On the passing of another year

One year ago I made a list of things to do. The concrete things I mostly managed; the waffly ones were, well, waffly. "Grow in wisdom and temperance" - yeah, right. What a pompous twit I was.

Lots of things have happened (duh). I became a teacher briefly, and I hope my erstwhile students have recovered. ('Egregious' actually means "very bad", 4P; I should have corrected myself a long time ago damnit. I mixed it up with 'gregarious' as you should have figured out.) It was a short ten weeks but that time changed me. It was the scope of the responsibilities and the feeling of the sand always shifting beneath the feet that did it. It's a rare teacher indeed who's ever in total control of the situation; every lesson was a challenge, and I think it's good that I had the courage to occasionally laugh at my pretence of being in control. Some people tried so hard not to, but I think it's okay to lose face sometimes; it makes you the bigger man (or dweeb, actually).

Brandenburg. Ouch. Organizing your very own Bach concert on a whim is no joke. Who does that anyway? I learnt two things: how to apply for an Arts Fund grant, and how to kill yourself through overwork. I guess I should never have plunged in without getting a team together first. Still, on the positive side I had a chance to play with many great musician friends for the last time in a long while.

As an aside: my mom told me of a childhood connection to Brandy 2 (the concerto grosso one). Apparently when I was a kid (two years old) the opening to Brandy 2 was the theme music for the arts channel on TV, and every time it came on I'd stop whatever I was doing and listen till it was over. Guess it must have resonated on some subconscious level.

Then it was preparing for the trip and then actually getting to Yale. I can't believe I dragged myself and my mom all around New York, New Haven and a bit of Boston. And then OIS (fun times) and then the few days before classes started, and then living for the weekend every week, and midterm season, midterm season redux, Thanksgiving break, reading week, finals, flying back home. Went by just like that. I'm glad I met great people in OIS and my classes and had awesome suitemates; my term would have sucked without these little mercies. Looking back I should have partied more, and that's reflected in my grades.

So since I live by terms now, not years, new term's resolutions are in order. I resolve to

• Party at least once (I need help for this)
• Take classes I'm excited for
• Keep my grades up
• Stop sleeping in the 9am classes
• Stop trying my luck with the rice in Morse

Happy 2011!

on leaving singapore

As my departure for university nears I'm starting to get more apprehensive about it.

I think for slightly more than two years I've been buoyed along by this post-admissions-outcome glow. I was ridiculously happy - hey, who wouldn't be? - and somehow it's actually lasted this long. But now as I'm having to settle visa forms, flight and hotel bookings, and thinking about setting up a bank account... rooming with a total stranger probably from a culture quite dissimilar to mine... the laundry situation O.o... it's getting kinda daunting.

And let's not forget that my brains have rotted. I can understand about 30% of an average Chinese text. I've done nothing to my mind in NS except attempting to plough through Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and learning enough Cyrillic to read the labels of vodka bottles. I can barely remember all the math and economics that I did and that's going to be awfully important later on.

I'm flying out of Singapore on National Day. When I booked the flight I downplayed the obvious significance - after all it's just a date. But the significance looms ever larger and it seems a very decisive up-yours to Singapore, and although the whole notion of patriotism is ridiculous to me I wonder whether I'm quite ready to leave the place I grew up in. It's all making me feel quite conflicted.

Come to think of it, once Yale said yes NUS never had a chance. When I did the US apps nearly 3 years ago I'd only applied to those schools that I thought were definitely better than NUS (the economists will recognise an application of ordinal utility here), so when an offer came along it seemed natural to take it. Looking back at it I think it was kinda self-centred. I know it'll be tough for my mom.

All things considered, there was a time when I really looked forward to independence and moving out of Singapore for ever and ever. Now I'm not quite so sure.

sporadic update #5

I thought about giving my writing some impetus the last time but that hasn't turned out well. It's been about four weeks since I last wrote. On the plus side, there are now a few things to report!

For instance, my badminton skills have improved significantly (from zero) ever since the geog guys started playing badminton fortnightly.

I've changed the default font on my blog to Franklin Gothic Medium because according to a survey on a site I just found (code style) it's the most common un-fugly sans serif font on Windows systems. Myriad Web isn't even represented in the survey, so this means no one apart from myself has been reading the blog the way it's supposed to look. Fail.

I finally went down to books actually a few weeks back, with adam. It's a lovely place - I want my house to look like that when I get one. Shelves everywhere O.o and lots of gems I never thought I'd find in Singapore. I got George Perec's Life: A User's Manual and a collection of Roger McGough's poetry (including Summer with Monika). That place made my day.

