Obiterdicti

Pecking Order of Crappiness

2011-08-01T00:51:00.002+08:00

With all this traveling that I have not been doing, I've had ample time to consider the whole business of visa applications and immigration procedures.

About a year ago, I'd had a conversation at work with a local colleague who'd been turned away from Brazil because she didn't have the requisite tourist visa. As it turned out, however, Malaysians don't need a visa to visit Brazil. "Can you imagine? We need a visa but Malaysians don't," my colleague had huffed before abruptly remembering that I was not part of 'we' and could go to Brazil any time I damn-well pleased.

In any case, I hadn't taken offence (partially because I'd been rather surprised myself) because my colleague had merely articulated what everyone thinks but doesn't dare say: countries that are crappier than yours shouldn't require you to have a visa to visit them.

Look, I'm sorry. Even in this era of airborne terrorism, economic freeloading and all that shit, there comes a time when you're being grilled about the purpose of your visit by an immigration officer while a grubby customs officer paws through your things with suspicion and avarice. And after you're lectured for the fifth time about not overstaying, you want to throw your hands out around you, as though to embrace your surroundings - the airport made of wood, the single runway the entire sorry nation calls 'international' and the zinc roofing overhead. And you want to yell, "Look at this shit. Seriously? Seriously?!"

Conversely, every visit I've made to the US has been one fraught with tension and cold-eyed officers scrutinising the space between the whorls of my fingerprints. And I'd been fine with that, because I knew that the country had more to offer me than I had to offer it. I had every incentive to overstay, and they had every incentive to believe that I would, if only to escape a country that doesn't know how to buy functioning submarines. If they aren't going to welcome me with Shake Stack and a Peanut Butter Concrete Shake, so be it, because I know my place.

And here's the theory I'd like to advance for the field of travel, based on the principle of knowing your place on what idiot PR people have begun calling 'the global stage'. There should be what I will call the Pecking Order of Crappiness (POC). Naturally, countries will be ranked according to how crappy they are. If you come from a country ranking above your destination country's, you don't need a visa to visit, barring certain political exceptions like if both countries are at war or if some sort of embargo is ongoing. Of course, if special visa waiver arrangements have been made between one country and another that's crappier than it, it still stands, regardless. The whole idea is to make traveling less difficult, not more.

And naturally, the ranking itself comes with its own set of complications - such as the criteria being used. There should be a weighted basket of factors, of course - the Human Development Index, your ranking on The Economist's Quality of Life list, GDP per capita, etc. Someone with an overly large brain will figure out the details.

Some things will count against you on the Pecking Order of Crappiness. Such as what proportion of your nation's toilets do not have doors - I'm looking at you, Certain Oversized Country With Very Loud People.

I allow that it won't be perfect, but it will roughly work. Like with how some women are ugly and others are hot, how crappy a country is can be objective on many counts. Maybe between Denmark and Finland, it'll be a tough call. Between America and Zimbabwe, however, who the hell are you kidding? That's like Heidi Klum versus Roseanne Barr. There might be some diplomatic fallout, but that can be fixed - by putting doors on your toilets, for example.

So maybe the rankings can be refined a little bit, with a banding system. So you can group together those blue-eyed, blond Scandinavian countries who always seem delirious with happiness on global indices, what with their free schooling, progressive legal system and humane treatment of madmen who go on shooting sprees. Within a band, everyone can travel to everyone else's country without this visa nonsense, and then collectively look down on the band below theirs. (That's what you're already doing at work every appraisal season so don't you dare look appalled.)

The rankings will be fluid, too. It will be influenced - among other things - by the actions of individual civilians. So, if too many of your citizens have been trying to board planes with explosives in their shoes, your country drops a notch. And the government can distribute bulletins with the name and photograph of the asshole who is the reason you, an innocent traveler, has to trek to a consulate to get a picture taken of yourself that has to be exactly 3.42 inches by 3.42 inches, with an off-white background and exactly 2.6 mm of neck showing.

I think that failed plane bombers will find that if that if they can't kill themselves in the air, a lot of people on the ground and in embassy waiting rooms will be willing to do it for them.

The free market could also work here, by involving something like TripAdvisor. Basically, the aggregated data from a site that collects travellers' feedback could be used as a weighted factor on the Pecking Order of Crappiness. The more people like a certain country, the higher bargaining power the country has in terms of who can enter without a visa. But if your beaches are shit and ragged children try to sell you wooden figurines or their little sister in every alley, you fall in the rankings. In a way, it also automatically regulates demand, so that the most popular destinations are most able to control overcrowding, while more people will be free to go to lower-ranked countries and buy their wooden figurines and little sisters.

In any case, I kind of hope this never happens. It'll be very hard to take the shirt-rending and national soul-searching sparked off by not being number one at something for the first time in forever.

Answer, Answer

2011-06-29T23:10:00.003+08:00

I discovered the most annoying thing on the Internet, today. It's called Scorecard Research. All I'd been doing was visiting one of the food blogs on my regular reading list - nothing in the least bit dodgy - when this bossy little pop-up ad comes up instead, with bold font that told me to "Tell us about your Internet usage'. That was it. No 'please', no neon promise of winning a $1 million jackpot if I click on it, no neon promise telling me that I'd already won $1 million - nothing.

I get tons of pop-up ads a day, all annoying in varying degrees, and I'm pretty easy to piss off. I once made my university wait a whole year before I would fill out an alumni career survey, and even then, I was so annoyed, that I put myself down as an "Internet technopreneur" and said that I belong to the $1 million-$2 million income bracket. (If one of you backroom folks is reading this, this is why your bell curve has crazy-ass skewedness. My bad).

Anyway, the Scorecard Research ad has reached some kind of nadir in terms of rudeness and ineffectiveness. If I wanted a marketing firm to nose around in the ass-cracks of my Internet surfing habits, I'd bend over for Facebook or Google in the normal course of my using their services, thanks. Even the careless Nigerian chappie who's perpetually losing his grip on the throne and needs your bank account number to transfer his considerable fortune into puts more thought into his emails. "Tell us about your Internet usage", indeed.

I was so incensed, I spent a full three seconds Googling the firm and unearthed a whole bunch of complaints from 2009 about an identically named entity linked to some kind of pesky cookie or bug that slows down people's computers. Granted, the current asshole company could be a completely different one from the 2009 asshole company, but it goes to show that most firms doing research are just better-educated telemarketers.

There's nothing more despicable than someone accepting money to climb into other people's brain. There's no skill needed for that sort of thing - just a dearth of self-respect and some degree of grubby voyeurism. If a market researcher were back in high school, he'd be the kind of person asking his friends if they think his penis is huge.

One of them, a local compay I won't name, is even using children, now. The boyfriend took me to a museum as a treat for my birthday this year, and every time we crossed the lobby to get from one part of the museum to another, this chubby child no older than 7 would accost us with a clipboard. We fobbed her off each time, but she cornered us when we were leaving. I took pity on her then because I'd mistakenly assumed that it was for some cutesy school project, but mostly because the kid had the faint beginnings of a moustache on her face and I knew life was not going to be one giant prom night for her.

I'd expected the questions to be something along the lines of "Can you name our first President?" or "How important is history to you?", seeing as to how we were in a museum.

But instead, the survey questions rapidly revealed themselves to be the kind asked by people wearing neckties that restrict bloodflow to the brain. "How much would you spend in a museum giftshop?" for example. ("Zero").

At the end of it, the hirsute little girl wanted my name as well, which I refused to give, right after getting a closer look at her tag and seeing the name of a research firm on it. Seeing as to how they haven't started teaching kids how to disagree with other people in school, she stood there dumbstruck as I turned to leave. Her mother, however, came flying after me through the doors of the museum, saying that the agency wouldn't pay her kid if I didn't leave a name.

What followed was the longest lecture I'd ever given someone almost twice my age, about the invasiveness of surveys, the exploitation of children and the disingenuousness of her approach.

I really should have kept it simple: Everyone hates surveys - and invest in electrolysis for your child.

As we walked away, the boyfriend whispered to me - "We should have just given them some names. We could have been Harry and Annie Kok".

Remembering

2011-06-28T23:37:00.000+08:00

You know how we never think that a certain set of days are the best days of our life while we're still living them? By time we do think it, it's too late and a little sad - mostly because our days need to get worse before we realise that the best ones are over.

