in a bookstore

What really kills me, when I'm browsing in a bookstore or CD shop, is spotting a title that someone I know would love. I laugh to myself (what would s/he say if s/he saw this?), commit the title to memory, intending to recommend or give it to him or her, then buy it to read or listen to it (just in case it really sucks and my reputation is dealt a death blow), and end up keeping it for myself. On reflection, that's how my collection grows, actually, I guess: it's a pile of all the shit that I ended up not giving you guys, in the end. I hope you'll forgive me, I'm only human, and I love my books and music too much.

motivation

I do believe that sometimes we're so battered and close to giving up, that the only thing keeping us going is the sense of "I'm better than all the other lousy fuckers around me", and an overriding desire to prove it.

Pride or hubris? Honour or ego? You decide. But it makes people do extraordinary things.

gosh

Today was happening. Tumbled back home from duty in the morning. As uneventful as they come.

Got to adam road for the lunch with the rest of us ex-YO fogeys - ike rachel shaggy ruolin jeremy remus alan & me - talked a lot of crap, and crashed YO after that. As always it was nice to be back, especially cos there were so many of us. Old friends and those nostalgic corridors and all that coming back together again. Dare I wish we were young again and pelting each other (and mrs wong) on the CCAB astroturf with waterbombs?

But things have changed; realities of life are being played out; people grow alternately closer and more distant, but more the latter, and sometimes meeting up is only an exercise in futility, hanging on to weaker and fainter shreds of what used to be, in feeble defiance of what is.

(When I write my Great Postcolonial Novel that sentence will be in it, somewhere.)

And I wish I could do something more for YO. It's not what it used to be; in fact that's an understatement. There's so much raw potential and energy that isn't being channelled usefully. The phrases are unsubtle, unpolished, directionless... notes barely in tune (string sections' intonation more akin to a dart board)... tempo horribly shaky... dynamics ignored. There's a lot to work on before March. And eroica is a monumental piece that doesn't deserve to be treated lightly.

Anyway after the rhsl I hopped onto a bus to Bedok (66) for the first time and fell asleep as soon as I got a seat. A bit of a panic moment when I was jolted awake by some guy who accidentally poked me, and saw lots of people randomly crossing the road, haphazard storefronts and colourful shop signs in Tamil and semigrammatical English, lots of shophouses and trash lying about (plastic bags and the like), and then I realised I was on Serangoon Road. Nothing out of the ordinary there, just not a side of Singapore I often see.

Got a call at Ubi while I was still on the bus; Sabby was at the airport. That was completely unexpected, but it saw me end the day at the airport. Cool stuff.

All that really made for a great day today.

something totally unexpected

I was at my desk, kinda stoning, the usual 9-o'clock-ish feeling of "now I've turned on the comp and watered the damn plants, what next?" setting in, and I'd taken out my Salman Rushdie - Fury - to read.

It's not a book that appeals to me greatly, and I'd had trouble with it the last two times I tried reading past the first chapter. It bores the shit out of me, frankly. I'd just left it on my desk in anticipation of lotsa free time to kill. 

So this staff officer, a captain from HQ CBRE was setting up for some meeting in the discussion room in my office, and he popped out and was about to ask me something (wholly unimportant) when he caught sight of that thing.

"You read Rushdie?" "Actually, sir, this's the first book of his I'm reading." "Hrm... (picks it up and looks at the blurbs) You know about him right?" "Erm... the Satanic Verses?" "No, that he's a twat."

That possibly made my day.

chick corea & hiromi uehara

If this performance isn't legendary it deserves to be.

Gershwin's Summertime

Chick Corea's Spain

rant

Ok those of you who've been with me in Lit classes over the years know that I'm not a great Shakespeare fan; I have no feel for the abstruse figures of speech, the convoluted characters, the plot, the great tragic flaws, and so on. But no doubt through the Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra (just a tiny sampling of his plays), I think I've gained at least a respect for the richness of meaning that can be coaxed out of his words, if you try hard enough. I'd be the first to admit that I find Shakespeare boring and inaccessible at times (I fell asleep in a performance of Macbeth when we were on the UK-Paris trip), but at the same time I respect him for the boldness and imagination of his creative vision. English would be far poorer, far drier without Shakespeare and great poets and playwrights like him.

