Up in the Air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water girl outed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earning Stripes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cock ups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bunions

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

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

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

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

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

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

A random conversation with Harry Redknapp

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

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

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

This is My Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why numbernine is single part 2

Not a bad weekend for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not all weekends are like this.

The Fall

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.

Crude But Effective

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.

Dumbfuck bimbo MILF

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Cleaning up

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.

4 places

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

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.)

Near Death Experience

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.

The proud Singaporean in Malaysia

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.

Nap

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

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.

Cuckoo

I want to start off that I’m typing this at 3 am in a McDonald’s with a big screen TV, who plays Electrico’s “What Do You See” which is a pretty OK U2 / Coldplay thing, although you know when you are writing a national song, other than being anthemic, it’s got to be more melodic, and it’s got to make more sense when you sing it without the accompaniment. And it goes without saying that it doesn’t sound very nice when you hear it every 20 minutes. Sometimes I think they put that song there so as to chase away people just buy 1 coke but hang out here for a few hours at a stretch.

Was seeing someone coming and ordering some food, and I thought, wow, she’s beautiful, until I took a second look, and realized – whoops, it should really be he’s beautiful. Ah well, I guess that’s common. Asspecially after midnight on Saturday.

There is a person that I will now call cuckoo, not because he is stupid, (even though in a way he is a little daft). A cuckoo is a bird who lays his eggs in somebody else’s nest, and I think in a way that was who he was.

He was – let’s say he was from the B class, but he hung out a lot with people like us in the A class. I know, that is very elitist. I don’t really know why there is a class system in Singapore secondary education, but there is, we just accepted it as it is. Ironically, years later, when I went to the US, I got introduced to the idea of affirmative action. The universities there are more willing to accept people from more disadvantaged backgrounds, not because they think that this way life is more fair, but because having a greater diversity of people in your university community makes the educational experience a richer one for all people involved. If you put all the high scorers in the same class, everybody would just be a nerd from the same kind of background.

Anyway, at that time, I just thought that he was a social climber. But eventually, a few years ago I glimpsed another truth: that he was also more like us than the people in the B class, who he also got along with nevertheless. Like many of us, he was stubborn and opiniated.

All the same I felt that he was always a little insecure, and I guess – who wouldn’t? I felt that he aspired to a level of intelligence that was a little beyond him. It still didn’t change the fact that he was smarter than most people, of course.

He’s a teacher now. He’s teaching at a girl’s school, even though he’s incredibly lecherous. He’s not only lecherous, he’s really too candid about it. He was showing around pictures of some of his class dressed in SIA sarong kebayas and a mutual friend said, "you know, I don't really think you should be in the teaching profession." Of course, we all recognise that there is still a yawning gap between being extremely horny and actually acting out on it, and we know that while he is standing dangerously close to the line, he hasn't actually crossed it.

He’s not like me, I like to make a lot of off-colour jokes, not because I’m especially lecherous. I have a good imagination, but I like to see people squirm. Or laugh. Or both. Shingot is lecherous, but he shuts his mouth up about it, and he seems to accomplish this seeming contradictory intellectual position of being very faithful to his wife, while retaining the freedom to leer at any woman he chooses. That’s in a way quite sensible if – and only if he succeeds in pulling it off. Otherwise you can imagine how fucked up things can get.

Cuckoo’s been single for a long time. I feel that there is something quite childish in the way that he talks about women solely according to their physical attractiveness, and not very much else.

He’s a Cancer, and something about him behaves like a Cancer person. He’s a little clingy to his friends. You will find him a little not very respectful of personal boundaries. And if you’re the subject of his pet peeves, he could be very persistent in finding some reason to get annoyed at you.

He’s quite friendly at first, which is good. But soon enough his faults will surface. And there is this innocence about him which is dangerously close to naiveté.

Recently, he confided a secret to me. He had been hanging out with a few friends of mine, who were Christian. I even thought for a while that he was in the same church as them. Until he recently indicated to me, after finding out that I am a Buddhist, that he’s just “infiltrating” them and trying to find out what being a Christian is really like.

He didn’t want to be a Christian, and I suppose in a way I agree with him. I will never be a Christian because there are too many Christian ideas I really don’t agree with. And because I cherish my freedom of thought too much.

After swearing me to secrecy (at least not telling those people) he went on a tirade against mega-churches, and how they systematically brainwashed you, while all the same they provided you with a community that made you feel like you belonged. He didn’t like the tithing. Your membership fee for a church is a fixed percentage of your income – this goes some way in explaining how a lot of churches to some extent set aside the traditional aversion towards material gain (remember it was written “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven”) and just tell their guys to go forth and multiply their income.

