Thoughts on ORD

I can't say I miss the place. I mean, that sounds terribly perverse, like Ost-nostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany) or Stockholm Syndrome (where hostages develop sympathy for their abductors) or something. 

To me, NS was all about a suspension of normality. "Normal" life processes (okay, for someone like me) like going to school, mucking about at home, relaxing on the comp/piano and reading were suspended, or disrupted. Instead we had extras and staying in and avoiding the wrath of senior commanders who could dig up any damn excuse to give you extras. 

They say that NS teaches you about life. I contend that this is only true because half the population of Singapore has gone through NS. The attitudes of NS permeate our society, and some people stick with them throughout their life. For instance, when you have 2 years to serve, you go through it with the "heck it" attitude cos you know that no matter what, ORD will come. But that isn't true of life, or a job - or at least, it isn't a healthy mindset, because when that happens then you're living only for death, or retirement, or a promotion, when what matters is actually the process and how it grows you.

I hated NS partly because of the discrepancy between the high-minded ideals it claimed to embody (defence of the motherland yada yada) and the sheer small-mindedness and hypocrisy of the people in it. Some people had a ridiculously inflated sense of self-importance - look at me, I outrank you, I'm gonna make you buy lunch/do my work for me just cos I can. 

We had a running gag about Karma in my unit. For some people, the bad karma they accumulate just doesn't come back to get them - maybe the dice of Fate are loaded. But in the Ranking Exercise of humanity they'll get a D grade. Justice is served. 

I hated my training days. Always tired, kinda hungry, never enough sleep (except at ETI, kind of, sometimes). And the bloody SOCs. And I can't shake the fact that most of my friends went to OCS and ended up getting $300 bucks more than me a month for the last year. Yes it reinforced the inferiority complex thing that I have. 

Though I guess all things considered, an admin posting's pretty okay. And I can't say that the explosives weren't fun!

But mostly I hated it because I ended up in a damn boring job. Damn DAMN boring, like so boring that I even started proofreading e-texts on Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders. 60+ pages in a day of proofreading - most in English but when I got bored I did a few pages of some French stuff and a few more pages on Heinrich Schliemann's Troy excavations, I think that was in German. That's the depths of boredom I plumbed in my NS days. Other people smoked, I did proofreading for Project Gutenberg. I also donated something like 10,000 grains of rice on freerice.com, playing French vocabulary.

I started drinking a bit but not clubbing so I think that's okay.

The people were mostly pretty good though - I mean fellow NSFs. Sure you meet some weirdos and lousy fkers but most were okay. Some were good to talk to and fun to hang out with and I hope to keep in touch with you guys.

Otherwise it's been a long 22 months and I'm just relieved that normality is resumed.

haven't been posting

Haven't been doing very much at all lately. been stoning at home, playing Civ IV to death and then reading a bit of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed (deep theology - notes on the Old Testament!) and other random books & articles without imbibing any of it at all. Also listening to Sergio Mendes' album Fool on the Hill, which has got me hooked!

Also been drinking rather more than I'm used to, but I guess it's ok (a bit of vodka or whiskey or irish cream, 3-4 nights a week, not gonna kill me). I need an authority to come over to my place and try my vodka, cos I suspect that some Schrodingerian trickery is going on and it's turning into paint thinner. ^^

I got silver for IPPT a couple of days back, which is quite awesome since I haven't really trained and I never got anywhere near there before all this NS shit.

A bad thing: I'm not feeling any motivation to get intellectually stimulated even though it's all around me. Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is still on my table and I haven't touched it for a couple of weeks. I read Cherian George's collection of essays Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation, and I saw some really interesting points but I haven't felt tempted to go back and dig them up again.

I need to ask the right questions while reading, and take notes, and things, like back in school. A to-do list might help!

Hope this ennui will pass.

