had to be crazy.

I’ve always seen my father as a boring accountant. But in the last 10 years he has gotten himself into a fair bit of activism, that has seen him get up the noses of some fairly important people. So I suppose I have had a lot more respect for him.

But it is not straight forward hero worship. He told me he just didn’t have it in him to be a brown noser. He couldn’t be a yes man for a long time. That would be true for me as well. There’s something to clarify - it’s not completely true that I have made the choice to be a rebel. Some things we do well, others we don’t do so well. To a large extent the role that you play in society is not yours to choose, it’s fate. Fate gives you a hand of cards and you just play them the best that you will. In a way, I have a very perverse respect for people who can control their gag reflex and suck up to people. In a way I almost think that they deserve their exalted place in society because it is their reward in a society which rewards that peculiar talent. Just as people think that it is unfair that great talent for being able to control a ball with your feet is so lucrative, it is inevitable that other useless talents are so well rewarded.

I forgot myself

2009-11-13T18:57:00.001+08:00

The other day I was at the library in a strange part of Singapore. I found a book that was found in only 2 branches of the NLB, both in equally obscure locations. It was a 600+ page book on the first few years of the Spanish empire. I was itching to read about that one day, so I borrowed that book. Similarly, I saw some other books in that branch that weren’t available in my usual nlb haunts, so I proceeded to get some of those books.

All in all, it was 1 long bus ride to another location diametrically across the central water catchment area from where I lived, then a few stops on a few other nlb branches, and then another long bus ride back. When I got home, I was at first happy about my new pile of books, until I remembered something:

Spending the rest of my life with my nose in a book is not a desired outcome for me.

Instead, I was supposed to do the things that responsible adults are supposed to do. Make money. Make love. Go out and meet people. Read about the world today, not just about books. At the very least, I'm not supposed to add new entries to my "to read" list.

Near Death Experience

2009-11-12T00:30:00.004+08:00

I was coming back home late and quite sleepy. Just had tennis with some of my kakis. Was feeling quite sleepy, and then I went to surf the internet.

I turned on the computer, the main computer which my household uses. Its the second oldest computer in my house, and has been in service since 2003. Considering the amount of trash that we've built up on it, it's remarkable that it's working almost perfectly still. Of course it's not as well used as some of the computers at work, which run massive database queries every half an hour. We call them the comfort women of our department because they're always getting screwed.

2 years ago, my father bought an external hard drive. I don't really know if it's the traditional magnetic type or the flash type, which would make it an oversized thumb drive. Anyway he's always been telling me to back up the computer, back up his files, and I've always dithered. What if I didn't know how to use the hard drive?

Then today, it happened. I was just using the computer, and halfway through, the screen went blank. I tried to turn the computer back on, and somehow the monitor wouldn't receive the signal. Then I turned it off without shutting it down (which I know is bad for the computer but when there's no signal on the monitor there's no choice.)

After that, a few aborted attempts to turn the thing back on. The LED would just weakly light up, and nothing else happened.

Magically I was wide awake in an instant. I was like - shit. Something I told my old man I was going to do, and I didn't do it. I risked losing a shit load of data. (Actually I hadn't actually lost it. I would just send the computer down for servicing, and he would get it back with 95% probability.) The thought of causing him to lose all his work... He doesn't really know how to use a computer, and I'm always at his beck and call, there will be once or twice a week he would need something relatively simple to be done - some formatting with word, some cutting and pasting from a PDF file, some scanning. But for somebody who doesn't know how to use a computer, he's got an incredible shit load of data - how on earth did he manage to accumalate 4 gigs, none of it MP3s or videos? I was in full panic mode, trying to figure out how I was going to tell him - your stuff's gone because I kept on putting off saving the damn thing.

I knew the problem was with the power unit, so I was trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with the thing. Could I kick the computer? I would if I could, but that would almost certainly crash the hard disk. What if I could kick one part of the computer?

I opened the panel, and located what I thought was the power unit. Or I guessed that was it, because it was next to the fan. Then I started tapping away at it with my finger. Then I turned the computer back on.

BY GOLLY, A MIRACLE - THE DAMN THING WORKED!

So without a moment's hesitation, I backed up all the files onto his hard drive. And the funny thing is, it only took me about 1 hour. I procrastinated for 2 years over something that eventually took me 1 hour! Folks, this is why I will never amount to anything in life.

Kurt Cobain

2009-11-11T00:45:00.000+08:00

Timeline:

1980s: Big hair bands ruled the day. Bon Jovi, Warrant, Poison. They were perceived to be more about image than music. During the 1980s, the major labels dominated the music scene.

Late 1980s: An underground scene emerges, formed by people who feel that the original values of rock and roll - teenage rebellion against society, anarchy, revolt against the established order – have been compromised by these large corporations who package rebellion and sell it to the masses.

1991: Kurt Cobain, a brilliant songwriter, forms Nirvana and storms to the top of the charts. He’s the vanguard of the underground scene that delivered a blow to the music industry that they’re still recovering from today, and broke their stranglehold on the upper reaches of the pop charts.

1992-1994: After releasing 3 albums of great music, Kurt Cobain is disenchanted with his heroin addiction, the pressures of fame and fortune. Most of all, he has become the person he hated the most – a rock star. Eventually, he kills himself. One of his last songs is titled “I Hate Myself And I Want To Die”.

2009: Kurt Cobain’s image is appropriated for Guitar Hero 5. He is portrayed as the ultimate rock star. He is singing Bon Jovi. A newspaper commentator remarks that it’s OK “because Kurt Cobain can’t kill himself a second time”. His widow, Courtney Love, hardly the most well liked personality in show business, goes apeshit.

Football Betting Season 2 Weeks 9

2009-11-08T20:13:00.002+08:00

First, I think this is one of the line ups of the Premier League which has the most number of former champions I have seen in a while.

Here is the line up, and next to each former champion, the last time they won the league.

Chelsea (2006)
Arsenal (2004)
Manchester United (2009)
Tottenham Hotspur (1961)
Aston Villa (1981)
Manchester City (1968)
Liverpool (1990)
Sunderland (1936)
Stoke City
Burnley (1960)
Fulham
Wigan Athletic
Blackburn Rovers (1995)
Everton (1987)
Birmingham
Bolton Wanderers
West Ham United
Wolverhampton Wanderers (1959)
Hull City
Portsmouth (1949)

Well, actually, the number is the same as last year, since 2 former champions were relegated - Newcastle (1927) and WBA (1920) and were replaced by Wolves and Burnley. Plus there were a few clubs that won the league before and played in a premiership a few years ago but funnily enough nobody seems to know where they are now: Sheffield Wednesday (1930), Derby (1975), Sheffield United(1898), Leeds (1992), Ipswich (1962).

So why am I telling you all this? IT's to distract from the fact that I had another depressing weekend at the bookies. It sounded like a sensible decision. Bet on Man City to win against Burnley, who are fading after a bright start. Bet on Arsenal to beat Wolves. Well Arsenal are in good shape now, and can wipe the floor with most of their opponents, including Man U. But Man City - what can I say? I was following the match on the internet while doing other surfing.

Burnley scored - I said "SHIT". Burnley scored again, I said "SHIT" again. Then Man City pulled 1 back before the break. I willed Man City on to score 2 more, and I knew they were capable of it. This they did. Then I went off to watch "Interview with the Vampire", one of those unwatched VCDs I have lying around and not doing anything. Then I turned on my computer again - "FUCK!" Burnley equalised and it was a draw!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK!

Man City - I write them off for now. They were good enough to beat Arsenal a few months ago, now it looks as though they might not even crack the top 4. Is there nobody you can rely on nowadays?

Football Betting Season 2 Weeks 7-8

2009-11-01T12:37:00.002+08:00

Last week was truly dreadful. I bet on 3 matches, and I lost on all of them. I bet on Wolves vs Aston Villa, thinking that Aston Villa were that much better than Wolves. I was wrong: Wolves put up a good show, they were at home, and this was a derby, which made the result harder to predict. In the end, Wolves snatched a draw and I lost money.

I also bet on Man U to beat Liverpool. This was a risky bet and I put a lower wager. It’s reasonable to believe that Liverpool is in a big mess right now: in the last few matches they lost to Fiorentina, Lyon, Sunderland, Fulham, and also their second team lost to Arsenal’s. This is relegation form. They lost all their matches in the last 3 weeks, except against their strongest opponent, Man U. There’s no legislating for this kind of inconsistency.

Last of all I bet on Arsenal to beat Weat Ham. It was going so well for me, they were 2 up, and then they just gave it away and drew.

This week, I didn’t bet. I would have bet on Chelsea to beat Bolton (they did), and on Man U to beat Blackburn (they did). But I would also have bet on Stoke to beat Wolves, and Wolves managed to claw back the points. I don’t know the betting amounts but I would have lost a few dollars.

The temptation was there to bet on Wigan to beat Portsmouth: Portsmouth are the current whipping boys, and Wigan had just performed well to be the first team to take points off Burnley at Turf Moor this season. But my policy is never to bet on a match that involves Wigan, and it shows: Portsmouth thrashed Wigan eventually.

I also made the right call not to bet on Liverpool to bet on Fulham, although it was impossible to call.

The lynchpin of my betting strategy is that we have big consistent performances by the big 4. This probably doesn’t happen until towards the end of the season, when everybody else is exhausted, and the big 4 can keep on going because they have been rotating their squads, or because their regular players are not human. It’s possible that I will have to lay off betting until after Christmas.

Edit: after this was posted I was mulling on whether to bet on Man City to beat Birmingham. I was about to bet on them, when I had this strange gut feeling that I shouldn't have. Thank god for that gut feeling - you can't rely on Man City to be able to beat everybody they're supposed to beat. They are, after all, Man City!

Punctuated Equilibrium

2009-11-01T00:22:00.000+08:00

There are basically 2 theories about change. One of them is that it happens gradually, and the other is that it happens suddenly.

Take, for example, option pricing theory. The Black Scholes model assumes that share prices move continuously, ie they don’t jump. But a few catastrophic episodes which have wiped out the accounts of not a few hedge funds have proven the theory of gradual change to be wrong.

Take, for example, the theory of evolution. Even people who agree on evolution disagree vehemently about how evolution takes place. Richard Dawkins takes the adaptionist approach, and thinks that the species evolved continuously and steadily. Stephen Jay Gould believed in “punctured equilibrium” where species stayed the same most of the time, but underwent sudden changes in response to a sudden change in the environment, which killed off most of the population except for a small minority lucky enough to have the right mutation.

Take, for example, the great debate that arose among practitioners of Mahayana Buddhism: a group of them felt that enlightenment is gradual. And then there was the Linzhi school, who started the Zen tradition (yes, Zen is a Chinese invention, not Japanese) who contended that it was sudden.

I live life in punctuated equilibrium. A lot of things don’t change for a long time. I lead the same boring, normal life, and suddenly, when it changes, it changes completely.

Something turned my life upside down 20 years ago around now. (Actually you may recall that this was also around the time the Berlin wall fell, so just as well there were a lot of changes in the world as well.) 10 years ago, another big series of changes took place in a short time. It’s only looking back, now that I may be on the brink of another great set of changes, that I realized that these two epochs were placed almost 10 years apart.

10 years ago, things were in a great flux. It was that 2nd year in college.

I started thinking seriously about a career in science (because of my circumstances I had to seek a watered-down alternative – half a glass full or half empty depending on how you look at it).

I finally believed that I could be a composer. (I have written around 30? 40? Lost count – songs since then)

I fell in love. (this didn’t last)

I became a film buff (the object of my affections was a film buff. I haven’t talked to her for years but she now has a PhD in film studies.) This didn’t last, but for a while, as I started to absorb the possibilities of this art form, I spent a lot of mind-blowing evenings at the cinema. Most of my all time favourite films were those I watched around this period. I could never be a film buff for long because of the suspicion I was whiling my life away.

I decided to become a kinder, gentler person. (Quite unfortunately this didn’t last – any much longer than my love affair did.)

I became a bookworm / I took an arts minor. (Strictly speaking, this was not true. But I started a lot of reading courses because a lot of engineers sucked at them I wanted to know if I could survive them. I did. Later on, after graduation, I became a bookworm. It’s hard for people to realize this, but I was not a bookworm when I was a kid, and I might not be one a few years from now.)

When I started learning about psychology for the first time, I had a lot of my thinking cleared up (or at least, I had some notion about the motives and driving forces of people, where before I had mostly behaved like I was a robot.)

I started living life with a passion. (This is partly still true. My behaviour is still more purposeful and driven than when I was a teenager, and just another cattle in the herd. But the fire is definitely burning much less strongly today. Is it any wonder? I am growing old.)

I took up cooking. OK, in a way this was based on necessity, but it was great – for a while. But I have never cooked while back in Singapore.

I took up exercising regularly. (It was strange because after NS I swore: I’m free from all this shit. I never liked physical exercise while in there. But falling in love made me horny, and the horniness manifested itself in exercise. Sorda. I still make it a point to exercise once a week.)

I also broke with the past. There were a bunch of people I considered to be my friends, but we never reached any real rapport with each other. I allowed those friendships to fade away, even though I would say hi to them if I met them on the street (which for some reason is “almost never”). I used to engage in really useless activities like hanging out in CD shops and looking at new music. I stopped that. I used to spend long periods of time staring at the ceiling, doing nothing. I decided then that life was too precious to while away like that, although I still spend hours surfing and then wondering where my time has gone.