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So I was at Borders at Parkway, searching for a gift for someone. I ended up in the poetry section, right next to Shakespeare and Lit Crit. I spent ages browsing through all kinds of stuff; TS Eliot, Billy Collins, John Betjeman, a bit of The Rape of the Lock which I had no patience to read properly... and generally getting lost in words, when these two airheaded twats started dissing Shakespeare next to me.

What stung me most was how flippant and trite their comments to each other were. They started with milder stuff like "my sister did Romeo & Juliet once and I couldn't really understand it" (fair enough, maybe she hadn't tried), but as they progressed and connected, they started a race to the bottom; it seemed as though each was trying to outdo the other in bimbo quotient. Once they got serious their main grouses were "it's not a storybook leh" and "haha the words are so weird". And as they went on they started picking up random plays and flipping to the middle to browse and giggle. 

I wasn't in the mood to give a response so I shut it, flipping through more and more volumes of poetry, just letting my distaste build up slowly. Eventually they tired of it and went to the chick lit, where they were way more at home. Obviously their education hasn't done them much good.

Girls these days! ^^ pfft.

blue whales

Ok I guess you guys want a break from all that tosh I usually rave or rant about, right? Yeah so today I'm going to rave about the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus).

First thing is, it's freaking huge and heavy. Those monsters generally weigh 150-170 tonnes - after they've been cut up because they can't be weighed whole. And not because they're too heavy; because they're too large to be weighed. And the longest whales ever recorded were >33m in length. Crikey. I don't think the stomach could fit in my miserably modest flat.

And yet it would choke on a beach ball. Blimey. Blue whales eat krill, mostly, except when they accidentally catch small fish, squid, or plastic bags. I'm sure I eat larger stuff than that. I mean, I eat cows. (Though admittedly, carved up.) And that's precisely what makes the blue whale so disarmingly endearing: the combination of zomg hugeness and awww vulnerability. And how can you go wrong with that?

For their 7 months blue whales drink about 400 litres of milk a day. That's insane. How many human babies can that feed? I think a standard dosage of milk is what... 400-500ml? So what, a thousand servings of milk for little toddles? Get this: we should give up on cows and farm blue whales for milk. Never mind if it tastes like piss, they'll all grow up to drink Starbucks anyway (and apparently, think it's "good coffee", both of which are descriptors that I have semantic issues with) so might as well start young right? 

I won't start on their mating rituals, but apparently they sing underwater. The only time humans sing with water in their mouths is at class parties while playing forfeits for stupid games, when they should know better, ahem Daniel.

And what's more, its scientific name is an original Latin pun. (Not like, say, homo which has acquired a double meaning only fairly recently.) Balaenoptera, as far as I can tell, means "whale-thing" and comes from the Middle English word baleen, meaning whale. But musculus is the clincher: it may mean either muscular or little mouse (mouse is mus in Latin). I think that for a biologist that's an extremely acute sense of humour Linnaeus had. Maybe it was a drunken bet. (So the more buff you get, the closer you are to being a little mouse. Irony ftw!)

I think blue whales are quite possibly, other than some humans of course, nearly the coolest animals ever. Adam might question me, but he's just jealous, even if he'd never admit it. xP

back home

Yes I'm back home after a harrowing day. I reported to camp for the APB course, then went over to the medical centre cos of my >1cm diameter abcess on my eyelid. It was sick - partly because it was huge, partly cos it was also sunburnt. The MO referred me straight to Tan Tock Seng's A&E, they pushed me over to the eye centre, and after a long wait at around 3:30 I got the fricking thing pierced. It was so bad that while one of the nurses was wiping the anesthetic cream off it, the damn lump burst. ftw. So in the end the doctor decided to gouge it out from the outside (damn messy but less tedious) rather than the inside (no scar but damn mafan). Zomg the thing hurt like fuck for ages, no thanks to the anesthetic needles (yes, TWO of them) that I guess hadn't kicked in before I got it dug out; and there was so much icky stuff that I literally cried silent tears of blood and pus during the surgery. Thank goodness for painkillers or I'd still be writhing and moaning on the floor. 