A remarkable thing has been happening, though. I've been doing the living and realising simultaneously. It's come in flashes, in brief bursts of sweet satisfaction. It's been surprising, because I've lived most of my life waiting for the bottom to fall out of things, an ornery concentration of pessimism.

But I'd been in the cab the other day, when it'd occurred to me that this is my primary mode of transport these days, when the boyfriend isn't driving me. There'd been a time when cab fare had felt crushingly unaffordable to me - and they still are, for lots and lots of people in this country. Now, I blithely spend the college education funds of my unborn children on peak hour surcharges and fuel price hikes everywhere I go - because, well, maybe my kid will make like me and get a scholarship. Or something.

I'd been taking the cab to lunch at Raffles Hotel, where there'd be starched linen, succulent dim sum and the company of someone I liked. We'd spend almost two hours laughing uproariously and whispering conspiratorially before calling for more tea.

My biggest concern that day was whether my bag matched my shoes. And I remember thinking, "This is going to be one of the best days of your life".

Today, I had a similar thought. A colleague, noting my fondness for everything Doraemon-related (I know. It's like finding out that Charlie Sheen likes kittens), had given me a plastic Doraemon encased in a whale with wheels on bottom a few months ago. For months, we'd both thought that one simply pushed the whale around to make it go and fancied oneself entertained by the whole thing. But to my delight, I'd found out today that you could wind it up by twisting the Doraemon part around, so that the whole thing would skitter across a surface, all business-like.

And so I found myself at my colleague's cubicle demonstrating how the Doraemon-whale-pod really worked, with plenty of giggling. It struck me then that I was, at 2 in the afternoon, perfectly free to act like a complete idiot in the office and there was someone else willing to do it with me, egged on by a Japanese robot cat from the future.

I didn't think that I would have many more days like this one, to be young and stupid and to be excused for being stupid because I am young - and the important thing had been that I'd had the good sense to realise it then.

The largest superstitions still stand, though. There is a quota on these self-satisfied thoughts, for example, because the one day that you allow yourself to freeze in your mind might become the day from which things begin to go downhill. The universe is cruel, like that. I have many cherished memories of relationships in which the endings have been acrimonious, with nothing but the best memories to taunt me - the ones I'd stupidly saved.

And now, I keep most memories in the working memory part of my mind, the one that you use to hold the most temporary of information, like a phone number you know you will only dial once. I periodically throw out birthday cards because they weigh me down. Whenever I get a stuffed toy gift, I worry about the inevitable trip to the Salvation Army if the relationship were to go south (so far, I've made 4 trips). I scrub out overdue memories diligently - the best ones will hurt you when reality catches up with you and the worst ones just hurt you, I reason.

But some days - just not too many of them - are worth remembering.

The Importance of Being Owen

2011-04-21T01:11:00.001+08:00

The Boyfriend found this Time.com list of Bizarre Animal Friendships today and passed it to me, thinking that I would coo over it.

In any case, I was going through all the animal pairings, monkey-pig, hippo-tortoise, cat-dolphin and the requisite video footage that showed them bow-leggedly ambling after each other in companionable fashion, when I started to think that all of them didn't resemble a friendship in the conventional sense of the word.

They were all remarkably one-sided, for one thing. Take Owen the Hippo and Mzee the Tortoise, for example. The footage opens with someone saying, "The relationship was very much Owen's initiative". Which is kind of the saddest thing you can say about a hippo. And really, the clip is all about Owen following Mzee around, Owen nudging a Mzee that is actually starting to do a very good impression of an embarrassed tortoise, Owen nibbling at Mzee's feet.

And the trend continued with The Cat and The Dolphins, where really, the dolphins did all the work, leaping up from the water to kiss the cat, while the cat just kind of batted disinterestedly at them from high, dry land.

After an initial WTF, it dawned upon me. What I was watching wasn't all that far removed from human relationships, after all. In fact, the whole unhealthy dynamic going on vis-a-vis Owen and Mzee was what most human friendships are like.

Allow me to explain by borrowing from an episode of How I Met Your Mother. In one of them, Barney advances the Reacher-Settler theory. In every relationship, there's a reacher and there's a settler. One of you is too good for the other person but has decided that I need to settle down/I want children/I just need a reliable way to get laid regularly - and so, that person becomes the one you settle for. In that episode which I am sure was the cause of a gazillion couples' spats around the world the week it aired, it'd referred to romantic relationships.

And really, that's nothing that we have a problem with. But consider for a moment a far more disturbing expansion of that idea to the platonic realm. With every one of your friends, you're either settling or reaching. And that's troubling, because in this twisted world, we are sometimes more comfortable being ourselves with our chums than with our romantic partners.

That's the way the cookie crumbles, though, and in your heart of hearts, you know it's true because you've been there. Do you have a friend whom you always have to text first, a long, slobbering and overly hopeful text that she replies to several hours late with curt, one-syllable answers? Reacher. Do you have a friend whom you ask to lunch last, after everyone else you can think of can't make it? Settler.

The thing is, it's not really that awful a reality. Everyone kinda gets it - that on the grand totem pole of social interaction, your hippo is my tortoise and so on. When it starts to go wrong, though, is when you suddenly and rudely discover a long way into the relationship that you, my friend, are the reacher.

Discovering it late can be for a number of reasons. One, you could be so alarmingly socially inept and self-absorbed that you've fooled yourself into thinking that you and your friends are equals. It's like how the fat girl actually thinks that her skinny beautiful friend keeps asking her to go to singles bars with her because of her conversation.

Or two, you both could have actually started out equals, but with time and mismatched speeds of ageing, one of you has gradually coasted to a station in life where you need the other person less than she needs you.

I'm using 'she' a lot because this is usually more of a problem with girls, who from the time they meet till the time they say, "Ciao, darling", are actively sizing you up in terms of future usefulness, current and potential social standing and threat level. Guys are lucky if they can figure out that another guy is mad at them. This is why the term 'frenemy' was coined by girls. Only something as warped as that can come from the gender that thinks stilettos are a good idea.

A frenemy is only made when the settler-reacher gap is too small or too wide. When it's too small, the reacher in the relationship labours under the delusion that she can turn herself into the settler of the two if she just tries a little harder, loses a little more weight or gets a better husband. When the gap is too wide, a frenemy is made because the reacher is unable to ignore the disparity in awesomeness and resentment ensues. The settler, of course, being so long used to her superiority of being a settler, will brook no dissent. And then what happens usually involves lots of tears, passive-aggressive Facebook status updates and smeared mascara.

But I digress. What I mean to say is, if you're the sort of person who seems to be perpetually mistreated or used by the people around you, the sort who is always more excited to see the other person than the other way around, then it's time to make peace with the fact that you're the reacher. It's not the end of the world, because you can always surround yourself with more hippos instead, and you can be the standoffish Mzee the Tortoise to their adoring Owen the Hippo. Sometimes, the solution to not being an Owen is to stop acting like an Owen.

So, the really tough question to ask yourself is: Are you Owen? Are you a big, clingy hippo?

Too Much Information

2011-04-07T23:42:00.002+08:00

You know how everyone tends to accumulate little pockets of obscure knowledge and gathers them in the cheek-pockets of their brain like squirrels? And how these little bits of arcania have a mortifying tendency to tumble out, nut-like, during conversations where no one in the group is ready for all that person's trivia in their awesome glory?

Actually, I wouldn't know if that's how everyone is. I only know that it is how I am. For as long as I can remember, no one else but me has exhibited the awkward-making tendency of gushing trivia in the most inappropriate of settings.

Once, at lunch, a friend's passing comment about how much she liked spicy food had set me off. For the next 2 minutes (which is an excruciatingly long time in human trivia-gushing lightyears), I had held forth on how it was the capsaicin in the chili that she had actually craved, followed by a painfully detailed explanation of how capsaicin encourages mucous secretion and all kinds of wonderful things like that.

It's always the hardest part: weighing explaining something and risking making that person feeling condescended to, against not explaining it at all and leaving that person floundering in the incoming tide of information like hapless flotsam.

Whatever option you take, it usually ends with your friend pushing her sambal away. Which is to say that it never ends well. At best, your companion scrambles to un-glaze her eyes and reward you with a dumbfounded nod and head-tilt, the universal shorthand for "Gee, that's an interesting bit of information, but even as we speak, I am consigning what I just heard to the Gaping Maw of Oblivion in my brain, never to be spoken of again."

And so the both of you settle into an uncomfortable silence - acutely aware that on the two different spectrums of social aptitude and trivia retention, you are both placed on opposite ends, respectively.