Yes, I imagined all that to be Year Zero. (In the French and Cambodian revolutions, they reset the calendar for a few years.) It was not hard to imagine, because it was 1999.

Things have faded somewhat, and there were a lot of disappointments along the way. But when your life has changed as thoroughly and completely as it has in that comparatively brief period of time, you usually measure yourself against that.

Wheel of Fortune

2009-10-31T03:07:00.000+08:00

This is not going to be an easy topic to write about.

In the late 50s, there was a team of young football players who were among the most promising players of their generation. They belonged to a team called Manchester United. They flew to Yugoslavia to play in an European match. On the way back, they transited in Munich… well if you’re a Man U fan you know the rest.

(Incidently Munich was the place where Hitler first established the Nazi party. It was the place where Great Britain and France decided to allow Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia, setting off a chain of events which started off WWII. In 1972, during the Olympics, a group of Palestinian terrorists kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes, promising to release them for ransom. When they were lured into an ambush, they killed all the athletes. Munich is quite an exciting place.)

A lot of the Man U legend was built around that disaster. One of those who were in that plane and didn’t die was Bobby Charlton, who went on to win the World Cup, and become one of the greatest players in England, if not the world. (Probably not the world.)

Eventually, the team rebuilt itself, and by the late 60s, with their 3 star players Law, Charlton and Best, they won the league, and later the European Cup. They went through a comparatively lean period of more than 20 years without the league, but they became one of the biggest club sides in the world in the 90s, helped partially by the legend of the Munich Air Disaster.

Liverpool would suffer even worse. In 1985, they were already the greatest club side in Europe. They had won 4 European Cups, including the one in 1984, and were looking for their 5th.

The European Cup final in 1985 took place in Heysel, Belgium. Their opponents were Juventus. There was some trouble in the crowd, exacerbated by the hooligans on the English side. Just before kick-off, a wall collapsed, killing around 50 fans. (I can’t remember the exact number, it doesn’t matter.) The match had to go on, because they were afraid that there would be even worse crowd trouble if the crowd were told that the match was cancelled. Understandably, neither side wanted to win, but somebody had to and it was Juventus.

In 1989, Liverpool were to play an FA cup semi-final against (Nottingham Forest?) in Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium in Hillsborough. The police were having trouble controlling the crowd entering a stand. The match was about to begin and there was still a large crowd standing outside. They made the mistake of allowing too many people to enter one of the stands, and in the resulting crush, 96 people died.

This was the incident that led to a wholesale review of standards for the condition of football stadiums, and increasing commercialization of that league. The formation of the Premier League resulted in player’s salaries getting more and more obscene. It is very distasteful to juxtapose these 2 incidents together, but there is a causal link.

The slave trade had already begun before the Europeans came. It was the Arabs who went into Africa to raid the continent for free labour. But it was the Europeans, especially the settlers in the Americas who took this to a totally different level. We all know some of the facts from our school textbooks, and I haven’t read up a lot on this so I don’t really know.

But the descendents of slaves in the USA are certainly having it better than those who remained behind in Africa. They are still being discriminated against, and not given as much opportunities as the whites, but the idea of race is beginning to fade, if not disappear. Right now, the most powerful government official in the US is a black man. OK, he’s actually a descendent of someone who stayed behind. But for the majority of black Americans, if their ancestors had not been captured into slavery, they would be having a pretty miserable life.

I guess the wheel of fortune is very funny like that.

The proud Singaporean in Malaysia

2009-10-26T01:58:00.001+08:00

OK will start by turning Shingot’s slogan upside down.

So we went to my father’s vacation home. He didn’t want to pay the toll for the 2nd link, but we also had some stuff to do in JB. Anyway I was wondering why he was burning another $8 worth of petrol so that he could save on $10 of toll.

I drove to the border, and then we changed places. Then he showed me this bridge they were building across the Sekudai river that would eventually provide a faster way to get from the older JB to the Iskandar region. After a couple of hours of driving, we arrived at Gelang Patah, which was the town nearest to the house. It was a former commie town. Had breakfast. Then over to the house, where to my father’s consternation, the contractor who was supposed to deliver 2 trees failed to turn up.

Later on, over to Pekan Nanas (I just googled the place on a map – wtf, it really was in the middle of nowhere!) To get some cheap groceries. Yeh well the old folks get really excited about cheap groceries. The stuff was OK, fresh farm produce. Although I haven’t really seen a wet market with so many flies buzzing around the carcasses for quite some time.

After that, back to the house, where armed with a newly acquired garden hoe and a wicker basket, I was about to engage in my great adventure of planting 2 pomelo trees. At the same time, we were expecting my uncle to visit and lend some much-needed advice to the renovation of the place. The storm clouds were gathering, so my father and I each dug a ditch for the two trees. This was the first time I was digging something since that trench I dug somewhere in Jurong for NS. Crappy (but hardly traumatic) experience, that.

As was to be expected, my father was much more of an expert at that than me. There was good advice, of course. You hold the hoe above your head, and let the weight of the hoe fall. I know that. But when I do that, the hoe doesn’t land where I want it to land. So most of the time, instead of methodically carving out lumps of soil (which is what you are supposed to do) I ended up pulverizing everything and having to scoop out sand (which is a great waste of effort).

My uncle was watching, and he chuckled and said, “ah, reliving the good old days.” (The two brothers were farmers when they were young.)

Anyway, they were all dug out already. So we did the rest: mixing the sand, some loam (bought this from a roadside nursery) and the clay-y soil, and dumping in 2 trees for good measure. Might have been the first time this city boy is planting a tree.

Doesn't this all remind you of all those old PAP cheap PR stunts called "tree planting day?" I don't suppose we have lots of them anymore because the amount of green spaces you find in newer HDB flats these days are a fucking embarrassment. But while I was digging a hole for the tree, I wondered if LKY ever dug the hole himself, or he had somebody dig the hole for him first, and then he did the relatively light work of filling it in with a sapling?

After that, more cheap groceries from wet markets, and then home.

Yes, I suppose it’s nice that the older generation want to introduce the charms of the rustic Singapore they knew from their childhood because it’s all disappeared. But it’s eluding me somewhat.

American Beauty - 10 years after

2009-10-24T18:01:00.001+08:00

I remember watching “American Beauty” 10 years ago and thinking, “this is a fantastic movie”. I’ve written at length about that movie before so I won’t do that again. But what made me suddenly think about that movie was reading about this: yes, Wes Bentley, that pot dealer who introduced everybody to drugs and invited them to turn on, is being sued by American Express for what he’s owed them in back payments.

I think, time has not been kind to the various people who were involved in the movie. They have never gotten back the same kind of acclaim that they had for “American Beauty”. Either they went downhill, or “American Beauty” was an accidental masterpiece, which fell into place because it just articulated what was on the minds of a lot of people at that time. I’m beginning to suspect it was half and half.

I think that the 90s were a bit like the 60s. It was a time when Americans were prosperous, and could afford to think about crazy ideas. It was a time when the world went collectively nuts and bought into the dot com stock craze. (Imagine how much money was lost in that bubble!). It was a time when there was a great cultural war waged between the conservatives and the liberals. It was a utopian time, when people were wondering if the world had changed forever, that the old cold war, pre-internet rules no longer applied to society. It was a time when counterculture was on the rise – instead of the hippies and Haight-Asbury, we had Kurt Cobain, REM and Radiohead, bands that were much less mainstream than the icons of the 80s – Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince.

But the merits of the film – I think that the ideas articulated were a little confused, just as 60s counterculture was confused. It was a time of great hope, a lot of talk about revolutionary change, but nothing really permanent and really significant materialised. I have not watched it a second time. The first time, it was a magical experience. Actually a lot of films I watched around that time were all magical. But I don’t want to spoil it. And I don’t want to get lost in a dream – there are very few fates that are worse than that.

Kevin Spacey had a few good roles, in “Se7en”, “the Usual Suspects”, “LA Confidential”. His role as Lester Burnham more or less carried the whole film. It was a great performance, and people were marking him for even greater things after that. But it was to be the peak of his career. A few good but not great roles followed: “Shipping News”, “K-PAX”, etc.

Annette Bening, the woman who managed to “tame” Warren Beatty. Remarkably, they are still married. She continued to get raves for movies like “Being Julia” and “Mrs Harris” but the movies themselves did not get a lot of attention.

Thora Birch was the goth daughter of Lester Burnham. They also considered Christina Ricci for the role, and you could see why. Afterwards, she was supposed to be the next Christina Ricci, and she had one good film in “Ghost World”. But after that – not much luck.

Wes Bentley was another person who was tipped for better things, having delivered that monologue about “there’s so much beauty in this world”. But other than a starring role in “Four Feathers”, he’s not starred in anything major. He’s still young and things could still happen. Or not. He’s just like David Bentley, fading after an early promise.

Mena Suvari, who was the hot chick in that bathtub, and the person Lester Burnham thinks about while masturbating, you’d expect her to be as hot as ever. But she’s now firmly slot in that “supporting roles for hot chicks” role.

Make no mistake, all the actors that I mentioned here are good actors, and a few are superb. Many have continued to put in good work, but none of them have achieved the heights of “American Beauty”. None of them can be considered failures – but Wes Bentley is dangerously close.

Sam Mendes is the director, and he’s done a few films afterwards – Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road. Revolutionary Road was a return to form, but hardly the equal of American Beauty, even as it also was similar in that it displayed the petty disappointments of the suburban existence. He also did a lot of stage directing in that time.

The one person who has moved on from “American Beauty” is Alan Ball. Not the England World Cup winning footballer, but the scriptwriter of “American Beauty”, and to my mind, the main hero in it. A lot of the sharpness of that movie came from the script, the strong characterization. A lot of the characters are stereotypes, but none of them are really 2 dimensional. His script does what very few scripts these days do: it has the ability to surprise and inspire.

1999 was a year in which there were 3 movies that promised to herald a better future for cinema: “The Matrix”, “Fight Club” and “American Beauty”. But to my mind this promise was largely unfulfilled in the 2000s.

This is Hardcore

2009-10-24T10:18:00.004+08:00

The CD player I bought from totoro 3 years ago has died. It didn't exactly die die. It was always a piece of crap. The CD door just stopped working one day, although it could still play stuff. But I think it was high time to chuck it.

The CD that was stuck inside was one that I don't play very often, but it's an album made about reaching your 30s and feeling that your life is going downhill all the way from now on.

A fairly highly regarded piece of work artistically, but this was a piece of work made under emotional turmoil: Jarvis Cocker had just become famous after more than 10 years of obscurity, but the lifestyle of hobnobbing with the famous (and all the bullshit that went with it) was starting to take its toll: it culminated in this especially infamous incident where he showed his backside to Michael Jackson (ie the moonwalker was mooned):

If your CD player could only play 1 album, it shouldn't be "This is Hardcore" by Pulp. That's bad. Not really something you want on constant rotation. So at the suggestion of the colleague, I took it apart with my screwdriver, and took out the CD. Now that the damn thing is out of my CD player I feel better.

Number Nine Dream

2009-10-24T09:38:00.000+08:00

When you're in your twenties you're being an adult for the first time, and you have to realign your priorities in life. Almost without exception, I hear a lot of final year uni students remark, "oh my God, I've just taken my last exam." What's so amazing about taking your last exam? It is that from the moment that the person enters school as a 5,6 year old, his life would have been centred around exams. It is not that difficult for him to name his reason for living: it is the exam. But when you rip that centre out of his life, a major reorientation is needed.

I once told myself, you have enough dreams to last your whole life. That is true. But what becomes of those dreams? There are plenty of instances in my life where I've been lost and headed down blind alleys. Let's look at some of those dreams.

Musician

It would not have occurred to me when I was a kid, my parents breathing down my neck to make me put in that one hour a day. I hated practicing. I wonder why people never seem to realise that people hate practicing piano. It's bad enough to hate practicing, and when you know that you aren't good with your hands, and all that practicing is futile, it's even worse. I still cringe a little when ppl come up to coach me on something that needs hand eye co-ordination (basketball for instance).

That being said, I think I have a good shot at being a composer. Except that writing stuff alone is not going to get you very far. You still need the big logistical problem of having things performed. For a few years I stopped composing because there was no way of writing things down. Then last year I started writing things down, and after that I wrote some more stuff that I'm happy with, but it's dried up a little recently. Anyway the writing part is OK. It's the translating all that stuff into music that's the problem now.

Academic

It's hardly the case that I became really interested in knowledge only when I got to the Uni. But I suppose at that time the educational system is hardly inspiring. Singapore educational system is second to none for drilling the basic facts into peoples' heads, and even the angmohs admire that. But above that and beyond, it only really gets interesting when you get to the uni. And even if I were inspired by knowledge while in Sec School and JC, it's for those ideas that you get to learn about in the uni.

And I think that it's like building a house. The part all the way up till JC is when you are pounding in the foundations and building the pillars. It doesn't look like anything is being done, even though it's a lot of hard work. It's dreary and boring. And uni is when you bring in all the prefab stuff and fit it on, and suddenly, magically, the house appears.

I would go into a field which is intricate and complex. I thought about artificial intelligence for a while. I think I would go into a field which involves a lot of complexity, and it is not difficult to find one. The big problem with academic stuff is that when you get the main idea, and that is usually early on, it's a lot of fun. But after that it is the long hard slog and the project takes forever.