There've been three birthday parties that I've been to since my release from hermithood (organising the brandenburg project) - Adam's, Jing Xun's and Brenda's. I got slightly drunk at the first, thoroughly wasted at the second, and we got peck wasted at the third by playing 猜拳 (cai1 quan2, guess fist - or "the finger-guessing game", as Google Translate tells me). All good fun.

Sidetrack: Amazingly 猜拳 has its own page in the Chinese Wikipedia (and even more amazingly, I can still read about 80% of it). Apparently it can refer to scissors paper stone (rock paper scissors) or the one where you guess the number of fists open at the time (which was the one we played for drinks). Both are documented in Ming Dynasty books, the latter in the encyclopedic 五杂组. Bet you didn't know that.

I also bought a new laptop last Thursday at the PC Show (HP ProBook 4310s) on which I'm typing this blog entry now. PC Show was mad and godawfully crowded but it's always fascinating. Anyway the laptop's running Windows 7 now after I repartitioned the hard drive (a single 450GB drive is nuts) and got rid of Vista. Battery life is about 5 hours on normal typing and web-surfing, and just over the length of a normal movie for movie playback, so I'm satisfied. I've just discovered that the Chinese input on Windows 7 is a bitch though (the old XP one used to have a correction function that would give you phrases as you went along, which was a godsend; no such luck with this one). But heck, I'm not going to use Chinese in an academic context ever again.

Well that about sums it up. I had a re: mix rehearsal yesterday and will have a TPO one later today, but that's it. Anyone up for coffee is welcome to contact me through the usual methods and suggest a place and time.

noteworth-less

Wow it's been an incredibly long time since I updated, for the simple reason that life hasn't been that happening. I assume some people blog to give meaning to their life, others to document noteworthy stuff that's happened to them; I personally haven't felt the need for such direction, and my daily existence has become so humdrum as to be noteworth-less.

Let me give you an example - I play Civilization IV, and I've recently downloaded a new mod. This one is so arcane that it makes the vanilla game a walk in the park. As you might know, Civilization is turn-based. A 'quick' game is 700 turns; in the early game you have maybe 10 turns a minute, maybe more. By the time you reach turn 400+ (which in the 'real' timescale is the Victorian era), you're down to a turn a minute because of the 30+ computer opponents on a huge Earth map. By the time you reach about turn 600 (which is the furthest I've got on the noble difficulty setting), you're down to one turn every 3 minutes - which means the last 1/7 of the game (assuming you don't win it before that) takes 5 hours, most of which is spent staring at the screen waiting for the computer opponents' turns. I have taken to practicing completing the square while waiting, but I've reached turn 600 and in the slide towards futility I seem to have left the point of no return behind me long ago.

But I've decided to reverse the slide and turn causality on its head, in a sense. I've decided that maybe I should use blogging as an impetus to give direction to my life. I thought Facebook might replace blogging (notes, wall posts etc.) but Facebook's social activity is entirely derivative. If you don't already have an active social life then you're reduced to posting videos and links and comments on other people's videos and links. By contrast blogging is primary, original, creative in nature (at least more so than facebooking).

Let's see how long this motivation lasts; I give it two days.

weird dream came true

It's been a long time...

A few months back I dreamt I wrote a letter to the Danish embassy about how Danish butter cookies always came broken in the tin.

(It's a fetish of mine that whenever I open a tin of Danish butter cookies, I eat all the broken ones and pack all the whole ones into airtight glass jars.)

And they wrote back to me offering to give me a tin of unbroken butter cookies.

-----

Today I opened a tin of Danish butter cookies and not one was broken. =)

2 weeks at RI

I've finished two weeks of my one-term stint back at that school in Bishan – yeah that one of happy and not-so-happy teenage memories – and seen lots. Some encouraging, some not so.

First of all, it's been a steep learning curve standing up there and doing your darnedest to keep order while delivering the content you're supposed to go through. I think it's a gazillion times easier if you're doing math or the sciences or even history – at least you have readings, handouts, and a fairly comprehensive syllabus to work with. Of course there's a syllabus for English as well but my guys' abilities differ so wildly that it's a huge challenge holding the class together. Some of them have problems stringing a sentence together and keeping the grammatical number or tense agreement. Sadly, this is especially but not exclusively true of the foreign scholars. I wonder whether standards have slipped and if so, why.