How to talk about books you haven't read

I came across this book How to talk about books you haven't read by Pierre Bayard, a Paris University lit professor (it's translated from French). It was funny and I wish I'd read it earlier – could've saved me some mugging for A level Lit eh

One hugely insightful comment I read was (I'm paraphrasing; can't remember it word for word, obviously) that every act of reading is also an act of non-reading. A counter-gesture is what he called it. To have picked up a particular book from a shelf is to have made a decision not to read all the other books that exist. I forget, though, what conclusion was drawn from this, but no doubt it was deep, for it impressed me.

He also introduces a taxonomy of books

• UB: book unknown to me
• SB: book I have skimmed
• HB: book I have heard about, and
• FB: book I have read but forgotten

And for HB, he creates the symbols ++, +, -, and --, for what he has heard about them – extremely positive to extremely negative in that order. Brilliant.

Anyway, How to talk about books you haven't read is an SB for me; for those who're interested it's available at Borders, and there're more reviews here:

Times Online
Guardian
NY Times

On MC

MCs are awesome. I had a fever and a bit of strep throat yesterday but the fever cleared up in 4 hours and the strep throat was gone by last night - and I have today to enjoy myself lol.

nugget of wisdom

from my mom:

Things look much better at IKEA than they do when they're at home.

in response to this limited-edition bookcase we saw yesterday - i have the one with the ordinary pine finishing =(

FML

that's my thought for today.

update

I haven't been updating regularly for the past few months now, as have most of the people I know. There's nothing edifying about life, as usual. I got called back to Army Open House for road marshalling Friday-Monday so I literally burnt the last weekend under the sun – I'm still recovering my normal skin tone, and my arms are starting to peel now that my forehead's done. Not pleasant.

First time I'd been to Joo Koon MRT – that place is really the edge of the known universe for me heh. I walked past some of the foreign workers' apartments and was overcome by the appalling smell of wet socks and sweat, like after field camp but way worse. I can't imagine how they live. There were clotheslines everywhere but otherwise it seemed to be neat – probably because these people live life so lightly, no real (physical) baggage to encumber them. I wonder how on earth they could live in there. The smell alone was surely a sign of the conditions inside.

These are real Singaporean slums, tucked away from public view by sheer geographical misfortune (just some factories, the end of the PIE and a couple of camps nearby). It strikes me now how little consideration we show to these people, who are after all here to earn a decent living just like the rest of us. Just because they're foreigners, they've been relegated to the edge of our national consciousness for too long, and it's time that they are acknowledged.

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On another note it was good to meet up with the geog guys over the weekend, too. It's been a very long time, and we talked for ages.

One thing that Wally asked and that I didn't address properly (I'm not sure whether any of the geog guys come here!) was whether you can appreciate music without playing an instrument. I don't believe so, at least not with regards to as regards classical music and maybe jazz. It's still surprisingly often that I realise things about music I hadn't seen before; it actually wasn't too long ago that I started paying attention to things like tempo and expression markings, and making sense of them, and once that happened I found pieces that I'd been playing wrongly all the while just because of some screwy recording I'd heard.

I'm sure, though, that it's different for other genres of music, like most modern pop which has a fairly standard set of instruments and lyrics, and even more so for Christian music where the whole point is its accessibility and inclusiveness – all you have to do is pick up a guitar and start doing your praise-the-lord stuff (that isn't a criticism). Different sorts of music simply have different purposes, functions, even audience intended, and I can't say I'm an expert.

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I've set myself a pretty ambitious reading programme, too; lots of the "classics". I'm not so sure how relevant they are though – some of Plato is awfully frustrating because of how careless they are about semantics. It'll be a long hard slog to ORD and beyond. I've long given up expecting any fulfilment from NS anyway.

Ah screw it I'm gonna sleep.

the banality of life is starting to piss me off.

There's nothing happening in my life. Nothing big anyway.

I did think I would start reading Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy on the computer (it's online somewhere; I've lost the link) but it is really tough going. I'm the sort of person who still needs to hold books in his hands.