Books

People have this image of my being a bookworm, even though I've had to explain to them that I've only been one for 10 years. OK, 10 years is a long time but I was more likely to listen to Jimi Hendrix / REM / Sonic Youth all day when I was back in JC.

This was probably related to the previous dream, of being an academic. I thought I'd better start reading everything I could lay my hands on, just in case I ever got the chance to be an academic one day. But now my house is stocked up with too many useless books and I set a target last year to clear 2 shelves of books by reading and selling them away. I have read through more than 1 shelf already.

Marathoner

This was something really accidental. Just that at some point in my life I got to know 5 people who have done marathons. So I signed up for a marathon at the end of 2008. It's very tiring to practice but it's too late to stop now. Anyway I finished it. Although "finish" is rather flattering to me. Towards the end when I was in an army of stragglers, I thought, "this is what it must have been like when Napoleon was retreating from Russia".

Playwright

I wanted to be a playwright in school. But I think I blogged about this before so I won't bore you with the details. Anyway bottom line is that I've taken this as far as it can go so I'm OK with this.

Career

Nothing much here. At one point my thinking was, "everybody thinks that this is important, so it has to be important." It wasn't easy at first. I'm still getting by. Maybe for now I will just have a job, get by and at the same time work on my other dreams. Until such a time when I stumble upon something that is compelling enough that it becomes another one of my dreams.

Pussy

The one time that I have been in love, something strange happened. Everything gets imbued with a whole new meaning, although if you were to press me about it now, I'm not sure I can explain what this "new meaning" is. Whereas I was a more easy going person before that, I just got more forceful over certain things. When am I next going to get somebody? Well I used to think, make more of your own dreams come true, and this problem will fix itself. And it used to be that impressing women would be a great incentive to work at those things. Little by little, though, it stopped being important, and now when I wake up in the morning, I know that I will measure how useful a day has been according to these other things outlined above.

Whole Brain Thinking

2009-10-18T15:51:00.000+08:00

OK, time for training again, and another fluffy course to make up the training hours so that we can fulfill another fucking corporate KPI.

This course is not that meaningless but at the heart of it is some overlong exposition of some idea that’s taken too seriously, taken too far. This is “Whole Brain Thinking”. Basically what it means is that they simplistically take 4 modes of using your left and right brain. You have 4 quadrants, and the personality test divides how much you use these 4 modes of thinking. They are:

The blue portion (left brain, cerebral)
The scientist who is always analysing, weighing up stuff, the rational-logical part.

The green portion (left brain, limbic)
The studious, conscientious part, which organises information into very

The red portion (right brain, limbic)
The emotional touchy feely part

The yellow portion (right brain, cerebral)
The imaginative, intuition part, which does a lot of leaps of logic.

So it was fun when at first I told them that I was a maths major, and then they concluded that I was a blue portion. Well it turned out that I primarily use the yellow portion, and a bit of the blue portion (that makes me more intensely cerebral than limbic, which means I’m primarily a thinker not a doer.) Then I’m fairly strong with red, and a little limp when it comes to the green.

I’m not surprised. I know that I’m good at blue because of my talent in maths. I’m also good at red because I have artistic talent. And given that blue and red are in opposite quadrants, I’m probably also good at one other aspect, and that is yellow, because it allows a person to see the whole picture, and probably you need holistic thinking in order to be able to switch between opposite modes of thinking.

But I’m concerned about my lack of green. This probably means that I should never ever touch operations. It probably also means that I have a good chance at being a success in life at anything other than operations. This is very interesting. In fact it means that I’m also fairly suspect as an engineer but don’t tell anybody I said that.

I’m thinking about other people I have to work with. I know that Monty Burns is either OK with the green portion and hopeless with the blue (or was that the other way around?) And he’s definitely crap at the yellow portion as well.

It is estimated that 70% of people use 2 of the zones, 20% use 3 of the zones, 7% use only 1 zone (and people in this category have an unfortunate tendency to piss off all those around them). The lucky few, the 3% who use all 4 zones, usually end up as leaders of men. If I were slightly stronger with red, I would be able to count myself as 3 quadrants.

The instructor did have a few interesting stories to tell. She did say that Singapore is very good and pumping out blue people, and to a lesser extent, green people. Yellow people have it tough in Singapore. I suppose that it’s quite ironic that they call it yellow people since most East Asian cultures are generally unfriendly towards yellow people. This is one major reason why I do not entirely approve of my own culture - I don’t give a fuck about people who say I’m being disloyal, the bare fact is that I often have to choose between being true to myself and being true to my culture. There is always a conflict.

The irony is that in my formative years I was brought up in a place which is yellow friendly. Most of my education were in yellow friendly places. But NS and work were not yellow friendly.

I know that the nail that sticks out will be hammered down but this nail intends to fight back. What usually happens is that when people pick on me I roll with the punches a little while, be very quiet, and try to sniff out their weak points, and then if there’s a way I kick them around a little bit here and there. This is nothing personal but yellow people need a lot of free space so too bad for you if you’re in the way. I can’t really help it but yellow people are rabble rousers. There’s really no point being always submissive, it’s no way to live your life. You have a role to play in society and you just have to do what you have to do. And anyhow the point of being yellow is that you can always find a way out because yellow is also the colour of cunning.

There are other ways of doing things - I think about Gorbachev, who came up in a very repressive and conformist society, and he still very artfully tried to effect a revolution from within. If you study history he gets most of the credit for overthrowing the Soviet system. He’s a person who managed to be a rebel, and yet do it without pissing too many people off. (Yes, he pissed off a lot of people, but that was later, after the USSR collapsed.) But I don’t have as many skills as he does. And you know, at the end of the day it wasn’t a happy ending for him. It wasn’t entirely his fault but Russia became a much more fucked up place after the end of the USSR, the life expectancy dropped by 10 years because everybody was drinking themselves to death. Russia is now ruled by the mafia.

The methodology of using user evaluations to assess whether the trainer gets to continue teaching is inherently flawed because it tilts the balance towards fluffy pseudo-psychological feel-good bimbonic stuff, and people who run one-size-fits-all management programs which have dubious relevance to the organisation can get away with charging really profitable admission fees. I sometimes wonder: is it very much more expensive to get your own guys to run some training themselves?

We haven’t had training programs that address problems that are specific to our company. That will change in due course.

I suppose Singaporean companies are very paranoid that people will find out about their modus operandi, to the extent that I have heard someone fairly senior on my organisation decrying the need to have somebody build an information portal that will be used by both ourselves and our customers. He complained that other companies will just bare a shoulder or two while we will strip naked in front of them and dance around. Be that as it may, if you want external consultants to effect real change in your organisation, you have to take it all off so that he can impregnate you isn’t it?

Unified Modelling Language

2009-10-18T15:25:00.000+08:00

Now, you probably wouldn’t think of engineers as being experts on relationship management, but there are other occupations which have persistently and consistently fared worse when it comes to managing their relationships. Like celebrities. And celebrities are supposed to be the most sexually attractive and desirable among human beings. So if we can do better than them, I suppose you should listen to us.

Another reason is that engineers are supposed to be masters at simplifying the complex, because if we can’t do this, nobody can. Engineering these days is almost the art of mastering complex systems. And we would say that a couple in a romantic relationship is a complex system.

One theory I’ve been expounding has something to do with software engineering. It’s how, when you are writing software specifications, you need to have descriptions about components. Each component is typically treated like a black box. You specify certain things about interfacing, without caring too much about the nitty gritties of how these things are being implemented. In other words, if you put in an input X, you should be getting an output Y. This should be very clear to the end user. It should work in a very predictable way, and after all human beings should work in a predictable way because at the end of the day, we are all machines, even though we are more complicated than what we think of as a machine.

There is an expectation about how people are going to behave in a certain circumstance, and people should deliver what is expected of them. If things are different, then maybe an environment variable we don’t completely understand is set incorrectly.

Under this software engineering model, we are supposed to understand the user interface correctly. I am not the first person to describe a woman as a very complicated machine whose workings it would a challenge to master. Which knob to turn, which button to push, and when. The point here is that, even if you understand that logic or you don’t, you have to admit that there is a certain logic at work, and the key to the longevity or the viability of that relationship is that you understand that logic as best you can.

At the same time that you are trying to understand this new fangled software component, you have to remember that you yourself are also a software component whose workings are clear to the other party. When circumstances are like this,

What is the consequence of the black box aspect of this? It is important to note that you don’t have to understand completely how that other software component works. Some women are very proud of the fact that nobody is able to understand her inner workings. Well and good, fair enough. Some women really mean that, others say that just so as to maintain some leverage over their man. Whether or not that is true, it doesn’t matter. But you have to understand the specifications. You have to know what is pushing what button, and what kind of behaviour is going to result from that.

Women are a little bit like quantum theory. You can look at all the equations, and you can look at the conclusions that come ouf of them, and you can say, “this is total nonsense. This is illogical, and does not conform to my expectations of what reality is like. Well and good. But you will always have those equations, and you will still be able to predict what is going to happen by applying those equations. Your job is not to understand the equations on a deep level, but merely to predict what is going to happen next so that you can act accordingly. You don’t have to understand your woman. But you need to be able to predict her.

Of course, when you go deeper into UML, you will have plenty of new-fangled engineering concepts that I’m only beginning to grapple with. What is a design pattern, what is a state diagram, what is a class diagram. Plenty of boxes with arrows and circles and what not. There is a logic behind everything. The key is to understand the system and work for it, and make that system work for you.

I see that engineers have an average to good record at making marriages last. Some people think that it is because engineers marry each other, and are so shit ugly that nobody else wants to touch them, I have nothing to say about that. Even if that were true, it still means that our quality of life is better than - say- Britney and Kevin Federline. And that is why engineers are better at romantic relationships than all these crazy celebrities, it is because when we buy a new piece of software, we take the time and effort to study the user specifications properly, and we actually read the operating manual that comes together with it, as opposed to those celebrities who only get into it because a sexy glossy manual looks sexy and glossy enough for them.

In a perfect world, all couples would understand the Unified Modelling Language well enough to apply it to their relationships.

The other thing about relationships that computer science can teach you is the halting problem. The halting problem is simply, given a program and an input, to decide whether the program would run forever or whether it would halt. There's no way of knowing until you try it out. So there's really no way of knowing for sure whether a relationship is going to work until you tried out that relationship in the first place.

Football Betting Season 2 Weeks 4-6

2009-10-18T01:05:00.002+08:00

I record my betting on this blog because I wanted to make public my experiment with football betting. The last 3 weekends have been very mixed in terms of my fortunes.

2 weeks ago, I had a great record. I bet on Everton to beat Portsmouth because everybody was beating Portsmouth (I was right). I bet on Liverpool to beat Hull, who were having a miserable time, and I was right. I bet on Arsenal to beat Fulham and I was lucky – Fulham played better than Arsenal, but lost 0-1. Finally I bet on Man City to beat West Ham and I got that one right. There was also a La Liga match involving Real Madrid or Barcelona, and I got that one right too. My takings were $20 for getting everything correct.

Last week, though, it was a disaster. I bet on Tottenham to beat Bolton, and they were only able to draw. I bet on Wigan to beat Hull, but Hull beat them instead. I bet on Man U to beat Sunderland, and I got that wrong too. The only bet that worked was on Burnley to beat Birmingham at home.

Burnley are very good at home. It was risky betting on Burnley but worth it. For the Wigan match, I had to remember: 2 times I bet on Wigan this season, and I lost both bets. Wigan are unpredictable. Man U was not necessarily going to win against Sunderland – they had just finished Europe. Later on I also found out that Alex Ferguson had made a few tactical mistakes. I couldn’t explain Tottenham and Bolton, but there are a few teams you shouldn’t bet against – Everton, Bolton and Stoke. The boring-football,-but-we’ll-kick-you-off-the-park types. In my haste to bet on something, just so that I had something to bet on, I violated some of my rules.

This week, though, things are going quite OK. I bet on Arsenal to beat Birmingham. Arsenal are going through a good streak this season, and even though many people were predicting they would drop out of the top 4 this season, it seems as though Liverpool would be the one to make way instead. I also bet on Stoke to beat West Ham. Stoke are another side like Burnley, quite good at home, and difficult to beat. The score was tied until the 70th minute and so it was uncomfortable for me, but eventually it turned out OK. I don’t know about Real Madrid, but I won’t lose sleep over it.

This week, I’m also proud of the decisions I made not to bet. Everton “should” beat Wolves, but this season Everton is weaker, and so it was a draw instead. Liverpool are stronger than Sunderland on paper, but they lost, because Liverpool are in deep shit. A very far cry from the swaggering giants who were winning week after week towards the end of last season. Chelsea “should” beat Aston Villa, but even though they scored first, Chelsea lost. Chelsea are another team in shit trouble at the moment and at this rate, Arsenal or Man City has a great chance at the title.

One regret is that I didn’t bet on Tottenham to beat Portsmouth, although I thought that would happen. I thought that Portsmouth turned the corner by beating Wolves, but they are still weak. Wigan are weaker than Man City, but remember – never bet on an outcome that involves Wigan.

Update: Man City and Wigan drew. So the dictum that you should never bet on an outcome involving Wigan is correct.