Now, there is a gulf that you have created between yourself and your friend, and it was your big stupid brain that had cracked the initial fault-line.

Most days, I keep my Too Much Information-itis in check. I try to talk about shopping. Or shoes. Any sentence that begins in my mind with "Did you know that..." is immediately stomped on en route to my mouth.

Tonight, I realised that my TMI-itis might be contagious. We were leaving a Thai restaurant after dinner, the boyfriend and I, when we passed a couple sitting outside the restaurant with their incredibly gorgeous dog. Earlier in the evening, I had pointed out the dog from inside the restaurant and had guessed that it was a Samoyed, because Amy Chua - of Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother - had written about her pet Samoyeds and there had been photos.

So we'd passed the couple and I'd stopped to look longingly at the maybe-Samoyed. The boyfriend, being the more gregarious of the two of us, had made conversation, asking what sort of breed it was. "It's a Samoyed," said the male half of the couple, the sort of guy who worked out just so he could burst out of his shirt.

The Boyfriend (to me): Oh hey, you were right.

The Boyfriend (to Shirt-Bursting Male Half of Couple): That's the same sort of dog Amy Chua has.

SBMHC: (blank stare). Uh....what?

The Boyfriend: You know, Amy Chua. The Tiger Mother.

No one else could hear it but me. It was the cracking of a fault-line. I am a veteran receiver of the Blank Stare. Rock-climbers regularly stare death in the face. Me, I scale Mount Blank Stare every damn day.

SBMHC: Uh....

The Boyfriend (to me, desperately now): What's the name of the book?

I told SBMHC the name of the book, but really, I could see the Gaping Maw of Oblivion in his brain begin to open, and a gulf widening in the linoleum between us.

We finally extricated ourselves from the quicksand of a conversation, but not before the brawny chap began to wonder if we were Jehovah's Witnesses.

As we walked away, to console a bewildered boyfriend (who on earth doesn't read the Wall Street Journal or hasn't heard of Amy Chua?), I whispered, "Don't worry. He didn't look like the reading sort."

We'd giggled like dolphins - and the world suddenly seemed like a less lonely place.

Sea Field

2011-02-19T08:37:00.006+08:00

They say that most things are popularity contests. Like becoming Head Prefect, for instance. That wasn't the case for me and in a way, this photograph - taken in my senior year in secondary school - proves that.

I didn't look anything then like I do now, but I'm not hard to identify - I am the only one whose face is obscured. I don't know if this was a conscious effort on the photographer's part (since I was an unpopular person in a popular position), or if this had been the hasty pre-actual photo-snap taken as everyone was getting into place.

There is even the distinct possibility that I'd hidden my face on purpose, darting behind the chap in front of me at the last moment because even back in 2002, it might have occurred to me that this middle-fingered moment might one day come back to haunt me on this thing called Facebook.

In any case, it struck me as fitting that only an 1/8th of my face is in that photograph, because in many ways, I wasn't truly present. Oh, I attended an SMK Seafield for five years of my teenage life, but it wasn't the SMK Seafield that my classmates attended.

I was just recently tagged in the photograph you see in this post on Facebook, and many of the comments had gone along the lines of Best Days of My Life and I Miss Those Days.

I've had many dark days in my post-Subang Jaya life, but none so dark that I would ever purport to Miss Those Days. Also, if those were the Best Days of Your Life, it's been downhill from there, hasn't it? That's unfortunate, because death is a rather dishearteningly long ways away, if you don't smoke very much or ride a motorcycle.

In any case, I digress. The photograph doesn't take in the rest of the classroom, but if your mind's eye were to pull back and take it all in, you would see that the desks had bottoms that were splintering, the windows were missing panes and that the brooms were threadbare. This wasn't even a bad school - it was just like any other school in Malaysia - woefully underfunded, unpardonably neglected and laughably staffed.

Subang Jaya had been above-average in affluence, so I don't think we ever felt poor, but the horrible thing was that it'd always felt like our country was. Utensils frequently ran out in schools and you had to eat your nasi lemak with your hands - a landmine-filled proposition when you're a left-handed kid in a Muslim country. (I once handed a teacher a stapler with my left hand and she'd reeled back, calling me kurang ajar - a slur on someone's upbringing to the nth degree. It wasn't quaint then, and it isn't quaint now. If it'd happened to my child, I would have sued.)

In the dusty, choked-toilet days of my schooling life, a nagging sense of lack had prevailed. It is ironic that in the background of the photograph, there is the phrase "Education is the key to success", because it certainly wasn't what our leaders believed. Maybe "Broken submarines are the key to success" or "A delayed RM10 billion Bakun dam is the key to success". But certainly not education.

Our school hadn't been where dreams had gone to die - it had been where they'd gone to be choked in their infancy. In my senior year - the same year this picture was taken, I had approached our counselor for advice on how to apply to Harvard and she'd laughed. "What's wrong with our universities?" she'd said, or something to that effect. Because it is the very height of ambition to be randomly assigned to a bachelor's degree in studying turtles in fucking Sabah or some other similarly confounding outcome.

She'd sneered the sneer of someone who was in equal parts confident that I would fail and afraid that I would succeed. Two years later, while in junior college in Singapore, my home tutor would push me to apply for Oxford and later on in life, a mentor had offered me the means to go to an Ivy League school for my master's - so it is apparently just how we roll back home and not an indictment of teachers in general.

So high school had been a desperately horrible time for me. I'd brought it on myself, partially, because when you weigh 82 kg at 17, the only kind of person you should be is harmless and goofy - certainly not ambitious and obnoxiously impatient with people.

And so that sort of girth had invited a corresponding sort of cruelty - of daily taunts of "Godzilla" (My prefect uniform was green, you see. It was all very droll), of puns about "one-ton noodles" (They were my favourite dish, apparently) and a co-ordinated effort by the senior class to whisper "bitch" whenever they filed past me for spot-checks. It's one thing to call yourself a bitch in Prada, it's quite another for someone else to do it for you when you're wearing scratchy polyester.

What had been worse hadn't been the name-calling, but the crushing awareness that you're living in a shadow of a country when there were actual places to be - Central Park, Wall Street, Fleet Street - places where actual people were doing very big things. At a time when my peers couldn't see beyond their next date or Dota session, I was craning my neck, desperately trying to see into a time when I'd be somewhere and someone who mattered. I don't know why this lack of a future in Malaysia or in my suburb was so hard to see even then - our main language wasn't English, we ostracized left-handed people and when I was just entering secondary school, our deputy prime minister was put on trial for sodomizing someone. I don't know or care if he did it - it was just mortifying that CNN had to use 'sodomize' and 'Malaysia' in the same sentence. We were what Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister would have called a TPLAC - a Tin-Pot Little Asian Country.

It also didn't help that I won every book prize worth winning - because when you're fat, you'd better have a damn-fine redeeming quality, and mine was readin' and lurnin' good. And despite a persistent stutter that emerged when I was nervous, angry, excited or on the verge of tears, I got the Head Prefect post, which brought with it the weekly duty of reading the national pledge to the school during assembly.

I remember, at an interview for the Head Prefect gig with 20-odd teachers in attendance, one of them had asked me how a girl could possibly do the job (we hadn't had a single female Head Prefect in the school's illustrious 8-year history then).

I'd trotted out what I see now was a hilarious answer - that being female, my frailty would make people think twice about roughing me up (yes, it was that kind of school). All 82 kg of my "frailty". And a Geography teacher - the kindest one on the staff - had struggled to contain a smirk.

It's funny now, when my BMI is down to 22 and I run 10 km every week, but when you're 17 and have put your heart on the table for a badge with your name on it, you replay that twitching of a teacher's lips many times as you lie in bed the night after that. (If you must know, it was worth it in the end, the many instances of being jeered at while reading the school pledge after that, because I'm a sucker for a shiny badge with my name on it)

It wasn't all bad. In the photograph are friends who made life worth living. In some very dark times, they were the only people who did. There was Tiffany - she's next to me, head half-turned away from the camera - my best friend who was the only person who saw me bawl my eyes out in dark stairwells at 6.30 in the morning when it looked like life was winning. There's Anis - seated on the floor, second last - who was every bit the outsider I'd been and had loved me for it. And there'd been Kelvin - second from the left and on the floor - who had taught me how to focus on a distant point in the horizon, beyond Seafield and Subang Jaya. He is, till this day, the only man I know who can look hot in eyeliner.