And one of the saddest and scariest things about the modern age is that reading and writing (in a sustained, intellectual fashion) are skills that aren't valued any more. It's scary because I'm teaching things that hinge vitally on command of these skills. The people I'm teaching now grew up with the Internet. The younger ones were born in the year I got Internet access – that's 56kbps dialup, by the way. They've known iPods and MSN for as long as they can remember, and they've been on Facebook possibly as long as me. A whole generation of people has suddenly migrated away from books, magazines and newspapers, to grow up on blogs, podcasts and tweets – a shift of that speed and scale is alarming. I honestly believe that the piecemeal nature of information on the Internet has led directly to an impairment of our ability to store and process knowledge. Is it just me, or have kids these days (in fact, all of us) become dumber on average? Is there any way of knowing?

I'm also stunned by some of the attitudes to learning and to authority that I've seen. To be fair, they're only manifested in a tiny minority, and perhaps they aren't worse than in my time – perhaps I led a sheltered GEP-humanz life and I'd never even seen the kind of stuff that happened in the rest of RI (not to mention outside). But a few assignments I've been handed have shocked far more experienced teachers than myself – that is indicative of the level of seriousness and pride with which they treat their academic work. 

As some of you may know, RISE changed hands recently, and I've been absolutely shocked by the nonchalance – indeed the slapdash attitudes – shown by some of the younger players towards their new conductor. I'm seeing ridiculously poor standards of musical and rehearsal discipline, and sec 2s speaking out of turn, talking back to their seniors and teachers. Putting it bluntly, they are perfectly happy to waste the time and energy and goodwill of their betters. I am disgusted. Or do they know not what they do? If this is true of other CCAs as well, then I think it's time to bring tekan camps back.

That is not to say that I haven't seen good things. The good thing about being in RI is that there are always brilliant students with a flair for the language who really demonstrate superlative achievement and maturity. I've seen a few extremely promising orators and writers already. But even then, many of them aren't living up to their potential. The level of energy that I've felt is rather out of proportion to the level of achievement I've seen. True, they're only 15 going on 16, and they're incredibly distracted and unfocused as us guys often are; true, as teachers and seniors it's impossible for us to expect the guys to perform at their best all the time. Perhaps it's early days yet.

It's early days indeed – just ten days into my job I've weathered day after day of teachers' throat (a perennial job hazard), late nights (8pm and more, thanks to the enthusiasm of the RISE exco, which I'm loathe to suppress), and rowdy classes (sad to say I don't have a 'stage presence' like Mrs Smith!) I sometimes look at myself and wonder what right I have to suppose that I know better than my classes, to pretend that I have anything useful to share. But then I come across some guy or other who's dumb or rude or screwed up enough that I feel like smashing his noisehole – that happens about once a day – and then all's right with the world again. Though I haven't smashed anyone's noisehole (yet).

New Year resolutions

I resolve

• to live out the year.
• to not use powerpoint presentations unless absolutely necessary.
• to use only sans-serifs in print except for titles.
• to lower my expectations.
• to raise my standards (not a contradiction).
• to save more and drink less.
• to do more and mope less.
• to read cervantes' don quixote.
• to keep on writing and writing and writing.
• to meet deadlines.
• to stop depending on others so much.
• to never stop trying.
• to grow in wisdom and temperance.
• to never be cowed.
• to learn when to stop.

Happy 2010!

Christmas 2009

Life is boring as bollocks. I was hungry and nauseous throughout dinner; that's weird. Don't know if alcohol will make me feel good =D or throw up =( wtf.

* * *

(15 minutes later) Still feeling nauseous. This is strange.

Okay never mind. Some targets for the near future:

• Finish the pile of books next to me, and Don Quixote and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets which I don't have yet
• Play or listen to a performance of the Brandenburg Concertos (I need help with this)
• Be less crabby
• Revert to Singapore time zone (GMT +8)
• Waste less time on facebook and random surfing
• Catch up with old friends (try, at least)
• Don't screw up my job

Happy Sol Invictus!

Concert Review – OMM/WAYO 14th Dec

I wish I had played in this concert, honestly. Other concerts, not so; certainly not the Rach or the Rimsky-Korsakov programmes and probably not the Mahler ones coming up next year either. But I can't help but rue the fact that this is the second time in my musical life there was an opportunity to play the Planets, and I missed it (the first one when I was too noob to be in SNYO, years back).

We saw some pretty solid playing, and I was impressed that the combined orchestra rose to the occasion. The brasses especially were fabulous, and milked the loud bits for all they were worth. I'm sure they enjoyed the mambo from West Side Story. I thought the basses did pretty well too, especially a couple of prominent passages in Holst's Saturn.