Nap

2009-10-17T20:01:00.003+08:00

I was trying to get to sleep after a Saturday morning run. It should have been easy. Sleeping is really easy right after you've done a run. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, my father called me on the phone. My grandmother picked it up, and started screaming my name, not knowing where I was. (She's blind and immobile, so that's the only thing she could do.) I didn't want to take it because I was asleep, I didn't get up because I wanted to sleep. But she was oblivious to it and was screaming my name for a couple of minutes. Then suddenly something pierced through the fog of consciousness, and she decided to give up, and when she tried to talk to the receiver, my father was gone, he probably figured out before she did that I was trying to sleep.

After that, I tossed and turned for almost an hour. It would have been so easy to sleep, but suddenly it wasn't. I was very pissed off.

I wonder whether that's what having kids is like.

High Ceilings

2009-10-11T18:48:00.000+08:00

On a weekend, it is usually a nice thing to just sit at a coffee joint, read books, and just chill out. Saturday mornings are best because many of the places in the CBD are open, even until the afternoon, and no customers.

So it was with the expectation of whiling away 2 hours that I popped into the Starbucks at Capital Towers. Yes, I know I’m supposed to cut out my reading but this time it’s not some random book pulled out of a warehouse sale / library, but serious stuff, like how to write a compiler, or how operating systems work, or stuff like that.

So it was a good way of spending time when suddenly 4 gentlemen from the Indian subcontinent and 1 from the PRC (probably) walked in carrying a few pieces of scaffolding, and plonked it down 10 metres in front of me. So I had a great view of the interesting project that was about to unfold before me.

Now I think that Starbucks has a few places which are basically air-conditioned greenhouses. (Actually you could say that most of the CBD is an air-conditioned greenhouse). Glass and steel are OK in cold countries because they trap heat. But in a tropical climate they are just stupid. Luckily this particular air con greenhouse had a tall ceiling, so I suspect that would save a lot of air con costs – ie it incorporates cooling techniques that were designed for tropical weather.

So OK, on top of a large cup of overpriced coffee, and reading about how to handled left recursion while parsing computer code, I had the pleasure of watching them set up the scaffolding. 1 layer went up, then the trestle was fixed on. It’s like a farm, where the farmer is sweating his guts out, and the cows are just there, watching him, insouciantly chewing cud.

Another layer went up, and it was more interesting, because it looked a little dangerous: there were no safety harnesses (after all where are you going to hook them on, a skyhook?) and there was this dramatic suspension: what are they doing this for, and is anybody going to get hurt? Finally, with the rest of the building materials handed upwards to this brave guy teetering on a plank on top, the platform on top was built. By this time 2 Indian guys were holding the bottom part of the platform for support. Then the Chinese guy came up.

Then it hit me: this is the answer to the perennial question: how many foreign workers does it take to change a light bulb? The Chinese guy plucked the energy saving tube out from the socket (I suppose you don’t really bother about switching off the lights when it’s so much trouble to get back down). And then he just changed the tube. He did that for a few sockets. So that was entertainment.

I had another piece of entertainment when I went down to Orchard Central after work. It is a very strange building, on the site of the sadly departed Specialist Centre, on a narrow site, and 8 floors of shops. Moreover these floors have very high ceilings.

So I was chilling out at their gelato outlet, when I noticed that a few people were craning their necks. At first I thought they were just looking at this loud and garish giant LCD screen mounted on the opposite wall, when I realised that I was sitting right underneath what was “the highest indoor rock climbing wall (in a shopping centre)”. It’s like 4-5 storeys high, and overlooks Orchard Road, so you really feel like you are on some crazy rock cliff in – uh – Orchard Road. Now that was crazy. I was just chilling out and eating an ice cream and suddenly I discover that if somebody slips and falls, he’s going to land up in my banana split, or if his bladder gives way, raindrops will soon be falling on my head. Or if he craps his pants, I will have extra fudge for my ice cream.

Anyway it is great that the lonesome life of a wandering bookworm is broken by such interesting side distractions.

Executive

2009-10-11T01:09:00.000+08:00

I’ve only started work on a new section at my workplace not long ago. It’s a place where, in spite of my long tenure in my department, I have never gone to – well, for more than 6 months at a stretch. That’s because they like to pigeonhole people, and I happened to have been pigeonholed as a “techie”, although not without reason. But I always resist pigeonholing, and I was bored of all that techie shit. So in my section, I get involved with more frontline stuff.

When you get closer to the frontline, it’s not so much thinking anymore. It’s a lot less being right about everything, and just a little more of doing. A lot more of making do, making compromises, a lot more of just doing a good job instead of doing a perfect job.

I know a lot of people at my workplace have invested a lot in a certain branch of management science. It sounded wonderful and intriguing at first when I heard about it but later on I grew to not like it very much. (And believe me it’s not very nice when you don’t like your job.) There is often a very big misfit between theory and reality and every time this misfit gets too large, it makes my stomach churn.

Yes, I know, I did pure maths. But I was comfortable with that because I never ever have to deal with a clash of cultures. I never have to make approximations, sweep some aspects of the problem under the carpet. Anyway I thought I would get more into that mode of executive thinking. This is something that I’ve always been a little weak in, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever cut it in management and stuff like that.

I know that, as a consequence of me having an elite education at just about every stage, there are naturally people who see me as one of those who put a little too much emphasis on book knowledge. While this is partially true, I also have parents who constantly drummed into me the limits of that. Like NWA said, "you are about to witness the strength of street knowledge". I have always understood the importance of street knowledge, even though, well, I hardly put that into practice.

I have always been a procrastinator, a ditherer. It is very true that a lot of people have brains that are wired up differently. This is the P-J axis on the Myers Briggs test – perceiving or judging? Perceiving people take a long time to think about things, and they go through a lot of very interesting but possibly marginal thoughts. Judging people make decisions quickly, and they stick to it. But in the event they are wrong, you probably have to break a chair over their head in order to convince them they are wrong. Generally, P and J people tend to drive each other up the wall. Among my friends and acquaintances, I have a rough idea who are the P and J people.

Needless to say, I am a P person. Unfortunately J is much more suitable for a corporate environment. So you could say I’m in here to learn a little bit more J thinking.

Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of reasons why I loathe the executive mindset, and why it never was my natural mode of thinking. I have a distaste for people who jump right to conclusions. I always believe that I can come up with a better idea when I wait just a little longer. I never really liked the corporate mentality which focused everything on the profit and bottom line. We all know that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but why is this so? Because most of us are corporation slaves who dedicate our lives to just this cause, whether we like it or not. Every time we squeeze out a little bit more of corporate profits, we are making some rich motherfucker even richer.

In a more general sense I don't like the executive mindset because it optimises the situation according to some narrowly defined criterion and says "fuck you" to everything else. You maximise profits, and some poor sucker elsewhere gets screwed. You maximise your wealth, but you piss other people off by pissing on them. Or you jeopardise your own mental health and your happiness.

In "Wall Street", Gordon Gecko says "greed is good. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit" I agree with the second part. But does it follow, then, that greed is good?

But I am willing to hold up my hands and say that a lot of the time, greed is good. Making snap judgements, trusting your instincts, saying the first good thing that comes to your mind, at least doing something instead of nothing, is good.

I’m not a man of action, rather I’m one of thought. But I need to get it all straightened out now and I suppose submitting myself to this sort of discipline is one way to proceed. When I was younger I used to have this disdain for management theory, management thinking. But I suppose it’s because there are a lot of intellectual creases in there that needs to be ironed out. Everything you do, you do it for a certain reason, but there are also a handful of reasons not to do that thing too. If you think too much, you could get immobilized by the inaction. Therefore it’s just useful to not think too much, just do it, have a stronger stomach, and just learn to say fuck that shit.

I used to put a lot of obstacles in front of me, so that I wouldn’t have to do anything. I don’t know if it’s just my way of avoiding responsibility, but this has been going on for a little too long. I suppose I read a lot of books because I enjoyed the knowledge, but I think I also enjoyed the lack of stress and the indolence from just curling up in front of a book, and kidding myself that a lot of good knowledge was going up into my head. The fact that this was partially true, I guess, just allowed me to go on a little longer. I would say that last year was a year I had set aside and allowed myself to ease back. (If you consider preparing for a marathon “easing back”) This year I’m a little edgier but time is slipping by and still a lot of things that need to be done still don’t get done.

The executive mindset is this: you focus on the task at hand. Get it done however and not get wedded to a certain ideology. Do it today, not do it tomorrow.

You know what we all say in engineering: a good solution today is better than a perfect solution tomorrow. Unfortunately we are all in the “perfect solution tomorrow” department. I see a lot of people who are more or less wedded to that mindset, dreaming about a better, more glorious tomorrow. Well I don't bank on being around when tomorrow comes. Or they forget about the law of unintended consequences: the big snazzy solution that you come up with today will be screwed up in a way that you currently are still unable to imagine.

Well good luck to me being able to change my mindset. This has taken forever.

Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-10T02:07:00.001+08:00

There’s a lot of talk about the Nobel Prize going to Obama. One insight suddenly struck me: Nobel prizes are always given out early. Too early, some might say. No, I think the prizes are too precious to be given away when somebody’s work is done. Most people would think that Nobel Prizes are given to commemorate work that has been done. But Alfred Nobel himself said that the prize was to be given out to living people. I suppose the spirit was to encourage them to continue their efforts, and to show their efforts at peace in a positive light.

There were prizes that were meant to honour causes, even as the struggle was going on. Lech Walesa was given the prize in 1983 for his struggle against communism, when the communist Polish government was only starting to weaken. Desmond Tutu was given the prize while South Africa was still under Apartheid. Aung San Suu Kyii was given the prize, even though since 1991, when the prize was given, not much has improved in Myanmar. Closer to home, Archbishop Belo and Ramos Horta were given the prize while the East Timor struggle for independence was still going on, and before they gained independence.

There are prizes who were given to people whose moral character are seriously in question. They gave the prize to Kissinger. Even though it was for a worthy act – the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War, there are many people who consider him a mass murderer because of his conduct of the Vietnam War, and because he ordered Cambodia to be bombed – an act that helped bring Pol Pot to power.

There was also Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat. The first was the Israeli President who, when he was a general, murdered thousands of Palestinians. The second was the Egyptian leader who was a dictator who oversaw the torture of many political enemies. But the fact remains that a large part of the Israeli conflict – the one with Egypt – was more or less resolved.

There was Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. They set in motion a roadmap for peace, but that was tragically derailed and if anything, the heightened expectations from that brief glimpse of peace worsened the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Seems like they gave the prize to a terrorist for nothing.

Then there was the Dalai Lama. I don’t really know the story very well, and there are always two sides to every story. This was definitely meant to highlight the Tibetian struggle for freedom, if not independence. But I don’t really know how much they contributed to the Tibetian freedom movement. On one hand it’s positive for him to put emphasis on non-violent struggle against China, and to spotlight the sufferings of the Tibetian under the PRC government. But I don’t know if it’s really peaceful when the knowledge that you have a government in exile incited a lot of riots and unrest leading up to the Olympics.

It is true that the Nobel Prize to the Dalai Lama is a rebuke to China. The one awarded to Aung San Suu Kyii is also one, but less so: Burma had close ties with China, but less so now. There were prizes awarded to some lady from Guatemala, and that can be seen as a rebuke to the US as well. I don’t really think that China is complaining that the prizes are unfair because lately, there are some prizes over the last few years that make very similar political points:

2002 – prize went to Jimmy Carter, former US president. Not an effective president while in office, but after his presidency was over, he did a lot of diplomatic work. Message to George Bush 2: look at him, and learn from him. He is a man of peace, unlike you.

2007 – prize went to Al Gore, George Bush’s opponent in the 2000 elections. OK, he did a lot of pushing for environmental issues, but he wasn’t the one who did the most work. In fact, some people accused him of undermining the Kyoto Protocol. Whether he deserves the prize is secondary. What is of greater importance is the message that Mother Earth is in deep shit. Message to George Bush 2: This is the guy that should have been president instead of you.

2005 - Prize went to IAEA and their director-general ElBaradei, who very vocally criticized the USA’s decision to go to war with Iraq. Message to George Bush 2: This guy said that Saddam Hussein had no WMD, and you should have bloody well listened to him instead of leading the US into war with Iraq.

2009 – prize went to Barack Obama, whose main foreign policy achievement in his as of now short stay in the White House was to repeal a lot of George Bush 2’s policies. Message to George Bush 2: we couldn’t wait for you to leave office soon enough and we gave the prize to your replacement at the earliest given opportunity.

Health Care

2009-10-04T22:40:00.000+08:00

Sent my grandmother to a stomach endoscopy. She had a real problem 1 year ago, when it always seemed that her stomach was upset. Now it’s getting better. Still, I decided to get her to go to a stomach endoscopy to see what was going on. I tricked her into going into a barium enema last year, and boy that was messy. I wanted to get her a colonoscope, but she saw the doctor without me around and she opted for the lesser option. As it turns out, there was no cancer but you can’t really see very much from a barium enema – just some shitty X ray images, whereas the colonoscope gets you a shot of the ass in full technicolour gory.