Growing up in an underfunded institution in a country rife with corruption and racial politics had its perks - it'd made me incredibly angry. You will see that the funniest people you know (of) are fundamentally angry people - Bill Maher, Charlie Brooker, Chris Rock - these are people who had been subjected to dazzling displays of stupidity and injustice, and now use the razor's edge of that anger on everything that they write. So now I am a funny girl who carries that anger around with me, and I drip it on everything - a roast of Tiger Woods, a profile of Julian Assange, a critique of the BP oilspill. From this standpoint, a happy childhood can be overrated, and I'm glad I'm not burdened with one.

And so I'd cobbled together a joke of an education - of Physics lessons taught in Malay - a language unequipped for the onslaught of the 21st century - of Moral lessons in which the difference in definitions of "berani" and "keberanian" were material - the culmination of which had been a school-leaving testimonial that the teachers had not even bothered to fill out themselves.

I remember that we were told to pick 5 adjectives - any 5 - to fill in the empty field of our certificate describing our respective qualities as the future leaders and workforce of the rakyat. I vaguely remembered going to town and choosing things like "cemerlang" and "berdaya kepimpinan" - assorted bullshit like that. I thought this had been the ultimate betrayal of your nation's youth - that you didn't even care enough about them to make up five stupid adjectives on their behalf.

My boyfriend - who went to school in Singapore - told me that when he left secondary school, his teacher wrote him a glowing testimonial - with actual sentences and everything(!) - that flowed onto the next page. Hearing that made me want to cry.

But I cobbled it together anyway, this joke of administration, policy, outdated textbooks and funding - and left for a country where I wasn't the wrong colour, gender or size, place so central to the region and to the world that my old suburb just seems like a really bad dream, today.

Today, my hyper-planny approach to life is viewed as an asset, I sit in on national Budget speeches where the government has allocated a staggering amount to education, health and workforce incentives and I am in a line of work where everyone speaks English and your article was due yesterday. It is a life of Formula One suites, tete-a-tetes at Fullerton Hotel and 3-beer lunches at LeVel 33.

And so now I run every week. I run like my life depends on it. In a way, it does. My new life does.

Seoul, 2010

26

2011-02-01T22:34:00.000+08:00

For previous birthdays, I'd sized up the year in terms of how much fun I've had, basically. I look back through the birthday blog entries of my early 20s and see now the copious references to alcohol and memory loss, the latter usually following the former in predictable fashion.

But as I turn 26 and am now closer to 30 than 20, perhaps the concept of fun is like pigtails - cute when you're young, but pretty stupid and Nina Yang-like when you're older. It is also true what they say about expectation and emotion regulation. As you get older, you adjust - almost flinchingly - in advance to be disappointed. And so you rarely ever are disappointed, and the deep valleys and peaks of emotion are smoothed into something more manageable without medication.

As I turned the 26th corner of my life, I got a little closer to that sort of emotion-smoothing. And I learnt all the inevitable and predictable things that people promise you that you will learn "when you are older".

What I haven't figured out yet is whether it's normal to desperately want to claw back time - just a little. At what age does a person finally accept that this is it - I will never become anybody, never do anything remarkable, never become incredibly filthy rich? Because everyone but the ones with the most wretched of beginnings earnestly starts out thinking that life will be different for them. That they will beat the odds of divorce and stay happily married, live for longer than the average lifespan of their income group and gender and be part of the 10 per cent of the population holding 90 per cent of the wealth.

At some point, they must accept the finality of the odds that were against them from the start, that they, like most people, belong to the bulky middle of the normal distribution curve. And like the curve is named, they are normal and very depressingly so.

I wonder because I consider myself something of a statistics afficionado - which is to say that I am interested enough to ask the questions but not smart enough to have the answers. And it is beginning to dawn upon me that I belong to the bulky middle of the curve (yes, I know it's obnoxious that I've taken this long to see that).

With each birthday, I have a year less to write that book or run that start-up or to make that sex video. Eventually, I will die and all that will be left of my legacy will be a tapestry of vulgarity-ridden Facebook updates. Not even a blurry video on YouTube.

How do people doomed to normalcy cope with it? And how do they have the courage to be so decidedly ordinary for the rest of their lives? It must verge on the unbearable.

Maybe there's still time to start on that sex video.

Phone Rage

2011-01-19T22:42:00.000+08:00

This is the conversation that ensues when someone is dropped on their head as a child but manages to join the workforce anyway.

Moron: Good afternoon, (person's name here)'s office

Me: Hi, could I speak to (person's name here) please?

Moron: Is it urgent? She's just stepped away

Me: Ah, ok, I-

Moron: Thank you, bye bye

*click*

Battle Hymn, Shmattle Hymn

2011-01-13T23:14:00.005+08:00

For this to make sense, you need to read this first if you haven't already because your head was up your arse.

I have a confession to make - I'm kinda obsessed with Amy Chua right now. It's not because she's kind of nuts, which she is. It's because she's 48 years old and has two (presumably very traumatized) children - but still looks pretty friggin hot.

Y'all will have to look up a picture of her yourselves, because putting up photographs of other chicks on my blog isn't how I roll (also, she's a Law professor at Yale and might momentarily forget I'm not her kid and beat my ass for violating copyright), but take my word for it when I say she's got pretty great skin going.

If I ever meet her, I won't ask her if she shackles her kids to the bed or strip-searches them every time they come home from school - I'll ask what brand of moisturiser she uses. Also, toner - essential or marketing gimmick?

On a serious note, I do think she's nuts. I myself have no truck with Western parents who raise their kids to be lazy, burger-eating, soda-guzzling, The Kardashian-watching little shits. Nothing makes me more mad than hearing some parent simpering on about their kid's "deferred success" when their kid flunks a test.

So I say this not as some bleeding-heart liberal or even someone who's a parent (God forbid). I say this as a Chinese person who got a damn-good hiding herself when she scored 95% on a test as a child: Lady, you're more ga-ga than the Lady herself.

First, her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is a little pre-mature. One of her kids is 14 or 15 - which is a little early for self-congratulation of any sort. From a Singaporean perspective, 15's nothing - there's still the 'O' Levels and 'A' Levels to fuck up. So this crowing about the superiority of the Chinese child-rearing technique is, well, a little un-Chinese.

Most truly Chinese parents hold their breath when a kid is born and do not exhale until the kid is 40 and has a solid pension plan. Even if you're unmarried, 30 and run your own business, a good Chinese mother will still deem you incapable of buying your own underwear. So why the noisy exhaling now, Ms Chua? Neither of your kids has won a Nobel Prize, saved a small country, gone to war against one or found herself a good Chinese lawyer/doctor/engineer to marry. Seems like a great deal of underachieving to me.

And then there's the very un-Chinese demonstration of a lack of understanding of statistical odds. In the Wall Street Journal, among the many things she said both her daughters were never allowed to do was to not be number 1 in every subject except gym and drama. Surely, in a class of 30 or 40, that's a little unreasonable, odds-wise?

If there's at least one other Chinese kid in that class with a mother who harbours similarly optimistic objectives and equally tyrannical ideas on child-rearing, it would be a zero-sum game that your child cannot win every time. It's like two Christians praying to the same God that they'll beat the other in a race - that's why I like my rivals to be atheists. (Anyway, if the other kid is fresh off the boat from Shanghai, your kid doesn't stand a chance.)

To put things firmly in focus, imagine if both her daughters weren't fortuitously spaced apart by several years - what if they were twins in the same class? Short of them tying for every single test score, one of them is destined to be a failure (i.e. second in class). Does this make her in equal parts a failure and success as a mother?

I was raised in a similar pressure-cooker type environment, in a suburb where bored housewives were defined by the grades their kids got because they weren't smart enough to get them themselves. I've had classmates who were too scared to go home when the bell rang because they got a 'B' for Malay Language - a subject that has done sweet fuck-all for everyone in the working world till this day.

All that hadn't bred in me a love for the stricture of being Chinese and its dictates of what constitutes value in this world - it'd only made me hate Chinese New Year very, very much.

In any case, the litmus test for whether Ms Chua's brand of parenting works is whether her kids will come home for Chinese New Year two decades from now when they've gained autonomy and purged from their minds the many hateful hours of piano lessons.

I can tell her very authoritatively that there are children who do not.