Fabulous solos from Ike, Zhaohan and especially Beverly. I'd forgotten that she was back, didn't recognise her at first and was absolutely stunned by the solos in the first couple of movements of the Planets (I think Venus); I was wondering where in Singapore did OMM manage to dig out this cellist! The quartet in West Side Story (was it Somewhere? or a later section?) did well too, as did the harps (especially the first encore).

A couple of disappointing areas though – though I'm not familiar with the score, I felt that the tempo changes in Mars (the contrast between the opening/final tempo and the quieter middle section) were rather jarring. There was too wide a discrepancy and when the orchestra went back to tempo primo it seemed more wrenched and forced than necessary. Mercury almost fell apart I think at or around the first violin solo – I think there was a missing part or section there, and it offset everyone rather. The opening tempo for West Side Story was rather controlled too, almost lacking in energy; I think everyone was too cautious there. Or perhaps it was a long programme.

Having the choir directly facing the audience in Neptune – rather than backstage as directed by Holst – seemed to make it a tad too prominent and jarring too, and the blue lighting merely cheapened the experience! The ethereal, otherworldly quality of the writing was completely unexploited. Having said that though, I guess there must have been reasons for having the choir visible to the audience; it was their only part in the entire concert and I'm sure they appreciated the visual exposure.

But these were minor details, and generally it was an excellent effort on the part of the players! I appreciated the thoughtful choice of the second encore, and I must admit I sang along to 'Land of Hope and Glory'. I don't think many people know the lyrics so here they are:

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet,
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

hong kong.

Been busy prepping for the Mendelssohn concert and the Hong Kong trip along with lots of misc stuff so haven't been posting. I hope that will change because I sense my meagre readership dwindling still further, and also because I need to practise writing more.

Hong Kong was fun; there were lots to see and do and wonder at. The pace of life there is visibly faster - in the MTR stations people walk at twice the speed of Singaporeans, there's hardly any conversation, and people frown at you if you don't keep right on the escalator. The buildings are set into the hillside at crazy angles and heights, and the bus routes are insanely long windy single-lane routes up 30-degree slopes – terribly scenic but hell to drive, I'm sure. Huge respec' for HK bus drivers.

The language barrier was surprising. In reality most Hongkongers know very little English – either that or they're uncomfortable with speaking it. You could almost tell the people apart by what they spoke – Hongkongers spoke Cantonese, PRC Chinese spoke Mandarin, and if it was English chances are it would be a Singaporean tourist. We managed to get by with Mandarin but sometimes it was amusing, like when peck tried for 10 minutes to get warm water at the dim sum restaurant. And apparently 白开水 means something totally different there.

I observed that the people there aren't all that friendly or helpful – certainly a far cry from Bangkok! If the waitresses didn't understand you, sometimes they'd just leave after a few seconds, or treat you like dumbasses. At the hotel reception it seemed that the smiley badge they wore on their blouses was supposed to make up for the lack of facial expression. The attendants at Ocean Park hardly smiled either – they generally looked bored. And worst of all, the taxi driver we got on the trip out of the airport gave us some Chinese Yuan coins and a Thai 10-baht note in change, shortchanging us nearly HKD100. That was a positively distasteful experience.

I came back with nearly HKD1000 left because things were as expensive there, if not more, and the variety was atrocious – I didn't see a single running shoe that I really liked at all the factory outlets we visited, for instance. It was probably winter season but still, I expected better.

We went to Macau too and it was quite a lovely place – crappy 60s-70s slummy tenements next to gleaming hotels and beautifully-preserved colonial Portuguese architecture. And of course the egg tarts – we only ate two each though we swore to get through ten. They were quite awesome but the back-street one was better than the one from the touristy-looking bakery (I think it's called Koi Kee Bakery). We went to the Venetian too; it was a glittering, glitzy spectacle of sheer opulence, a monument to the power of money. The ceiling paintings and carpets were admittedly awesome, but the amount of it was so overwhelming that to my mind it was in very poor taste.

Oh and of course we stayed up late nights to talk cock but I'm not going into that. Suffice it to say that many secrets were learnt.

What else can I say? Hong Kong positively invites comparisons with Singapore; they're both majority-Chinese, extremely urban, modern Asian cities. It is huge though, compared to Singapore, and the people move much faster. The buildings are ridiculously tall, and mostly quite haphazard and dingy – the view from our hotel window was of a highly unedifying high-rise block whose whitewashed exterior had turned part cream, part rust-stained from age and neglect. The shopping was disappointing, possibly because we didn't go to the right places. Weather was pretty good (cool and mostly dry) but I was wheezing most nights from the pollution and low temperatures. I can certainly feel the extent of government microplanning in Singapore and for once I'm glad of it.

Now back to life!