OK, I’m a bit sadistic. You know me, I’m the sort of guy who thinks that the infamous “bring out the gimp” scene in Pulp Fiction was funny. (Actually I’m not alone). After the barium enema, my grandmother was groaning, “you’re doing this for your own amusement aren’t you?” I didn’t deny that. Well I got her stomach checked too. OK, maybe these problems come and go. Maybe she was just getting anxious about her facilities leaving her one by one, and it’s OK.

But it’s OK. I go to Tan Tock Seng, and the place looks like it’s well run. It works. Doctors are busy, and they’re always busy. But the place is well maintained. Yes, it does help that Singapore has cheap and abundant foreign labour.

I don’t know what the US hospitals are like because I’ve never been in one. (Not even after 4 years). But from what my sister tells me, she’s being overworked. I should have remembered that the US health care system is being stretched thin before I gave her my moral support to become a doctor (I was the first one in my family to do so, and for quite a while, the only one). I don’t know whether it was a mistake for me to do so. On balance, I still believe that medicine is the right career for her.

Still, the general impression I get is that health insurance companies which are providing health care for the Americans are always trying to squeeze every last drop out of the system, by forcing doctors to see more patients in shorter periods of time, and giving her shit loads of paperwork because of the litigious culture in the US of MF A.

One of the first few things that Bill Clinton did as president was to get the health care passed. He gave the problem to Hillary, who worked on it behind closed doors, came up with a 1000 page proposal, which was shot down in Congress (doesn’t that remind you of working life already?).

It’s a problem that has come to a head recently, with Obama fighting to get universal health coverage passed in the US. There have been a lot of public protests against this, of late, and the insurance companies which have been fighting against this are suspected of organizing more than a few of these protests. Many people have been falsely labeling as socialism. I just realized that the US have this culture where they are extremely suspicious of any form of government. But they’re not doing themselves any favours like this. It’s a bloody shame that the world’s richest country cannot take care of their poor.

I haven’t watched the Michael Moore movie “Sicko” yet but I think I’ll go have a look.

History of numbernine’s facial hair

2009-10-03T23:03:00.000+08:00

Before I was 17, I was under orders from my mother not to cut it. I started growing this ridiculous moustache which made me look ugly. She was so adamant that she was right that I got severely berated for trying to cut it. I was made to pull out my beard with a pair of tweezers. (I never used it on my upper lip - too painful). The impression was that if you shaved yourself, then your hair became thicker. First, later on I learnt that it was bull. Second, I got more problems trying to pluck my hair out with tweezers than by shaving. Last of all, I learnt not to trust women when it comes to knowing anything about facial hair.

I finally got my own shaver not long after. It was a small Braun shaver. My father liked Braun shavers, and he always used electric shavers. He didn’t use a razor because he always cut himself.

While in the army, I used the Braun. There was this sergeant, he didn’t really like me, so during morning inspections, he always used the excuse that I had stubble to pump me. I know there’s always a bit of bad blood between the farmers and the geeks. My revenge is to never ever not be a geek, because I know the mere fact of my existence makes them pissed off - but that’s another story for another time. It’s true, though, that electric shavers are not that clean.

I went to college, and when I shaved, I didn’t go out for 1 hour. I used to have cuts all the time. I started using the razor. I used the old Gillette models because the Gillette III was so expensive to be a rip off. I used the Gillette III once - it is a great product, because I never get cut while using it, but it’s still too bloody expensive. I also used shaving foam, because it was the cool thing to do.

I bought some shaving balm - I needed it. So it was - shave, slather on some shaving balm, get into my bath tub and study some more, then 15 minutes later, wash away those bloody red patches. It was gross.

I experimented here and there. I found out a few things, that shaving tends to be easier when you haven’t shaven for 3-4 days, when your skin isn’t dry and scaly, when you didn’t cut yourself the previous day, when you are using shaving cream.

One day, I made the biggest breakthrough - the secret formula (which wouldn’t be a secret if I had bothered to ask somebody who knows how to use a razor). Wet the skin first before you put on the shaving foam. After that secret, it was so much easier. I’m still guaranteed to cut myself after using the razor, but not as badly as before.

What do I apply to my face after a shave? I used to use shaving lotion or shaving gel. That was OK. I bought a small bottle of aftershave, but there’s too much alcohol in that, an it dehydrates my face, making it difficult for me the next time around, so that’s bad. Shaving lotion works best for me.

I don’t have steady hands. I need all the help I can get. I’m pretty hairy for a Chinese. My father is one of the hairiest Chinese guys that I’ve ever seen and he shaves just about every day. He has chest hair, something I don’t even have. I used to ask my grandmother if she had an affair with an Indian. Myself I’m quite hairy too, so I have to shave myself every day. But I’m a little lax, so I make it every other working day, and no shaving on the weekends. The last thing that makes shaving difficult for me is that I have a sharp chin, so it’s difficult to get at all the angular bits without more blood. Yes, shaving’s quite a bit of a drag.

There was once when I fractured my right hand, and had to go through life doing everything with my left. Shaving became a big problem. The few times I had to shave were a total disaster, and it looked like a horror film after I finished.

I also use my electric shaver, because if I don’t do that my face will get razor fatigue. It used to be very difficult to get a clean shave from my electric shaver, so I found out that wetting my face did the trick. I didn’t have to worry about water getting into the electric shaver, it was meant to be water proof to a certain extent. First time I wet my face and shaved with the electric, though I had a nasty experience. I allowed the stubble to build up in the shaver before I cleaned it out. But the first time I cleaned it out, there were lice all over the stubble that was inside the electric, so it was gross. So I have to clean out the shaver every time I use it. No big deal, that.

I have used the same electric shaver for more than 10 years now and I should change to a new one, but I think this one still has a few more good years in it.

The last thing to learn was this: I always wondered why I cut myself more with the razor in temperate countries than in Singapore. Finally I found out: when you are shaving, always shave with warm water.

So my father still doesn’t know how to use a razor, but I do. Yay!

OK, to sum up, this is how to shave.

Step 1: Clean your face.
Step 2: If your face is not wet, wet it. Of course, just wet the part you have to shave, unless you enjoy being wet. But only girls enjoy being wet. Use warm water.
Step 3: Put on the shaving cream / foam.
Step 4: Shave. Use a razor with a pivoting razor head for ease of use. Shave in any direction you want, although some people feel that shaving against the direction of your hairs is wrong. Use a clean motion with every stroke. Always shave in a direction perpendicular to the blade, never parallel. Do not press too hard on your face, but emphasise the sideways motion.
Step 5: Put some after shave lotion on your face, and wash it 5 minutes later.

Law of Large Numbers

2009-10-03T01:30:00.002+08:00

I wrote the music when I was running at McRitchie. Night fell and I was groping my way around in the forest for a while.

I wrote the first part of the lyrics while driving. It's my favourite set of lyrics so far. The middle section has no purpose other than to wind up people who don't like maths.

If I had a time machine
to bring me back to yesterday
before I screwed it up,

Would I do it differently
or would I do it all again
because I'm being me?

Who is to say, if I didn't do that yesterday
I wouldn't do the same dumb thing
on another day?

Statistical theory:
the action of an agent is
the realisation of

that which is inherently
a trait deeply embedded in his
personality

Repeated instances of that experiment
will show me screw it up again -
the Law of Large Numbers!

McCartney had it wrong,
There is no going back into
a fabled "yesterday"

Walk on by and don't look back
the things you never get are the
things you never had.

Beatles - 2

2009-09-27T17:57:00.001+08:00

The Girlfriend
Every band has a disruptive influence on their music which is blamed for breaking the band up. But seldom has this influence been encapsulated in 1 person: Yoko Ono. She was Japanese. She was an Avant-Garde artist in her own right, and even if she was not as great an artist as John Lennon was, she had a tremendous force of personality, and was a great influence on him. The Beatles always had girlfriends whom they got along with with various degrees of success, but they were second class citizens, and a lot of the time they played a marginal role in the band. This was until Yoko Ono came along.

Yoko Ono was a polarizing figure. Some admired her for being a feminist pioneer. Opinion is divided about how talented she really was. Some were happy that John had finally found the true love of his life. Others despised her for being a talentless groupie, and – well – Japanese. But after she came along, John Lennon broke the golden rule that girlfriends don’t come to the studio. She started putting in her contribution, most notably to the song “Revolution No 9”. She was an unwanted 5th member of the band, and more significantly, it was clear that after she came along that John Lennon’s heart was no longer in the Beatles. There is no doubt that would have happened anyway with or without Yoko Ono, but she now bears the unwanted tag of being the woman who broke up the Beatles.

There would be other bands that had their Yoko Ono. The most famous one was Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love was always called his “Yoko Ono”

Artistic growth
Most bands do not go through the 3 phases of being a lowly pub band, then being teen idols, and lastly being highly respected artists, but since at least 1 of these labels apply to the majority of bands. The Beatles came of age at a time when the rest of pop music was highly experimental and constantly breaking new ground at a rate that has not been matched since. They were innovative in many ways.

Right from the start, they were good musicians and songwriters. But as time went on, they progressed from the teenybopper head shaking “woooo!” songs to write songs of greater depth and sophistry. They wrote about sex, drugs, politics. They blended surrealism into their art. They achieved sound effects in the studio that had never been done before (but then they were one of the very few artists with the clout to work in the studio practically full time, and with an unlimited budget.) And what they didn’t innovate, they co-opted and assimilated. They easily met the challenges of the Beach Boys, the Byrds and Bob Dylan because they were able to work the influences of these people into their own art. Considering that they were only around for 8 years after they released their first recordings, their rate of growth was incredible.

However, many in Singapore would mainly remember the early days. When they started growing long hair and smoking pot, I think it was too outrageous for the conservative society they had here.

It is probably true that all artists need to evolve and cover new ground in order to remain creatively vital. But soon the band members would hanker for greater artistic freedom, which led into…

The Artistic Differences
In the beginning of their heyday, the Beatles were a tight unit. Much tighter than in the Sutcliffe / Best days. Under Brian Epstein, they presented a united front to the public. The songs were all listed down as Lennon-McCartney songs, and to a great extent, that was true. Even though most of the songs were mainly written by 1 of the two, there were very few that didn’t have a contribution by the other one. However they were always photographed together, and they always played music together.

However, from “Revolver” onwards, they started having more separate identities. It was around the time when George Harrison started writing music. The later songs were more obviously either “Lennon songs” (songs about the ego, surrealist and crazy stuff, punkish rebellious ones) or “McCartney songs” (more melodious, more harmonically sophisticated, character portraits, nursery rhymes). By the time of the White Album, it was a pastiche of solo recordings from each of the 4 Beatles. The famous inner sleeve was the first time they were photographed separately. By the time of “Let It Be”, they were hardly talking to each other. They only patched things up for “Abbey Road”, but that was a Paul McCartney dominated album.

How many other bands were like this? One of the most cited reasons for bands breaking up are “artistic differences”, because this is the one where nobody is really to be blamed, whether the excuse is true or not is another matter.

India
It is true that at some point, the band would want to pursue more exotic avenues. The Beatles went to India to study meditation under an Indian guru, but soon got disenchanted with him. John Lennon wrote the sarcastic “Sexy Sadie” to diss him, and at the last moment, was persuaded to change the original title, which was “Maharishi”.

George Harrison was the one who pushed the band to experiment with meditation and Indian culture. His Indian inspired recordings are not the most well regarded parts of the Beatles canon, but it was not a bad thing that the Beatles wrote a lot of good songs about spirituality (and drugs).

After the Beatles, it was a wide practice for a successful pop band to embrace a foreign culture and work it into their music. The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” had Brian Jones on sitar. Jimi Hendrix had Hindu images on his second album. Paul Simon had his African adventures. The Police had their cod reggae. Madonna had her Kabbalah. Although none went so far as Peter Gabriel, who set up a world music consortium. Each of them would be criticized for not being sufficiently authentic and representative of that foreign element, but then again, each of them would be instrumental in bringing that world music to the attention of a wider audience.

Breakup and Death
It was not that clear at that time, but the breaking up of the Beatles was a fantastic career move. The Beatles never stayed together long enough to see their standards go down hill, although this did happen to each of the individual members. Towards the end, John Lennon was the most unhappy of the Beatles, partly because he felt that his position as the lead Beatle as being usurped by Paul McCartney. (But it was his fault that McCartney was always better at dealing with fame, and was the more hardworking one.) He was depressed and suicidal over getting battered for having found the true love of his life. Their business affairs were in a mess, and both John and Paul had different people representing them. Artistically, they grew apart. Their friendship was breaking down. It was the perfect storm in the making.

So the only surprise here was that at first, only one of them wanted to break up. This was understandable because they were still the number 1 band around, and because they were still functioning pretty well as a unit.

Probably no other band managed to mythologise their breakup as well as the Beatles did. Since the Beatles were always in the news, the various reasons for the breakup were well known to the fans. But this is probably the only time a band of their stature broke up at the height of their success. (Only other examples I can think of offhand were the Police and the Smiths, but although they were great bands, they weren’t in the same league as the Beatles.) They never stayed around long enough to be Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a shadow of their former self, flogging their dead horses over and over again. *cough* Rolling Stones *cough*.

Both John and Paul wrote about their break ups. John Lennon wrote about it on his song, “God”. (“the dream is over / …. And so my friends, we’ll just have to carry on / the dream is over”). Paul McCartney wrote about it on his “Let it Be”.