Facepalm

2011-01-04T22:32:00.003+08:00

I have come to the irrefutable conclusion that the holiday season is a bleak time. It is a time when some people realise that they are irredeemably and undeniably alone in this world. As part of a desperate cry of loneliness, they turn to Facebook and reach out to someone - anyone - in the hope that companionship lies within the cyber-abyss.

And then they have the misfortune of sending someone like me a Facebook message. If they are even unluckier, they will stumble across their own message in a post like - why - this one.

Take this chappie, for example, who must've been in some kind of pre-Yuletide funk. In search of someone to kiss under the mistletoe, he's decided that the best way to message a complete stranger is to pretend that he's done it before, the idiot. In doing so - even under false pretenses - he's demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge of the cardinal rule of dating: only a loser has to ask if someone has received his message/SMS/email. No response is response enough, you poor bastard.

And then there is this guy, who had the misfortune of my reading his message when I was in Lombok and getting into a scuffle with locals who did not understand the concept of queueing. Rather than ignore him, I decided to make the rejection explicit.

A few days later, however, he made clear that English was not something he'd list as a strength if he were to ever audition for The Apprentice.

Sometimes, I'm willing to grant that it's not seasonal blues that push you towards chucking your dignity at strangers online. Maybe you're driven by the allure of a clean slate that the new year brings, like this schmo. What was this fellow's new year's resolution, I wonder. To alienate every sane woman on the planet? I've sent out blanket press queries that were more personalised than this.

I'd feel sorry for the lot of them, but I've come to realise that there is no male equivalent for the word 'minger'. Men have no qualms calling women who don't make the grade all sorts of names, but have such a warped idea of their own equity that they reach way beyond their league.

I don't have the time or patience to coin a male equivalent of 'minger', but let me just state - and this is for every girl who's been overlooked in a bar - boys, beyond a shadow of a doubt: you're completely and categorically out of your league.

Toodles.

Apocalypse Now

2010-12-31T17:12:00.000+08:00

"Enough that God my father knows: Nothing this faith can dim.
He gives the very best to those who leave the choice with him" - Hudson Taylor

I've never been afraid of a new year, but as 2010 draws to a much-needed end, I find that I am verging on the terrified, and not because of this ludicrous 2012 apocalypse bollocks - if only it were that easy to be released from your 20-year house mortgage with subprime rates.

My friends are telling me that your 20's are the most tumultuous time of your life, where all kinds of shit happen to you as you carve out a life for yourself, a life you don't know you want. So far, they've been right about the tumult and the shit.

What has been especially hard about this year has been the disappointment. The towering kind of disappointment that played out at an award ceremony early this year. Or the quiet, soul-shuddering type of disappointment that only betrayal makes possible. Or the comic type of disappointment, writ large in the form of squandered getaways and delayed flights. Or the million little kinds of disappointments that abrade and chafe as the months fall by the wayside, leaving you raw to the threat of next year.

When these things happen, the first instinct is always to protest - But I've worked so hard or But I've done everything right. Which is futile, really. When the universe has a fatwa out on you, it doesn't give a shit if you've crossed your T's and dotted your I's.

2010 has kind of chipped away at me, working on the grooves left by the previous years, and as I survey 2011, I find that I am worn down. Maybe this is how it starts - young professionals, declaring themselves burnt out or simply burnt by life, who then take off to Third World countries to "find themselves" on other people's coin. I'd like to say that I'm made of sterner Republican stuff, but today, as what is left of my 2010 is ragged and frayed, I don't trust myself to tempt fate. (The fact that I'd started the year more Democrat then Republican should say something).

Maybe it's too much to ask, but I'd like 2011 to be as boring as possible - so uninteresting and routine that someone else would be driven to tears, every day virtually identical and blending into one another.

Of course, now that this wish has been articulated, I've virtually ensured that I've brought forward the 2012 apocalypse by a year. Time to max out your credit cards, folks.

Glorious Inferno

2010-12-22T23:57:00.000+08:00

There had been a time earlier this year, when I written a post lamenting my age, or lack thereof. It’d been hard being 25 - an age where you have all the responsibilities of an adult without any of the credibility of one.

As we near the end of the year - inevitably older, all of us, that post has already begun to strike me as naive. I’ve had one of those balls-to-the-wall days, the kind in which you see people and their machinations approaching from a distance. The kind where you are privy to incredible rudeness and self-interest.

But instead of striking back with all the vitriol of fresh outrage like you would have before, there is sudden realisation that it makes sense to choke it back - just for now. That you are going to be here a long, long time and at that some point as the circle reaches a close, you are going to need all the allies you have.

Funny thing about allies - they are simply people who haven’t turned on you yet. Maybe, everyone’s search for lasting relationships- platonic or otherwise - would be less tortured if they understood and accepted that.

It also occurs to you that maybe there isn’t a satisfactory denouement - an ending where everyone who’s ever crossed you dies in a glorious inferno and you get exactly what you want, right before the folks at Fortune come over to put you on the cover. (I must, however, note with some satisfaction how Facebook has shown that all the people who made high school an ordeal for my formerly fat self are now themselves supremely fat.)

The real sort of ending to strive for, you suppose, is one in which you’ve managed to make the sum total of your insignificance add up to more than it should. To have enjoyed the few moments in life in which the universe hadn’t been playing hacky-sack with your happiness. Maybe everything else - including the enemies-in-a-glorious-inferno scenario - is a bonus.

So you think about your year, the year in which you learnt to take dressing-downs, to mouth platitudes and to say ‘ok, will do’ when what you really mean is ‘fuck off’.

And after all that time passes and you find yourself on the spent end of 2010, more grim but more calm, you realize something else.

Being young is a problem that takes care of itself.

My Better Half

2010-11-22T12:06:00.001+08:00

You'd think I'd know better than to read a Stephen King novel in an empty house at 11 pm, but almost 2 years of working life have dulled my survival instincts.

In any case, it's a very bad idea to read a gripping short story about a woman who discovers that the man she'd been married to for 20 happy years is a serial murderer, especially when your boyfriend is out on some mysterious jaunt off to nowhere (Ok, he was off riding and enjoying an innocent Milo but the mind will wander where it wants!)

At that point, I was more than a little thankful that Singapore isn't the sort of country filled with countless unsolved murders and women's bodies turning up in swamps - just stupid little boys who try to hack each other with their mother's choppers in a shopping mall while yelling a string of gang-related battle-cries. Don't bend over in the shower is all I'm saying, you young fool.

In any case, when he came back, I put down the Kindle and launched into a condensed version of the story (the annoying thing about reading fiction is that you start to want to share it with other hapless people). As he listened patiently, eyebrows lifting higher and higher into his brow, I finished my babbling lamely with: I think what's really disturbing about the story is the idea that you never really know the person who's supposed to be the closest to you.

If that had been a scene in a shlocky horror story, I suppose that would have been the instance he'd have led me over to a secret compartment in the closet and begun showing me a stash of deceased people's belongings.

Instead, he wrinkled his forehead thoughtfully and said - in all earnestness - If either one of us were a serial murderer, it's more likely to be you.

Of course, it'd been hard to hear him, what with the clanging my jaw made when it hit the floor.

WHAT?!

In the oblivious rush toward certain doom:

Well...yeah. You're the more wily one. And you're so fierce when you're mad...Plus, you hog the bed. (pointed and futile shoving to get me to scoot over)

Only indignant spluttering from the serial murder-inclined half of the couple now.

But it's true! It can't be me. Do you think it's me?

After more spluttering, the horrible acceptance dawns.

When the police come a-knocking, I'll just hold out my wrists and go without a fight.

Four-eyes

2010-11-21T23:33:00.001+08:00

So, after an earlier bout of my lashing out at the ninnies on Amazon, I was tagged in a note that had a list of 100 books by the BBC, of which they believe most people have read six titles, on average.

That statistic sounds terrible at face value, but it’s actually worse if you study the list closely. I went back to the BBC website for the source of the list and found, as I’d suspected, that the 100 books were not called BBC’s Best 100 Books or some similarly lofty title. They were simply a list of the nation’s best-loved novels, as nominated by readers - which explains how the Da Vinci Code managed to get on the list in the first place. (The only place it should be is on the Shit List)

But I digress. The reason the 6-out-of-100 statistic is even more horrifying is that this is already a list adulterated by contemporary piffle like Philip Pullman’s stilted storytelling and Mitch Albom’s cotton-candy words. And yet, after discounting the piffle that even a six-grader could read, people only managed to read 6 of these books on average? (And yes, I have contemplated the possibility that the majority of the books that made up the population mean of 6 could have been quality, boring shit like Jane Austen and Joseph Heller, but I don’t believe in Santa Claus anymore and will bet you anything that an overwhelming 1 out of the 6 had been Bridget Jones’s Diary)

What the heck else have they been reading, then? Wait - have they been reading?