I did start re-reading Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance today. It's part On-The-Road-esque travellogue, part philosophical rambling, part ego-tripping. I'm sure he has something very significant and meaningful to say about rhetoric and quality and the pursuit of excellence; I'm just not sure what.

What else? Thanks to the TPO meeting I found a new restaurant to take people to. It's called Curry Favor, 2 blocks down from Raffles City, and they do Japanese-style curry. The tenderloin beef that I had was pretty good - although it seemed more like beef stew to me.

There's a bottle of Baileys at home that's going (relatively) fast thanks to my valiant efforts.

It disturbs me that people know that hundreds and thousands of bright young Singaporeans have left this place and no one's asking why. Maybe they should set up a Panel or something.

Uniquely Singapore!

Where's the compassion in our "fine city"?

A short summary: this homeless guy who was sleeping in a tent at East Coast Park without a permit got picked up by some National Parks ranger and ended up being fined $800 - going to jail for 4 days because he couldn't pay. "In court on Tuesday, Noor was asked to produce his Identity Card or passport but he said that he had lost both items. It prompted District Judge Mr Shaiffudin Saruwan to retort in jest: 'I suggest you use a bicycle chain to tie yourself to a tree or you may lose yourself as well.'"

At this very moment District Judge Shaiffudin Saruwan has made me so very proud to be Singaporean. He should have sent him to jail even longer so that at least the guy could've enjoyed a few extra days of decent shelter.

On a more serious note, wtf? In that callous remark where was the respect and compassion due a human to another human? Was the judge lost in the contemplation of his wit?

In my view that remark was incredibly degrading, unnecessarily cruel and offensive. Surely this is not what we mean by the phrase 'to pass judgement'.

Sack this dude already.

-.-

Well I've fallen out of the habit of writing regular posts and these last couple of months have been pretty quiet. Just to reassure you guys that I'm still alive and posting, some thoughts:

I ran 21km in 2 hours 12 mins woohoo! Alright it's not fantastic but I think it's pretty good for a first try.

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People should be educated about the difference between (ethical) right and wrong and (factual) right and wrong. If you think about it, the confusion between the two is one of the main reasons why bigotry exists.

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I'm very disappointed at the maturity of political and social discourse in Singapore. I read the Online Citizen (TOC) and some local blogs semi-regularly, and the comments are highly unedifying. Usually on one side it's just inane and unsophisticated government bashing, while on the other we have those equally mindless cult-of-PAP fanatics. Why is no more effort being expended in being thoughtful and reasoned?

I think Kenneth Jeyaratnam's National Day message was a step in the right direction: we have got to recognise that yes the PAP has brought us economic development but no there's more to it than just GDP.

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Poets and authors and playwrights in Singapore have got to start asking the difficult questions: why else do they exist? Entertainment?

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What on earth was our foreign ministry thinking when they said they were "happy" that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was granted amnesty for half her sentence (1.5 years now) and that she will be under house arrest instead of being imprisoned? Oh the tender mercies of Myanmar's military government. Is she now expected to be grateful?And does the foreign service not have the balls to tell Myanmar their conduct is unacceptable? Or do our arms manufacturers really need their dirty money?

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I am absolutely enthralled by John Bayless's reinterpretations of Beatles songs in the style of Bach. Why is this genius not more widely heard?

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I think TPO, OMM and re:mix have got to come together and talk. They're cannibalising players off each other, and there's no way our amateur music scene can support so many groups in the state it's in right now. Music-making here could be so much better.

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From a comment I posted on someone else's blog some time ago:

Any particular set of values, of necessity, excludes others that don't agree with them. The point is that tolerance and secularism, by definition, exclude the least. Consider this statement: "the only thing I can't tolerate is intolerance".

To describe someone else as heathen is as good as saying: I am morally right, you are wrong, and therefore beneath me. It is an elitism of morality.