The lesson to other bands is that you will probably be more fondly remembered if you break up at the height of your powers, and you don’t tarnish your legacy by releasing inferior stuff afterwards. The Beatles did re-record an old, unreleased song, “Free as a Bird”, and it got a pummeling in the press for not living up to the old stuff.

It was the ideal breakup, a wholesale breakup. Not 1 important band member leaving, and the rest heading in a new direction, as was the case with many other bands.

For the 10 years after the end of the Beatles, John and Paul were hardly speaking to each other. Their finances, and the lawsuits ensured that the relations during the 70s were, while not entirely acrimonious, highly fraught with tension. Lennon and McCartney never got a chance to work together again when John Lennon was murdered. It is quite conceivable that if he had lived, they would have collaborated on something. The Beatles often guested on each other’s solo records here and there.

The fact that there was never a Beatles reunion only helped to cement the legacy of the Beatles. It also “helped” that in their solo work, they never accomplished anything as great as when they were the Beatles.

Reason number 4: They wrote the template.
The Beatles were lucky in a way, because their reign of the pop music world took place when pop music was undergoing great changes, in fact, when society itself was undergoing great changes. Pop music at the beginning of the 60s were a bunch of rock and rollers who sang really nerdy, outdated music. By the end of the 60s, it had reached a level of artistic sophistication that hasn’t really made very much progress, even today, 40 years later. Sorry guys, we’re still living in the shadow of the 60s.

The Beatles matched the progression of 60s pop, step by step, and in many instances, were the innovators.

The British Invasion
OK, since this took place a mere 20 years after D Day, this phrase had a resonance it doesn’t have today. But they were the first British pop group to make it big in America, and are probably the main reason why the UK is a main centre of (English) pop music today. They typified many UK bands: emphasis on strong songwriting, catchy music. Urban, working class. Substance is a must, style is optional. Emphasis on simplicity.

They wrote their own songs.
Or more accurately, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote most of the Beatles’ Songs. George Harrison was an above average writer (and he wrote a few classics) but he just wasn’t in their league. The Beatles created the expectation that great pop bands should write their own songs. To understand why this is significant, just compare this to Chinese pop music: you have the singer, who concentrates of singing and looking good, and they sing songs written for them by professional writers.

The legacy of this is mixed, because bands that run out of good new material would inevitably go downhill. There were a lot of bands out there who were generally good with their instruments, that would generally benefit from having other people write material for them.

The Studio
One of the innovations during the 60s was the use of the studio as a special instrument for recording effects. This innovation was not unique to the Beatles, and was also associated with others like Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys and Phil Spector. But studio tricks made great strides forward under the Beatles, and after them, a lot of other people would be very inventive about creating interesting sound effects for their music.

They created albums
It used to be that albums were just a collection of singles, or they were just there to put 3 or 4 of the current singles in the same place, and padded up with filler. But Sergeant Pepper was the first of what was to be the concept album, where the whole album was a song cycle, or at least all the songs put together would tell a story, the entire album, instead of the song would be the basic unit.

This concept concept would be responsible for both a lot of artistic triumphs, and a lot of pretentious hogwash.

Sex and Drugs
As said before, the 60s were a time of the collective loss of innocence for people living in the West. It was a time of the sexual revolution, which more or less lasted until the emergence of AIDS. People started experimenting with a lot of drugs. Those were the times. The Beatles of course were not responsible for this, but having 4 young and attractive gentlemen in front of a screaming horde of teenage female fans did not

So – the legacy of the Beatles. Now who wants to say that they’re not the greatest band ever?

Beatles - 1

2009-09-26T17:55:00.001+08:00

Since this blog is named after a Beatles song, I think that I should be writing about the Beatles.

I didn’t know that they re-issued all the Beatles’ albums until I was looking through my favourite music online magazine (OK not my favourite, but it’s one of the most complete ones) and found it chock full of Beatles reviews. I’m not surprised at the release date of the re-issues: 9/9/09. Nine was John Lennon’s favourite number. He wrote “Revolution No 9”, which is actually the most atypical Beatles song of them all.

It’s possible that nobody ever dominated an art form the way that the Beatles dominated pop music.
However, not everybody is that crazy about the Beatles. Once, my sister (one snippet of history: we used to quarrel all the time but she became good friends with me when she found out how fantastic my music collection was) asked me, “you know, I like the Beach Boys and the Kinks more than the Beatles. I always had a few songs I really liked. This isn’t true of the Beatles.” OK, fair enough. Then I remember something my school buddy said years ago when we were discussing music: “Why do people worship the Beatles and why do they worship Shakespeare? I don’t see anything really great about those two. People only regard these guys highly because everybody are sheep.” (My friend despised people who followed the crowd and a lot of that rubbed off on me.)

I don’t know about Shakespeare, but I can say this about the Beatles. Both their statements are not wrong. None of my favourite albums are by the Beatles. But I can still understand why they are the greatest pop group of them all.

Reason number 1: they meant something to everybody.
The Beatles may not have written your favourite songs, but they have produced something for every segment of the market you could possibly think of. Teen bopper? (“Please Mr Postman”) Straight forward pop? (“Help!”) Broadway show tunes? (“Til There was You”) Rock and Roll? (“Rock and Roll Music”) Brill Building? (“Baby It’s You”) Folk? (“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”) High school reunion music? (“In My Life”) Romantic ballads? (“And I Love Her”) Drug music? (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) Hard rock? (“Come Together”) Punk? (“Helter Skelter”) Blues? (“Yer Blues”) Surrealism? (“Strawberry Fields Forever”) String Quartet chamber music? (“Eleanor Rigby”) Nursery Rhymes? (“Ob la di, Ob la da”) Funeral music? (“Let it Be”) Acoustic Ballad? (“Blackbird”) Romantic ballads? (“Something”) Heartbreak song? (“Yesterday”)

And not only did they cover a large ground, they often wrote some of the best songs of each genre they were involved with. The Beatles were also the most covered band ever. Apparently there are 1800 versions of “Yesterday” recorded. This is probably a record. In a way, the Beatles were everywhere. In another sense, they are invisible. Most songs are distinctive enough that the identity of an artist is forever associated with the song. For many Beatles songs, there are many instances where anybody could have taken that song and made it their own. Perhaps this is one of their weakness: many of their songs lack the distinctive force of personality of the artist. But it is also a strength, that each song exists in its own right, rather than sounding like a “typical Beatles song”. There are no typical Beatles songs.

Nirvana wrote “I Hate Myself And I Want to Die”. Oasis wrote “Live Forever”. These are 2 of the 90s bands which most consciously take the mantle of the Beatles, although other than having a lot of loud guitars, they have nothing else in common. Frank Sinatra was famously contemptuous of rock music: he covered “Something”. Classical music fans usually turn their noses up at most of pop music, except at the Beatles.

Reason number 2: They were extremely popular
There are only a few names which have completely dominated pop music for a short period of time. Frank Sinatra. Elvis. The Beatles. Michael Jackson. That’s about it. There was 1 week in 1964 when the #5 song, the #4 song, the #3 song, the #2 song and the #1 song were from the Beatles. That is the one and only time it happened in the UK since people kept records.

Reason number 3: They were the typical pop group.
If there is a bible for pop music, it was written by the Beatles. Just as Adam was the archetypal man, the Beatles were the archetypal pop group. Just as many God fearing Christians ask themselves, “what would Jesus do?”, most pop groups ask themselves, “what did the Beatles do?”

Most famous pop groups have their mythology, or famous stories about them. Jimi Hendrix had his setting his guitar on fire, and dying young by choking on his vomit. (The second story has been revised lately: apparently he was murdered.) Cat Stevens had his conversion to Islam. Elvis had his stint in the Army. Sly Stone had his “happy optimistic phase” and his “dark druggy phase” and right in the middle was “Thank You (Fallatinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”. Pink Floyd had their crazy diamond Syd Barrett.

But the Beatles had the greatest and richest mythology of them all. It just seemed that they shared DNA with just so many other bands.

4 personalities
To be sure, there are 2 ways of looking at the Beatles. There were 4 people who were close like brothers (and this is a compelling version, because the individual members of the Beatles never achieved as much artistic success as they did while in the Beatles.) The other way is that it was John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and 2 others. Both versions are equally valid.

What made the Beatles so compelling collectively is that they were all very different people, but they represented molds that many band members who followed in their wake belonged to. There was John, the fiery, sarcastic and arrogant one. There was Paul, the cute one (but underneath that cuteness was a hugely ambitious social climber). There was George, the shy one but the best guitar player of the lot. There was Ringo, who was exceptional because, even though he is quite the solid, dependable drummer, is the least talented of the bunch.

Think about the Smiths: Morrissey is the John Lennon, and Marr is the George. Take That: Robbie Williams is the John, and Gary Barlow is the Paul. U2: Larry Mullen is the Paul, the good looking one. Bono is the John, The Edge is the George, and Adam Clayton Jr is the Ringo. The Police: Stewart Copeland is the John, Sting is the Paul, Andy Summers is the George.

We know that sweet and sour is a great combination. Paul was sweet and John was sour. They needed each other: John was the cutting edge, and Paul was the one who appealed to the masses. Although Paul has a quite an unfair reputation for being a conservative, and the less artistic one, in fact his best songs had an artistic sophistication beyond what John was capable of. But you always could rely on John to come up with a crazy artistic concept. It was quite apparent to both of them right from the beginning that they needed each other.

John Lennon was the id, Paul McCartney was the ego, and George Martin, who was their producer, and who had the best musical background, was the superego. The Beatles were also very interesting because they had a two headed leadership. No one personality dominated the band, so you could see more than one facet of the many-headed monster.

The other two? George was no slouch. He was not a Clapton or a Hendrix, but he could play a mean guitar all the same. He was ambivalent about fame. Ringo Starr bore the fame with equanimity, although they had to deal with less than John and Paul. But they were famous together, they were the Fab Four, so they had to deal with it. And they were all level headed enough to be good at dealing with the pressures of fame. I think they were important because their presence turned the Beatles into a family. The other two more famous ones could always rely on them, until the end. Come to think of it, the big irony of the Beatles is that John Lennon, the first Beatle, and the leader in the beginning, was the one least able to deal with the fame.

They all had their turns at the mike. They also wrote a song about friends that never leave you in spite of your inadequacies, and not surprisingly they let Ringo sing it. The Beatles were a very effective unit because of their contrasting and complementary personalities.

Art School
It has become a truism that bands come from Art School. John Lennon couldn’t fit in anywhere, so he went to Art School. Paul McCartney was good at school, but it all went downhill after he joined the Beatles. It was just as well that they all had a sense of aesthetics: appreciation of beauty is something that is rarely confined to any one art form. This brings us to another great cliché of bands: the ones who were with them at the beginning, but left before they became famous.

The could-have-beens
There were 2 more Beatles: Stu Sutcliffe, and Pete Best. Sutcliffe was John’s art school classmate, and a talented artist in his own right. He imparted a sense of aesthetics to the band, and helped shape their early image, in the style of the Rockers. But he died young. In any case, he wasn’t terribly talented in music, and he plonked along on his bass guitar. He didn’t get along with Paul McCartney, since both of them were vying to be John’s number two. Eventually he knew that he didn’t belong there, and he left the band.
Pete Best was another story. He was a drummer, and the most handsome of the four. He played with them throughout the Hamburg days, but he was sacked, almost on the eve of the Beatles getting popular. No reasons were given, but a few have been suggested: he didn’t fit in, he was too handsome and popular with the girls, and Ringo was simply a better drummer.

Needless to say, the early band members who didn’t make it are part of the rock band tradition.

The pub band
The Beatles paid their dues before getting famous. John Lennon formed his own band in his teenage years, and for a long time, was the only competent member of the band, until he met Paul, and shortly after that, George. It’s another tradition that even the greatest bands have humble beginnings. But that is not always true: there are bands formed by members who were already famous: these bands are called superbands. Examples are Led Zep, Emerson Lake Palmer, and Traffic.

Hamburg
The rite of passage for a band is that they play on the road, overworked and underpaid, while they earn their experience points. Nobody could accuse the Beatles of not paying their dues. They also first became stars of the pub circuit in Hamburg, before making it big back at home in Liverpool, and like so many other bands after them, first made it big overseas before a triumphant homecoming.

Record Company Rejections
Before the internet, and before punk, you had to sign with a major label if you had any hope of making it big. The Decca audition was infamous because they went down to the label, made a few cuts over a few days (some of which were below their best) and the record company listened to them and decided they weren’t good enough, and anyway boy bands were on the way out. This has gone down in history as the biggest mistake ever made by any record company executive.

The Manager
The Beatles had one of the more colourful managers. Brian Epstein was different from the Beatles in so many ways: he was a son of a rich man, Jewish, and gay. He was gay at a time when it was not acceptable to be gay – the gay movement would only come up in the 1970s. He saw them while they were performing in Liverpool and got so turned on that he decided he was going to manage them. He was instrumental to their early success, promoting them as a cute boy band, and shaping their image. However his role became more and more marginal as the Beatles started to grow in other directions.

John Lennon was famously contemptuous of him, and treated him cruelly, although Epstein seemed to enjoy the sadomasochism of it all. When singing his song from “Magical Mystery Tour”, John allegedly sang “Baby you’re a rich fag Jew” instead of “Baby you’re a rich man, you”.