And the upshot of all that was, I got a 3-day MC. Stingy bastards... I was expecting 5 days haha.

coming 20

It's quite amazing, isn't it? This year it'll be 20 years since I was born. Solidarity (the political party) was legalised in Poland in 1989; the Exxon Valdez spilt; Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie; CFCs were phased out; people were massacred in Tiananmen Square; apartheid breathed its dying breath; and the Berlin Wall fell. 1989 was momentous.

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People were still using pagers and eating vanilla ice-cream; fridges were smaller, computers barely available and took ages to load MS-DOS, and how many channels were there on TV?

Cartoon Network wasn't around back then. (And I attribute the incredible stupidity of the post-1992-ish generation to the introduction of Cartoon Network around 1994, because watching TV just deadens the mind.) The CD drive wasn't around; neither were MP3 players.

Do you remember how Channel 5 always repeated Home Alone around Christmas? I think I watched it 4 or 5 times before I got immensely bored and gave up hope on TCS.

And shopping malls were like... Parkway (which still exudes an irresistable draw on my soul due to the happy confluence of Coffee Bean, Borders and Gramophone) and Thompson Plaza (which does not, due to the fact that it sucks, now). 

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I can hardly imagine what it'd have been like to be 20 in 1989. Or what it'd be like to go back 20 years and try living with what we had. There was a striking sketch on the Mitchell & Webb Situation called "The Early 1990s House" - a couple living with only the stuff there was in the early 1990s; at the end of the episode the wife broke down when there was only neapolitan ice-cream. It actually became psychologically distressing.

Somehow my childhood was nothing as deprived as that. Or maybe it was but I never noticed. But I think I had a much more healthy and stimulating childhood than kids these days. 

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In many ways 1989 was a year of hope - both the hope of a better, kinder, juster, more human world, and the blind but inextinguishable and sacred hope of a baby me. Somehow both hopes have been much diminished, moderated by the passing of years.

But I guess it must mean something when both these hopes refuse to die.

drudgery

Girls can sit out this post, it's another NS angst rant. 

I resent the fact that I'm going back to trainee life for another 7 days. True it's not very long, and yes my life is otherwise pretty decent, but no, I don't want to go to my grimy dusty shithole of a bunk and sleep on lizard poo (no one's figured out who's responsible for changing bedsheets; no one stays in; no one cares. Duh.) and wake up at 5:15 (or earlier) cold and irritated and sickened at the thought of another day of drudgery. Fixing up bridge parts is an exercise in futility. 

Yes, I'm going back to build bridges. No, it's not CIP, it's not some lovey-dovey giving food to the elderly or befriending orphans kind of thing, for fuckssake get real. Bridges not as in bridge over troubled waters bridges. As in London Bridge, but not as posh. Think a dismantlable version of Cavenagh Bridge that can actually take vehicles over 3 hundredweight, and cattle and horses. (And the irony is that I'm technically a field engineer, but nevermind.)

What's the point? I'm not getting extra pay. It's just one more exquisite variety of timewasting. If a real war ever comes, we'd all have forgotten how to dig holes, shoot people - enemy combatants, not people; dehumanise them, all the easier to kill them without thinking - lay mines and detonate explosives anyway. When shit hits the fan and there're bullets zinging just inches overhead everyone'll be scared ball-less. Except emotional eunuchs, or people with a death wish.

When push comes to shove I don't know how anyone would ever convince me to take up arms for my country. But maybe I'm cynical.