In any case, I will republish the meme I was tagged in, complete with the running commentary that I did not want to annoy people with in the original post on Facebook.

***

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (The dude spent a whole chapter describing the shire and at least a paragraph talking about the hobbits’ hairy feet. If you thought the movie was long and over-indulgent…)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (My sweetly ambitious father bought the unabridged version for me when I was eight and I couldn’t understand a thing, so I came back when I was 11 and finally got through it, banishing my secret fear that I was an illiterate git)

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (I belong to a certain category of Christians who know the salient parts used frequently in theological debates - the same parts produced by atheists with a triumphant flourish (“If your god is so loving how come he says he’s a jealous god? Hah!”). But I will be damned (eep) if I could tell you who begat whom. I skipped all those bits. Also, I don’t think I finished the Book of Revelation - all the stuff about chaos and the horned beast just wigged me out. If I wanted to scare myself, I’d read The Shining. Also, most people should hesitate to say that they’ve read the whole Bible. That is the last book you want to fudge the truth about)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (All I know about this book is that there is a lot of tragedy and lovelornness and somebody jumps off a cliff…or was it someone called Heathcliff? Anyway. Sound like a downer)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (Am I the only one who thinks that Orwell practically bludgeons the reader around the head with his message?)

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I’ve always had a problem with the animal manifestation of your soul that supposed to be an extension of you in Pullman’s trilogy. If you go to the can, does your animal companion go, too?)

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (When I was a wee girl, my piano teacher gave me a graphic novel version of the book. I vaguely recall an old broad who wore her wedding dress every day and a wedding cake covered in cobwebs. WTF, Dickens, WTF)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (I loved this book in its unabridged glory growing up, but I tried to re-read it last year and realised that it was awful and mawkish. It’s really like going back to eating KFC after you’ve spent a few years eating Cornish game hen)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (You know how descendants of authors might be entitled to royalties from the authors’ works in some situations? I wonder if that principle works in reverse - whether Mr Heller’s descendants will give me back the hour of my life I wasted on the first part of this book)

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I studied Othello for ‘A’ Levels and had a tupping good time. Hurhur)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I have nothing bad to say about this book. Nothing. For weeks after, I swanned around, saying things like “Fiddle-dee-dee” and “Well, ah do declare!”)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (42! I love this book, even though parts of it were probably written when Adams was stoned out of his mind and giggling loudly with Stephen Fry)

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Short of planting yourself alone at a bar with a bottle of vodka, this is the quickest way to feel depressed and devoid of all hope in life)

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (My key take-away from this book was this sumo tactic in one of the scenes called the swinging door or something, where you let your blubber-filled opponent charge you and at the last moment, you step aside. Driven by the sheer momentum of lard, your opponent will rush past the spot you were in and throw himself out of the ring, thereby losing. I’d wondered how to use it in prefect-board politics at the time in high school, but was disappointed to learn that no one was interested in sumo-wrestling, figurative or otherwise)

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Yeah, I know. My bad.)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (I’m not sure about madding, but the book itself was maddening and I could not get far away enough from it)

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (I always use the three-toed sloth to invoke the comic imagery of laziness for when I write at work, and this book is the reason)

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Maybe I didn’t stay long enough for the steamy scenes, but they didn’t happen early enough in the book if they’d happened at all, and I got bored)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (I have to admit, this book made being British, neurotic and chubby look good. It also inspired the Englishman Phase for about a year)

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (This book was one of his most lacklustre, which is still brilliant by everyone else’s standards. Only Bryson can make repeated accounts of walking through the drab countryside and muck of Britain entertaining)

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (I only started on it because it was so dirty that it was banned in its day. I guess they hadn’t seen The Kardashians then)

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (I think I spent the bulk of this book worrying about whether I would go to heaven. Once there, I don’t suppose I’d be too picky about whom I meet)

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

***

20 books down, and quite a number of them that I’m not very proud of. It’s alright, though. I write good.

Bookface

2010-11-16T20:10:00.000+08:00

Thanks to a stomach bug that I’ve been carrying around with me for a week, I spent today laid-up (yes, like a motorcycle is laid-up), out of work and in bed.

When I hadn’t been curled up in a foetal position feeling sorry for myself, I’d been looking for a fiction book to buy on Amazon.com.

Up to this point, buying non-fiction books had been easy - chances are you’d have watched a TED talk video of the author or have some clear idea of what you want out of a particular field - non-fiction books, being, as they are, more useful than they are enjoyable.

But when it comes to fiction books, it’s a damn sight more difficult, what with new writers out there and the liberties taken with the story-telling and writing (please, James Joyce, you’re not too good for punctuation).

What has made choosing a book on Amazon very hard, I realise, is the people who review the book on Amazon. Given the many hours I’ve had to myself today, I’ve decided that it takes a certain kind of person to post lengthy book reviews on websites regularly. They are the same type of people who like going for all five days of a conference and almost certainly did not have any friends in school.

While they fall in the broad category of People You Want To Punch In The Head, they can also be divided into more specialised niches, like such:

The Indiscriminate Punctuation Mark-User
Where people are less literate (i.e. at the iTunes app store), the bludgeoned-to-death punctuation mark of choice is the exclamation mark (OMG!!!! I LOvE ThiS GAmE!!!!). On Amazon, the over-usage is more restrained, but the undercurrent of hysteria is still present, like so:

or so:

Why don’t people realise that the number of repeated punctuations varies inversely with how seriously other people take you? Especially if you call yourself a ‘huge Sophie Kinsella fan’ - at which point, you’re kinda starting out with a handicap, as it is.

The Prententious Douchebag
For this chappie, everything he writes is a masterpiece he is bestowing upon the world, a new and boundless chance to prove to everyone that he is, in fact, better than everyone else.

The trademarks of such a review include starting off with an anecdote that is linked to the book by the most ludicrous and tenuous of threads and using diction that can only come from reading the New Yorker too much.

Like this guy:

WTF, dude. I don’t know how he manages to go a good 40 words before even mentioning the book, but he does, the git, just so we know that he’s been to an art museum.

It is, in essence, a grand self-masturbation, shiok sendiri blitz of image-building - all for a group of people in cyberspace that he will never meet. I would feel sorry for him, but I’m just annoyed that he’s ruined the book for me. That book could win the Booker, Neustadt and Nobel literary prizes, and I still won’t read it because this asshole has.

The Guy Who Doesn’t Get That It’s All Pretend
I’m all for plausibility as much as the next guy - unless the next guy is this fellow, who submitted this review for a science fiction novel.

He’s the kind fellow who will pick on fantasy or science fiction novels, teasing out one skein of the plot fabric like a rabid ape with a rusty fork, arguing that the novel ‘doesn’t make sense’ or ‘is unrealistic’. The science fiction genre has the word ‘fiction’ in it, jackass. It doesn’t get any more of a larger disclaimer than that. I bet he’s the sort of guy who corrects his wife’s grammar and takes the writers of The Social Network to task for inaccurate programming references.

Calm the fuck down, it’s a book.

In any case, this is really just a very long way of saying that I couldn’t find a book to buy today. Which is so unfair. How am I supposed to get by on the five unfinished books in my Kindle?

How Are You?

2010-11-03T01:16:00.001+08:00

There appears to be a competition that no one’s told me about. It’s the let’s-see-who-can-make-Joyce-the-angriest-on-the-phone competition. Most of the participants are telemarketers, naturally.

But the rest of the people who aren't telemarketers actually call me about relatively serious matters - or at least it’s serious to them. It might not be entirely legitimate (“Would you like to write a story about something that is not yet invented but will save the world?”) and they might be complete strangers, but it more or less necessitates better treatment than the kind telemarketers get.

Lately, however, there appears to be a concerted effort to get my blood pressure up and out through my temples. And all they have to do is open a conversation I am already not sure I want to have by saying, “How are you?”.

I swear, there is nothing more infuriating to hear when you
(a) have never met the person who wants a bit of your life that you will never get back on the phone
(b) are in a fucking big hurry (and these days, who isn’t?)
(c) are already not particularly amenable to a request that is almost certain to make your life a little bit worse
(d) actually are not feeling very good about your life

Of all the Western pretenses that we have picked up, this is the absolute worst - even worse than the air-kissing. At least, in order to air-kiss someone, you’d have to know what the fuck they look like, first. Asking ‘How are you?’ works perfectly fine out in California, where a bummer day is when the waves aren’t high enough, and everyone has time to linger on at the In ‘n Out.