In the end, his behaviour became more and more volatile, and his drug taking spiraled out of control, aided by his anxiety that he was being cut out of the decision making process. He overdosed on drugs and died. His death was a big shock to the band, but in the long run, it resulted in their taking over their own management. They were quite incompetent at managing their affairs, and this was the beginning of the end for the Beatles.

In the wake of their breakup, their affairs were in such a mess that it took years of lawsuits to sort everything up. This state of affairs was the main reason why it took so long to remaster all of the Beatles’ stuff.

Beatlemania
It was crazy, as was said earlier. The enduring image of the Beatles is of 4 guys being mobbed by fans wherever they went, of teenage females going crazy and fainting, of their having to sneak out of back doors to avoid being mobbed by crazy fans. In the middle of their career, they quit playing live for good.

Their relationship with the media evolved, as was the case of many of their peers. The press, in their early days were greatly supportive of the Beatles. But as time went by, they started getting hounded by the media. John Lennon took the brunt of it, for his statement about being “more popular than Jesus”, and for his relationship with Yoko Ono.

Many bands that followed would follow this script: the initial euphoria of fame, giving way to the cracking up under the pressure. The claustrophobic life leading to disenchantment with the high life. The drugs for escape. An initially receptive press that ultimately turns against them.

Asian male

2009-09-19T15:53:00.000+08:00

On Facebook:

#9's sister: An unpaired sock seems more distressing but less futile than an unpaired chopstick. I have both in any case.

Some random angmoh chatting up #9's sister: What about unpaired humans?

#9: What about I unpair your nuts?

When Obama was inaugurated, there was plenty of talk about how America had become "post racial", and suddenly the colour of your skin didn't matter. That was until last week, when a Harvard professor was arrested for breaking into his own house. In spite of his vehement protests that he was the occupant of that house, the police held him in a cell for 4 hours, before he got released.

Skip Gates was one of the most famous black professors in the USA, and the irony was that he wrote a lot about racial profiling: examples of police officers picking on black people and checking them out because they were black and more likely to be criminals. On one hand the more likely to be criminals part is true, and on the other hand, you could also call this blatant racism.

There's a lot of hoo-hah in the media about that incident. OK, Obama is PUSA, but it doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people in prison in the US are black. This is not reparation for slavery because he did not descend from slaves (although Michelle did).

Of course there is hope that the majority of Americans have indicated that they would not mind a black man in the White house. But this does not mean that all the racists have gone away. With every action there is a reaction, and the reaction here is that some extremist minority will feel so threatened that he will start being a terrorist (like that guy who bombed the holocaust museum earlier this year.)

A digression here - the way that Obama handled this incident showed that he is a very good politician. He did not hold back from criticising the way that this case has been handled. He called the officers "stupid", knowing that the majority of Americans would have either agreed with him, or otherwise not blamed him for saying that. After the police union criticised Obama for that comment, Obama said that he would invite the officer over for a beer, and also Skip Gates.

He knows that he's the first black president, and the black community would be looking to him to at least make 1 comment about this incident, and he duly obliged, without killing himself politically. He didn't shy from making a statement as a leader. Later on, he invited the policeman over for a beer. This shows he's in touch with blue collar culture. If the policeman accepts, he's also accepting a reconciliation. If he keeps quiet, both parties treat it like a joke and there's no harm done. As for him turning down such an invitation, I hope that police officer only says that in private. That's something that a good leader does - he brings up issues, thrashes them out, and then reconciles people afterwards.

In any case, race is only but a form of class warfare. Class warfare will never go away. The notion of social status is deeply wired into the human experience. Race is different from class warfare, but in a way it is a form of class warfare. There will always be a means for people to differentiate who's the haves and who's the have nots. That will never go away. The rich will always get richer and the poor will always get poorer. The only exception is if a revolution or a war destroys everything and people start from scratch.

This is not a pleasant topic to talk about but what the hell. There are different dimensions of racism in western countries. I have learnt that it is not precise enough to talk about how East Asians are treated. It’s well known that East Asian ladies are quite attractive, and they get better treatment. At the same time, East Asian males are – well, less masculine, so they get a little more stick. It is quite well known that most heterosexual relationships between a Caucasian and a Chinese / Korean / Japanese / Viet / etc will involve an angmoh guy and an Asian woman. It is also true that more angmoh guys than women travel to Singapore, but you don’t know whether that is the cause of this phenomenon or whether the direction of causation is the other way around.

It is strange because Asian males have been the driver of incredible economic growth – we’re not slouches. But we are subservient and not very pushy, at least on the outside. These are traits that are considered attractive in a female and – frankly – unattractive in a male.

You will observe that for different races, the different gender will be more attractive. Black men are considered more attractive than black women, partially because of their reputation of having large dicks. Black women are – well the fact that I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be stereotyped as, that tells me that they’re low profile. I also suppose that black women suffer because the conventional standards of beauty hold that fair women are prettier. There are exceptions, eg David Bowie has a taste for black women in general, not just Iman, but he’s always been a little weird.

For angmohs, the guys are more attractive. The average angmoh male is considered more attractive than the average Chinese male, and the average Chinese female more attractive than the average angmoh female.

Who’s the first Chinese American in the US cabinet? Elaine Chao, a female. Who’s the first Black President? A male.

I suppose this is an undercurrent of the race debate that people don’t pick on. It’s already complicated enough to talk about gender alone, or race alone. But I think this is significant. I wonder why people don’t always mention this more often. It hasn’t bothered me a lot for quite a few years now, but I remember this fact for two reasons: the recent Virginia Tech murders. Both were committed by Asian males.

Yes, here’s another stereotype you can add to your collection. Asian males are ticking time bombs. I read this article that said that one of the differences between southern and northern Chinese is that southerners have a slow burning fuse and northerners have a quick temper. It may be true. Southern Chinese are notoriously passive aggressive. Singapore is one of the most passive aggressive places I have ever seen. People just bottle it in until the time comes, and then they explode. Anyway Edward Yang, the Taiwanese film maker who is my favourite director makes films about people bottling their anger inwards until they explode.

It’s not only the East Asians who have this, I think. I heard somebody say this about the Turks – they will smile back at you the first 10 times you slap them in the face, and on the 11th time, they will kill you.

Myself, I used to get very annoyed whenever I noticed a white guy going out with an Asian female, especially if she's Chinese. Now, much less so. These days I'm much less horny (which is true). Also I have gotten angry at this before, gotten into flame wars with people I'm sure are Caucasian males and after a few times, I've grown tired and seen the futility. Also, I've learnt the futility of anger, and also I've learnt that after you have rationalised something, and thrashed things out, it is more difficult to get emotional about things, good or bad. (Incidently that is one important function of criminal trials - families of victims, after a trial is over, after all the facts are pored over, are less likely to seek revenge, unless they are totally pissed off at the way the trial was handled.)

I've learnt to understand some of the gains that Asian males have made in this world. I've reminded myself - the tide is turning, the future is Asia. I've even thought of the racial stereotypes of the Asian male, and it is not all negative. You could call us timid but we could be circumspect. You could call us nerdy but we are hardworking. You could call us slavish, but is individualism really such a great idea? You don't get taken for a thug, which is the problem a lot of black people face.

You look at some of the Asian stereotypes that have made their way into popular culture, they are not that bad. The hyperactive Stephen Yan in Yan can Cook. Geeky but very knowledgeable and friendly. Mr Miyagi, one of the best teachers there ever was. Bruce Lee - OK, a little violent and narcissistic, but the hero of the underdog. It could be a lot worse.

Political Philosophy

2009-09-12T14:32:00.000+08:00

Some of the courses where I learnt the most interesting stuff in school didn’t even have anything to do with my major. One of them was political philosophy. I asked a senior which courses she liked taking, and she told me that a good course was political philosophy, so that was one of those that I took.

It was not bad, and the teacher was lively. 2 lessons stuck out in my mind.

First was Hobbes. His theory of society was something that was truly dark. He saw people as atomised entities, a rowdy mob of people who just did whatever they felt like doing unless they were restrained by violence. His theory was an argument against anarchy. Basically people will take advantage of each other to the fullest extent. They will fuck each other over for nothing. Moreover they are so equal in strength and abilities that nobody will really win. There will be a permanent state of chaos and anarchy. In his most famous phrase, he says that life like this will be “nasty, brutish and short”.

And that is why we need a government. We need to have a person who is king. We give away some of our rights, and pay him for protection. It might be a tyranny, but it’s still better than nothing.

I supposed in a way it was an extension of what I saw in America. People hardly had any deference to each other. Not to say that they are necessarily rude, but they don’t really have that keen a concept of structure as we do in Asian culture. But then again, having grown up in Singapore, deference to authority was more or less automatic. If I was disobedient to my teachers or my parents, it was because of a moment of weakness, like I didn’t do this piece of homework, or I didn’t do what I had to do because I was lazy. But to stand up and challenge them, or outright defy them, that was totally out of the question, even though we did discuss with our classmates the strengths and weaknesses of our elders.

But thinking about an atomised society made me see human relationships in a completely different way: what if a lot of the people I saw in real life didn’t have any kind of special relationship with me? Like they weren’t a teacher who I had to defer to, a drill sergeant I had to obey or get assraped in detention barracks, or a parent who at one point in my life was some kind of a deity? What would all these people be like if I were to relate to them as though I were a peer?

Now, I suppose, this is one reason I had never heard of Hobbes until I got to America. What he was proposing was in some way the opposite of Confucius, although they are some similarities. The crucial difference is this: Confucius would never start from the standpoint of everybody being of equal status. This situation, even if it were hypothetical, must be completely inconceivable, which is probably why I had never thought of it that way, no matter how rebellious I had been when I was a teenager.

The similarity is that both of them come to the conclusion that there has to be some higher authority in any society. But their attitudes towards this higher authority are different. For Confucius, this is simply the way that it is, that it always has been. Hobbes will ask “why should it be this way?” But Confucius will never even allow this question to be asked. Just shut up and listen. Confucius will say that deference to authority is the highest virtue. Hobbes will say, well, anarchy is really bad and messy, so I guess we’ll have to settle for tyranny instead.

But after this, my attitude towards people was going to be very different. I would be more judgemental of people, even my elders. Before, I would ask, “who are you in relation to me?” And if that person was a superior, I would treat that person as a superior first and foremost, then I would think about what that person is like as a human being. After that, the reverse would be true. Some part of me would defer to a higher-up even though he’s a dick, because there is a limit to the amount of unrest that I’m willing to cause. But primarily I would think about what sort of a person he is as a human.

I suppose all this is part and parcel of growing up, that there are no more superiors like the ones you had as a kid. That you have to make your own decisions, your own mistakes. I suppose I would have picked this up after spending enough time in a western country. But I think it was Hobbes famous story of the war of man against every man which sealed it for me.

Plato and the noble lie.

Nowadays when it comes to the big argument between Plato and Aristotle, I’m more inclined to side with Aristotle. Aristotle is more the realist, and Plato the idealist. But Plato appealed to me more at first.

He held that there were 3 types of people. First was the philosopher, the educated scholar. Second was the warrior. I forgot what the 3rd category was. The first one would be king, because he is wiser and smarter than the rest. (Sometimes I believe that this is just a geek fantasy on his part). For the second type, the problem was how to tame him. The warrior had to believe in a cause so great that he would lay down his life for his country. He had to believe that this made him a great person, a bigger person than he would otherwise be.

You have to construct meaning out of the miserable life of being a soldier. You have to give him prestige, and make him out to be a great man. Even though he's not the real leader, or the one running the show.

The last thing I did before entering uni was to be a soldier. I wasn't much of one, actually, and spent 1 whole year being a clerk. But unfortunately our NS is long enough that I still spent a substantial period of time being a soldier. It made me think about what it was all about. At first, during BMT, I bought the whole thing hook line and sinker. When you're fresh, you don't always know what it's all about. But later on, we did start to question the absolute authority people had over us. We were being fed the noble lie, and some of us bought it whole.

To be sure, the noble lie is not entirely a lie. It is heroic to stand up for your tribe, no doubt about that. There was a disturbing book that I read not long ago which argues that somewhere deep inside of the human psyche, we love war. I would guess that is true, because war is so terrible that it is difficult to imagine anybody engaging in it unless he loves it in some way. The noble lie was there to make us love it.

But what were the 2.5 years? I had very little expectation of the 2.5 years except that my parents were always nagging at me that if you don't get your shit together the army's going to eat you up. But there was a lot of pointless bureaucracy in the early days. A lot of having to wait for the rest of the company to get things done. A lot of lousy food. A lot of pettiness and backstabbing. A lot of pretending to work. A lot of janitor work.

I could have approached it with a better attitude than I did. After 6 months I was completely in the mode of "avoid all possible work". And sometimes I wondered if this attitude did spill over in other aspects of my life.

Let's ask ourselves whether this lie is even a noble one. In the early days of the republic, we definitely needed an army, because we never knew whether our neighbours were going to kill us. But after 20-30 years of nothing happening, everybody doing great, you had to wonder about the war.

In a place like the armed forces, it is full of people who give up an easy life for the security of an iron rice bowl. Are they predisposed to change? I don't think so. Even when the army wants and needs to change, you will have a few stubborn buggers fighting till the last breath against that, everybody defending his turf. It was a very bloated army in those days, with a lot of people shuffling around and not doing very much. I thought that it was a great thing that they cut down the length of service to 2 years, because seriously, we don't need such a large army.