He didn’t like how Christian doctrine tells you that Christians are better than non-Christians, that men are just that much better than animals. That is the dirty little secret of Christianity – I was quite shocked to read in an article, that in a poll of pastors, 50% of them are unwilling to hold inter-faith dialogues, lest people might think that Christianity is not the superior religion. Yes, in Singapore.

And he also didn’t like how a lot of Sunday school teachers would tell the congregation that the Bible is right and your science textbooks are wrong, which basically reverses the work of other school teachers like him. I think a lot of these things are all about protecting the Christian faith attacks. First, you bend the truth as far as you can, maybe even break it, so that people stop doubting the Bible. Then in the end maybe you even bend what’s written in the Bible.

I suppose I shared a lot of his misgivings about the Christian faith. What happens in Islam I can only guess, because it is even harder for me to find out what goes on in a mosque sermon.

But I understand a lot of problems that take place in a religion. How do you preserve a faith when everything is based on a book, and ever since that book was written, people keep on finding out stuff that keeps on contradicting what’s in there? How do you preserve the character of a community, and keep them believing? How do modern living, and the moral values of the religion that you want to impart, coexist with each other? How do you make all these thorny philosophical problems accessible in some form to people who may or may not be intellectually sophisticated to grasp all the issues? How do you tell them that although what’s written in the Bible is false, all these stories allude to a spiritual truth?

I know where he’s coming from. But a lot of these things don’t really have to do with religion. There are a lot of faculties in universities which teach pretty useless stuff, but they are very resistant to change. There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t applied and probably shouldn’t be applied, but you just insist on it just because it’s there. Then it’s a human issue, the principal-agent problem.

The government has so far adhered to the Religious Harmony act, because it recognizes the importance of preserving social harmony. But recently it has found that the Church of Our Saviour has stepped over the mark, as some people have pointed out about the AWARE incident. I think they can go too far, and I don’t think they should be protected if they go too far. If you read some of the things that they’ve been saying about “secular thought”, you would be completely shocked. The way they’re talking, they would rather prefer the enlightenment didn’t happen, that we’re all still living in the stone ages.

All the same, I recognize that organized religion provides certain things that cannot otherwise be provided. Atheists always talk about a new religion called “humanism”. How the hell do you know that humanism is going to work and not have the problems that Christianity is having? In spite of everything, it is all tried and proven. All the fuck-ups (think about the bloody holy wars and the Reformation) have already happened. How do you know that your new religion will not result in a lot of stirred shit?

And this Cuckoo, what is he “infiltrating” the church for? Does he not recognize that it is a community of people who have shared values? Does he not realize that society is going to be in big trouble if you took away all these little communities? This is part and parcel of living in the real world, rather than living in a world of ideas. I have this theory that many church goers are closet atheists, that they all don’t believe in the literal existence of God, but rather they just say what they say because they need the spiritual guidance and the friendships in the church. God is false but all the other stuff is real. Does he want to “infiltrate” the church because he can have a few more friends?

In fact I am going to commit some intellectual blasphemy here. I think you should not reject religion because it is false. You have to see the whole picture, the whole system, and then make a wholesale evaluation.

I'm thinking, religion is really not that important to me to intellectualise about. Its all about practice, what you actually do with your life, it's about whether or not it makes you a better person, makes you want to do things the right way, rather than the content of your belief. Knowing things on an intellectual level, I've come to realise - it doesn't mean anything at all.

Well, at least he knows how to be friendly and polite to people, which is much more than I can say for myself.

Three random pieces

1. 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.

2. I asked my grandmother if she had seen a total eclipse in her life. She said yes, and during those days she lived in a village. They were taking out their gongs, pots and pans and banging them over and over to scare away the dog who was eating the sun. I asked her before or after the war, she said, after, when your father was a kid.

I asked them, didn't they already know about astronomy? even during those days it was fairly well known. It was only around 10 years before they put a man on the moon. Well you don't know about these things.

3. Played basketball with Sniper and gang. It was a typical game, no better or worse than anything else. Did 1 or 2 stupid things, as usual. Towards the end of the evening, we had sniper trying to pull my leg, almost as though he suddenly remembered that he forgot that he had to insult me at least once every week. I looked at him and I thought for a while.

It didn’t rank particularly high on the list of nasty things he’s said to me over the years. But I’ve had enough. I’m quitting that scene for good. There were good times over those 5.5 years but they're all over. If he’s getting difficulties getting his team together that’s his fucking problem. People who are friends of his don’t tend to stay that way for long.