But this is Singapore, bitch, where time is money and money is already being spent on peak-hour surcharges and parking coupons and time is spent developing stress-related Irritable Bowel Syndrome. We don’t have time for a goddamn ‘how are you’ - just tell me what you want, we’ll work it out brisk Asian-style and get out of each other’s face, both parties satisfied that they came out on top.

And time aside, it’s all the more baffling when you’ve never met the person before. From what non-existent point would this complete stranger pick to compare this eternal question of how you are?

Also, how late yesterday do people think you were born, that the mere act of pretending to care how you are will subliminally cause you to be more cooperative?

So, in order to educate these people, I’ve made a list of the ways I will respond the next time someone in a button-down shirt and sensible shoes asks “How are you?”.

Q:How are you?
A:Suicidal and suppressing farts. And you?
Q:How are you?
A:No, how are you? I’m sick of going first!
Q:How are you?
A:How am I…what? Finish your sentences, goddamn.
Q:How are you?
A:Computer says no.
Q:How are you?
A:Oh no, we thought we could run it without your finding out. Anyway, it’s tomorrow’s Page 1 and there’s nothing I can do about it. Do you need the name of a good lawyer?
Q:How are you?
A:What are you wearing?
Q:How are you?
A:Like Barney Stinson - suited up, manned up and awesome. Also, what are you wearing?
Q:How are you?
A:If you’d gone to an actual university instead, you’d know that the correct question is ‘Why are you?’
Q:How are you?
A: 42
(if you didn’t get this one, you’re the idiot asking ‘How are you?’)
Q:How are you?
A:*click*

Let the re-education begin.

Overstimulated, now with a new theory!

2010-10-26T23:52:00.000+08:00

You know, I realise that people tend to say that they're bored a lot. Maybe it's just the people who post regularly on forums andFacebook who are - being, of course, so bored that they would have the time to post on forums and Facebook, and boring everyone else in the process.

And it's just hit me that I haven't been bored for years. Maybe the last time it happened was in some Entrepreneurial Development class in university - but even that was situational boredom, caused entirely by events beyond my control and with a definite end in sight. (The end usually took place in Ice Cold Beer on campus, where I had a pool stick in one hand and a frosty mug in another. Seriously, everyone remembers themselves being cooler on campus than they actually were).

But while I might occasionally encounter situational boredom, I have never experienced existential boredom.

In any case, I tried just thinking about my month and even my year - and what I got was a mental montage of just how I have spent every waking moment being the opposite of bored.

Like yesterday, when I struggled not to lose my rag at someone who had the nerve to tell me, "Our bad and stuff".

"Our bad and stuff"!

Isn't it bad enough that it is your bad? "And stuff"! "And stuff"!

While I'd mentally dealt that person a kick to the nuts, I certainly hadn't been feeling bored.

Or the time later at night when I'd found myself in one of those very fast cars with the top down, pinned into my seat with my stomach in my mouth on the highway. (I would name the car but the point of this post isn't to incite envy but to elicit laughter). Then, I'm bored had been probably a distant 100th from the main thought I'd had which was - I'm going to wet myself.

I've been calm, sure - like when I'm baking and smoke isn't coming out of the oven for once. I've been sanguine, like when I vacation on the beach inKuantan and am, for once, the person I want to be. I've also been unconscious, after several rounds of whiskey. But I've never been bored, and that perplexes me.

I was, I'd concluded today, living an overstimulated life.

Who are these people who are perpetually and - it seems - existentially bored?

What are these people doing for a living? Data entry? Maybe the issue isn't the job, but me. Maybe if I started doing data entry tomorrow, the Y2K computer disaster would strike, 10 years late.

I'd used to want to smack people who said that they're bored. Grab life by the throat and all that shtick. But when it seems like life is the one that has you by the throat, you kinda wish you had the luxury of living a life where nothing remotely interesting ever happens.

Maybe, like the tears and bumps in the fabric of outer space, the distribution of eventfulness is unequal amongst people. Like how there's this guy - Roy Sullivan - who's been struck by lightning seven times, the poor man. Maybe he's the reason the rest of us live our entire lives with unsinged eyebrows.

That must explain how it is, that in a universe where so much happens and so much goes wrong, there are people sitting in the office, twiddling their thumbs and watching the clock.

The more important question is - where is this office, and how can I get a job in it?

Signs that you're becoming an old(er) cubicle drone

2010-10-19T22:18:00.001+08:00

While you’re digging into a salad, the first words to leap from your lips are “This is going to be wonderful for my digestion!” much to the horror of everyone else at the table.
Your friend asks you out to lunch next week and you can’t tell him if you can make it because
(a) you have become so busy that you’re now the sort of person who has to ‘check my schedule’
(b) the schedule is not with you but in the office because you spend practically all your waking life there anyway
(c) you can’t remember what’s on it because that is just how old you have become
You rant about the “young idiot” who keeps getting her appointment times wrong and the “young dumbass” who starts emails with “Hi, Both” when he sends an email to two people. (wtf is up with that, seriously?)
You heave yourself from one of those trendy sofa-bed-type things at some club and tell everyone it’s past your bedtime. It’s 9 pm.
You’ve started peering over your glasses to read print material and holding up unfamiliar bits of paper with a slightly harassed-looking squint and your mouth slightly open.
You’re beginning to see why people drop the “I” from the phrase “I understand that you want to etc..”, and leap right into the annoying “Understand that you want to etc…”
instead. It’s because life is short and you’ve suddenly discovered how little of it is left and don’t want to waste it on typing superfluous pronouns.
You take some kind of perverse pleasure in telling everyone how you’ve somehow let all of your leave-days pile up at end of the financial year.
(a) there’s now a calendar year, and then there’s the financial year
(i) the financial year is more important than the calendar year
More and more of the people you deal with are younger than you and you have to make a mental note not to send them away in tears.
You are really just one more company software upgrade or iPhone email server download from throwing your swivel chair into your desktop screen.
You find yourself wishing you could print all 154 pages of a legal document because your eyes are watering.

Driven Loopy

2010-10-07T02:02:00.000+08:00

There’s this frivolous, irreverent thing that I’ve wanted to blog about all week, but haven’t felt frivolous or irreverent enough for because I have been wearing what The Boyfriend calls The Glower, which I blame entirely on work.

So, my frivolous, irreverent thing had presented itself last Friday as I skittered across the lobby of Marina Bay Sands, already late for a work-related gala dinner.

I’d been wearing the Marc Jacobs gown I’d bought in New York for the first time, this elegant black and white-pearl affair.

It was then, after a lot of uncomfortable fidgeting on the escalators which I’d desperately tried to keep my colleagues from noticing, that I’d decided that this is something I will admit to the world.

I have no clue - none - what women are supposed to do with the long ribbony loops that are sewn on the inside of your dress, right beneath your armpit.

When the dress is not being worn, the loops are fine - helpful, even. They’re looped on the sides of hangers so that the dress itself doesn’t have to be stretched around the hanger.

But when I’m in the dress, the loops just become these maddening things that won’t stay in my dress - they slip out and hang under my arms like limp spaghetti, while I surreptitiously try to slip them back in without looking like I’m rabidly scratching myself.

They’re maddening, too, in that if you lose all control and cut them off in a fit of anger, the jagged, prickly edges that are left will irritate your skin and haunt you forever.

As I stood on that escalator in a beautiful dress being ruined by loops that wouldn’t stay in it, I felt myself beginning to lose my temper at the dress industry.

Is it not bad enough, the number of pre-existing boobage wardrobe malfunctions and sudden onset of bodily fluids women have to navigate around?

Why has no one talked about this? Surely I’m not the only woman who has experienced this. Don’t the transvestites have something to say?

Is there something I don’t know? A rite of passage that I’ve missed out on, passed from mother to daughter as the Secret to Keeping Loops in Your Dress is guarded in venerable families? It’s like how I didn’t know how to braid hair until I was 10 and never learnt how to cook until I was 24.

Come on, what do you nice girls do with the loops? Tuck them in your bra? Turn them into goddamn flowers to give to guests at your coming-out ball?