After defending our sovereignty for so many years, the armed forces risks having the rug pulled out from under them. The concept of sovereignty is somewhat perverted because this world has become so inter-connected. Can you imagine Toa Payoh waging war against Ang Mo Kio? That is never going to happen. There are some times when I wonder whether Singapore vs Malaysia is going to be like that.

The nature of the threat has also changed a lot. In an introduction to his book "The Utility of Force", a British general who served in Bosnia points out that the old model of the war, which had 1 state fighting against another state, is gone. The last such war took place in 1973 between Egypt and Israel. Practically all other wars since then have been guerilla wars.

Is our army up to this task? Have we evolved?

Understandably, the fact that such a war has not happened is not the reason why we can dismantle our army. It could well be that the reason why these things don't happen is that every nation in the world has armed forces which prevents this from happening. But the fact is that we can still cut our armed forces by a very significant amount, and that will not change the fact that nobody wants to invade us.

The other thing is that somebody wrote a book on a more pernicious and pervasive form of the noble lie. Thomas Frank, "One Market Under God". In the 1990s, in corporations all over the world, rights have been taken away from the workers at the bottom of the corporation, as it exposed the dark side of America's miraculous economic growth.

Workers were all persuaded to work harder and tougher for the company even though their wages were being cut. They were being told "this is for your character." They were given a substantial amounts of "freedom" in return for their medical benefits being cut away. Starbucks aimed for "flexibility" and not telling their workers when they were going to show up for work until a few days beforehand. They were to act as though they were perpetual college students.

There were a few main reason why the big companies were able to get away with this. One of them is the hype surrounding the "new economy" that was being remade by the advent of the internet. You could believe that "everything's changed" and the old rules didn't apply. I'm sure that a lot of bosses had fun making up the new rules. You had internet startups where a few of the earliest employees had to work like slaves for a few years, in the belief that they were this close to conquering the world, only to see the bubble pop and all their efforts come down to nothing.

Another reason is that bosses had changed their image, and wisely (for them) decided to become more hip and trendy. You could come to work in T-shirts and jeans. You bosses listened to rock and roll, just like you!

Another reason is a whole slew of management theorists which line up to persuade you that the whole meaning of your life revolves around hard work. I agree that a lot of your life revolves around hard work, but this is just emotional manipulation. People now came to work to have fun and attain spiritual fulfillment (which probably means they didn't need to have fat paychecks anymore, I suppose.)

Thomas Frank is a cultural critic, so he didn't touch on many of the economic reasons, chief of which is this: China and the rest of the world are driving wages of all people in developed countries down. But I will refer to his work because it tells us all that the noble lie is alive and well.

My workplace instituted a training program that tried to develop management talent at work. It is a good thing that is long overdue, because training is the best way of transmitting values that we want in our organisation. One training aid raised my eyebrows, though. It came from a booklet written by various SAF personnel, a series of essays where people talk about their "defining moments". A lot of the essays - well they talked about "I must do my best for this, for that, etc etc. I should push my limits a little further". Others were in the vein of "I must be more thoughtful of others".

There was a bit of ambivalence about reading that book. There are some parts, which are in the vein of "more effort", which I don't like - asking them to work harder is not unimportant, but the effects are temporary. You can inspire people, but can you inspire people to work harder every day? You can do this by making a systemic change. You can change the environment in which they work. Otherwise, getting people to put in more individual effort alone is not going to work.

Elsewhere, though, I liked it that you see the workplace as a community of people, and I like it that people are actually thinking about the values in the workplace. That a team is more than just numbers and performance.

I don't completely agree with Plato - he talks about the noble lie, but it is not a lie. It is something that has basis in reality. I would call it a half lie, no more than that. There is this social divide between people who think for a living and people who work for a living, Plato doesn't seem interested in overcoming that.

I know that I always appear quite philosophical to people but my family, at least those in the older generation are people who have always worked for a living, and who have always believed in the practical over the ideals. For me, ideals serve only one purpose: they are a means with which we seek to understand the world, they are a framework with which we learn about our environment. Once that purpose is served, it's time to throw away those ideals, open your eyes, and see how things really work in reality.

Dead Hobbies

2009-09-05T17:07:00.003+08:00

1. This isn't really related but I sometimes think about the hobbies that I used to have. One of them was Transformers. They were really a big thing during my time. I didn't have transformers toys but I liked Mask toys. Had quite a few. Zoids too. And then the miser genes I inherited from my old man kicked in and I said to myself, "why am I keeping all this junk in my house?" Some people never get rid of these hobbies, which is why you see grown up men still having Transformer toys in their cabinets. I'm different, and while I will still marvel at the ingenuity of these toys, they're done for good.

Also I still remember the time when I had the burning desire to be a playwright. I used to watch a lot of sitcoms and analyse the flow of the dramas and plots. I only paid attention at literature classes when they are talking about literary devices, because they are the working tools of a playwright. I usually don't give a shit about memorising essays and getting A1s for literature. My literature teacher bragged that one of her former students who was a good playwright didn't take her advice to write simple and uncontroversial essays, and he got an A2 instead of the A1 everybody expected him to get. I can see her point but if you asked me to get an A2 in lit instead of writing a school play, I would have taken the school play instead. (I got A2 for lit and I was happy with it because I used to get Bs all the time.)

But my playwriting career is over. It will take work and effort to get back the momentum I once had. I entered the 24 hour playwriting competition in 1999 (I won something) and in 2004 (I didn't) and I considered entering again in 2009 but I eventually didn't.

I still remember 6 months ago when I was still running 5-6 hours every week, in order to get myself ready for the marathon. Considering that I am a little reluctant to run half marathons in the future, this is another vanished hobby of mine.

Blogging? I used to blog a lot more often than I do now. I used to entertain thoughts of having a very well read blog until some unfortunate flame wars have put paid to that notion. Once a week, I can still maintain that momentum now. I still have something to write about. I'm blessed with a lot of creativity - it takes an extraordinarily long time for me to run out of ideas. But maybe one day I will.

So a lot of people call me a bookworm. Yes, but the mountain of books I used to have on my reading list is now a small pile and eventually it will go down to nothing. I don't know if it's coincidental. I used to look forward to the weekend because it would be time to myself to read what I want, and now I'm a little sick of reading, I have problems doing it for more than 1 hour at a go. And then I will have to find my next hobby to occupy myself.

I have another hobby - not really a hobby because I can't do it all the time. It's songwriting. I've been thinking about how to take it to the next phase, so that will occupy my free time for a while.

A new hobby of mine would be learning about computer science. I once considered that as a major but took Maths instead. Now I'm wondering. Of course this is reading, but it does mean that another subject that I really used to enjoy reading about would be slowly phased out - that's history. I now have a framework of world events and their significance, how we got to what we are today, so further study is no longer necessary.

2. As for work - I thought about how I looked at it. In around the 4th or 5th book, Harry Potter learnt that he was placed in the care of his aunt and treated like a Charles Dickens character for a reason - that whole place was magically protected against Voldemort. Unfortunately that's my attitude towards work at the moment. They're treating me better than Uncle Dursley is treating Harry Potter, but that's not saying much. If you want to think about how long you're going to stay in a place, think about how you'd feel if you were asked to take over your boss' job. Would you like the work? Or is it just a fatter paycheck in the end?

There are many worse places than my job, I know that. It protects me from idleness, having a completely purposeless existence. But are all thinking jobs like that eventually? Just sitting behind a desk, and churning away at data? Would I find some other job, and eventually, run into the same problems, getting tired of it all? That's the issue. I think this issue could be far deeper than something you could solve by switching lines.

I think that when you’re doing something – anything, actually, there are 3 stages – the beginning, the middle and the end. The beginning is usually quite rough, and you’re trying to learn the ropes, trying to be good at what you’re supposed to do. The middle is more comfortable, you’ve found a group of people you’re comfortable with, you’re getting by in your work. The end is not very comfortable, knowing that another new beginning is ahead of you, trying to make that new beginning happen, having to do a lot of things at work that you’ve been putting off because you were never comfortable doing them in the first place.

I’m getting old. I look at people at work who are 5 years younger than me and I think that I am looking at myself in a funny mirror, because that is the destiny that I could have taken, a road that I could have gone down, but instead I chose not to go down. And every time you go past a big big junction in life, you’re always wondering, could I have gone the other way?

They are articulate, polished. More conscious of their self image, and usually thinking about how other people are going to interpret what they say.

If people project a good self image, is that good for the company, or are they merely selfish people who are looking out for number one? I don’t know. What I do know is that this method of doing things was so foreign to me that I simply did not bother to try to take it up. I could have done that, but I wouldn’t be me. (Which may not be such a bad thing, considering the number of people who have come up to me and advised me to “stop being yourself”)

They believed fully in their careers, and the primacy of their careers. I gave up on it almost as soon as I had begun, in a fit of pique, when I was going through some difficult period. At that time I was totally sure that my future lay elsewhere.

But something strange happened. I developed a curious respect for the way that things were done at my workplace. Why do I use the words “curious respect”? When I was in secondary school my bio teacher took the whole class out on an excursion to a mangrove swamp. At first I thought that it was a very dreary place, and it is the epitomy of unproductive land. But later on he explained how things worked in the ecosystem, how the mangrove prevented the river from washing away the soil from under the rainforest, how it was a home to many animals like Kermit the frog. I wrote at the end of my report that I had developed a curious respect for the mangrove and he wrote back that he liked that comment. As with the mangrove swamp, so with my work place.

As for my workplace, it is the closest thing you get to a war zone. As a student in school I despised the military, and swore never to join the SAF, and how I got to join something that’s even more war-like than the SAF (let’s be honest here, the SAF doesn’t fight wars) is one of the big quirks of fate. But you always have to remember that all harsh words are said in the heat of the moment, all mistakes are made in the heat of the moment, it is so difficult to judge them because this is war, and all sorts of crap takes place when there is a war going on.

I look back at those guys, who developed the right attitude towards the place, and I wonder if it was possible to have a positive attitude win over the lazy cynical attitude that eventually took over me. For me it is a constant battleground between those two. Among my colleagues there are a few who have that positive attitude, a few whose lazy cynical attitudes have won, and the rest, for the most part, are battlegrounds. I think my bosses were not good enough psychologists to realise that I was a battleground, and at first only saw the lazy and cynical side. Eventually, though, they found out.

I also think about that one part in my life when I did try to overcome my snide and cynical attitude, and try to be nice to everybody at the same time. It was a happy, hopeful period in my life and not coincidently it was also the one time in my life I was going after a chick. Who knows how differently history would have turned out if I had won her over? (But I made the judgement call - probably a correct one - that she wasn’t worth the trouble.)

Well in a way all roads are connected and just because you turned this way on one junction, it doesn’t mean that you can’t turn back. And sometimes it might be fun to just wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t taken this particular turn.

So even at this late stage in my work, I still feel like I'm learning new stuff. I'm taking my time. Eventually the time will come when I feel that this is no longer the case, and after that... toodle loo....

3. There’s this mahjong game that I won’t forget. I played it on Bintan, with a few friends (Shingo may have been one of them, I can’t remember.) Now I’m a mahjong novice, and not that experienced, I take too long to think of my next move, people usually get a little irritated with me. Usually that’s what happens. My brain works better in parallel rather than in series. I excel at solving problems which require some unusual and novel solution, rather than doing something repetitive over and over again and doing it well. So making fast and good decisions in mahjong, I’m not good at it.

There was this incident where I already had what it takes to "hu" and I didn't even know it, it took Totoro's husband, looking over my shoulder to tell me.

But there was this game, I had basically a formation, and was just missing one more tile to complete it. After a few moves, I began to sense that the tile was never going to come, so I set about dismantling 1 section of that formation, and building something else, and I won that round.

Leonpix who was overlooking it was surprised, and he started off in his machine gun Mandarin about what I did (I roughly got the gist). It was probably something he wouldn’t have done, something that he perceived to be really risky.

As you might know, risk is all a matter of perception. Risk is about something that is unknown, and people have a different set of criteria when they are talking about risk.

The way I saw it, I had 2 of a kind and I was waiting for a third. It was possible that somebody else was also holding on to the other 2 tiles, in which case I would never be able to get it. The chance of success, in continuing on my current path, was approximately zero. Better for me to break that 2 of a kind (this is risky too, because it could allow somebody to game. But it was still a risk worth taking.) and then risk building up another formation. I would at least have around a 50% chance of success. In this calculation, what I was doing was not risky at all, but an oblique way of maximizing my chances of success.

But I suppose we all have this thing about holding on to what we have. We think that a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. But sometimes the bird in your hand is not the bird you want, and there are more than 2 on the bush.

What I have read about psychology is that people usually have a very distorted view of risk. People tend to over exaggerate the sensational ways of dying. For example, terrorism. If I were to take a cold hard look at terrorism, I would not believe that I would die like that. OK, maybe my not working in an office tower has something to do with that belief. But I commute to work, and I use one of the most crowded MRT stations, and every morning, there is a traffic jam. All it would take is 1 suicide bomber with a backpack, and he could take out approximately 200 people if he’s in the middle of a

In other things, we tend to underestimate our risk. Land travel is risky. The number of people who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks is 3000. In America that year, between 2-3000 people died in car crashes. So why does 9/11 “change everything”, whereas car crashes don’t change anything?