Underaged

2010-09-16T04:26:00.006+08:00

I've been having trouble deciding which is worse - to be young and unsure of everything, or to be older and painfully sure of what is no longer possible.

When people call me 'young', I recoil. And they've been calling me 'young' a whole lot more now that I'm doing things that older people have tended to do before me. It's not youthful bravado that causes me to jerk back from the label, but simply surprise.

From my side of the fence, as the 'young' epithet is hurled at me, I can't help but think in mild bewilderment - But this is the oldest I've ever been.

And then I think - I can be older, if you'd like. But you'd have to come back in a few years' time.

In this day of airbrushed models and actresses who won't reveal their age, you'd think that it'd be more than easy to be young - that you'd want to trumpet your twenty-something status from the rooftop of a club playing loud techno music. I should be saying 'like' a lot, going on Jagermeister benders and flashing the 'peace' sign in every goddamn photograph I'm in.

But all I've done since being young and putting on sensible shoes is apologize for it.

I'm sorry I sound so young and am so high-pitched in voice. I'm sorry I say 'awesome' a lot. I'm sorry I sound so gauche and callow. I'm sorry I drink so much and swear so much and actually think Gossip Girl is awesome. Sorry, I said 'awesome' again.

And I want to tell people all the time - Be thankful, okay? I can tell your Franklin from your Teddy Roosevelt. I remember the age before dialup. And I know that the A-Team was a TV show before it became a movie.

But that's never enough, though. It's as though you'd need to have been alive during Roosevelt Senior's time and have Mr T's jewellery before anyone will give you a break.

I'm not even asking for a break. I'm just asking that you not be rude or state the obvious. I know, 25 is a very small number unless you're playing Blackjack. The horse has been whipped enough, god-damn.

Tonight, though, I realised that there might be something worse than being young - and that's being old.

There's a happy middle, right? Somewhere between both extreme stages of irrelevance?

When do you stop feeling like you don't know what the fuck you're doing, before reaching the stage where you can't remember what the fuck you're doing?

I suspect it's the stage where I become too embarrassed to use words like fuck on my blog.

When You're The 'Bus' in 'Airbus'

2010-09-12T17:52:00.004+08:00

In about 12 hours, I'll be clambering onboard a plane for the fifth time in 3 weeks. After this jaunt to Germany, I will have spent about 75 hours cumulatively on one airplane or another, including the recent trip to New York.

I'm not complaining, though. I'm not jaded enough to dread the check-in process or the airplane food. I actually like the prospect of getting my meal onboard, really. There's that Christmas-like feeling of opening the silver foil package in front of me with unflagging childlike wonder. I am frequently disappointed and sometimes horrified by what I find in my silver package, but that hasn't stopped me from looking forward to the next one.

Heck, I don't even mind traveling economy class even though the seats seem designed for people far too undernourished to be able to afford international travel. And when I'm traveling alone, the crying children don't faze me because I would have already drunk half of all the alcohol onboard.

But all this flying has gotten me thinking, though. After a particularly harrowing episode on the New York-Dubai leg, I now have a hypothesis. If you're fat, it doesn't matter what class you're in - you'll always be comfortable.

Not just chubby or slightly overweight, mind but seismic-activity-causing fat. I'm willing to bet you my last vacuum-packed meal that if you fall into this category, you've never understood why other people moan about cattle class, or get incredibly stiff on long flights or pray for aisle seats.

And here's why - even though you've paid for just one seat, fatty, you are actually sitting in two - yours and mine. You don't mean to, of course, but the rules of triglycerides and space mean that your arm will take up the entire arm rest that we share and every now and then, one massive fleshy paw will fall onto my knee.

Your entire midriff, of course, will transcend plastic and metal and bulge out over the arm rest before springing out joyfully into my seat, where my long-suffering torso is. And I know how it is when you sit down with thighs the size of redwood trees. There's a lot of splaying. So, as you drift ever deeper into blissful and oblivious slumber under your airline-issued blanket (which looks like a piece of tissue on you, btw), your legs spread out ever more so, until both your feet are stretched into the leg-space of the passengers on either side of you.

And at the end of a 13-hour leg, you pull off your furry eye mask and stretch bounteously into the overhead cabin space, as refreshed as a baby deer that has just frolicked in a running stream. And as you look around, you wonder why the people in your row have bags under their eyes and tight, angry lines around their mouth.

On the New York-Dubai leg, confronted with just one such seat-encroaching fatty, I had wedged the airline pillow between us in a desperate bid to reclaim some seat real estate. That, of course, was just futile and silly. The little tuft of polyester, in the face of rolls and globs of sheer fat, had simply folded into a crumpled ball of defeat.

Of course, no one ever says anything. What can we say, really? Lose weight? Pull your goddamn legs together, lardass? Fold your gargantuan arms around your breasts, dude?

It's a bit useless, isn't it? Obviously, you can't sit like a normal person because you're governed by the spatial rules of your earthly shell. And if losing weight had been that easy, you'd have done it by now. Also, in some cases, you might have a thyroid problem, although - do you have to eat every bag of peanuts they give out? Water retention and all, you know.

Besides, it's terribly un-PC to tell off fat people even though for the large (sorry) part, it's a self-inflicted condition.

In any case, you're perfectly entitled to be fat. It's no skin off my nose if you want to voluntarily shorten your lifespan, lower your libido and have constant joint pain.

You shouldn't, however, be entitled to be fat in my chair. I did not pay several thousand dollars just so I could hold my breath and sleep on my side with my knees touching my nose for 13 hours just because 20% of your body mass is in my seat.

So when some airlines caused a ruckus by trying to make some fat passengers buy tickets for two seats, I simply hadn't understood the kerfuffle. If you're going to effectively sit in two seats, you're jolly well going to have to pay for both of them.

I don't know if such a policy exists now, but for the sake of mankind, please bring it back.

Knowing my karma, after this post, I'll have a fatty on my right and a screaming child on my left on my flight to Germany.

Don't Panic

2010-09-12T11:55:00.003+08:00

Maybe it is the fundamental difference caused by that split down through the Tebrau Straits, but you lot need to calm the fuck down.

It is depressing, the single-minded focus on a particular task at hand, and the lack of perspective on everything else surrounding it. Why is it, that over here, if something doesn't work out, you're given the distinct impression that it is going to be end of the goddamn world as we know it?

Surely, that isn't the case, if only for the mundane and slightly disheartening reason that you aren't important enough.

And why do you take yourself so damn seriously all the time? I'd watched an iMax documentary on the Hubble telescope on New York. The astronauts repairing the mirrors on the telescope lens were thousands of miles above Earth, tethered to their shuttle with only a cable, handling equipment that was worth million of dollars, in an operation that could end with their spattered body fragments falling to Earth in little charred clumps. And the whole time, they were joking.

You, my friend, aren't an astronaut. In fact, the most dangerous thing you've had to do is manouevre your Toyota around a tight corner in the Liang Court parking ramp. You've only ever encountered outer space on your Xbox 360, you loser. So calm the fuck down.

I'm all for hustling. But you lot are all hustling, all the time. You gotta pick your moments for hustling, chappie. Otherwise you'll look like a goddamn hamster on crack. Insignificant, frantic and making little difference to the general scheme of things.

Please, take a moment to think about the universe. Not the complicated, Carl Sagan-like universe full of shit that's expanding and contracting at the same time. Just the most simplistic notion of the universe that you have. The one that even a 5-year-old knows is fucking huge. Think about the speck that you are in the infinitesimal and unending state of a universe that doesn't give a shit about you.

And then go off in search of a beer, crack it open, sit back and calm the fuck down.

And, please, don't make anymore frantic phonecalls. It's the goddamn long weekend.

Empire State

2010-08-31T10:48:00.011+08:00

There isn't an adequate way to condense 7 days of New York City into one entry, I suppose. But as with most things, I will be foolhardy enough to try.

The Boyfriend had suggested that I divide things into 'Do-Agains' and 'Not-Do-Agains' as we are wont to in our pidgin shorthand. Let me just say straight up though, that NYC had been amazing and any 'Not-Do-Agains' were not so much undesirable as much as they were not absolutely sensational.

Also, New York would not have been as enjoyable as it had without Shay and Michelle, who took the time to have the most sinful meals with us, mooch about in Times Square and on the Brooklyn Bridge and even brave lactose intolerance, in Shay's case. Also, for being such big cheerleaders at my ill-advised phaal challenge. You were the best hosts we could have had, and Len (even though he swiped everybody's Peter Luger chocolates) and I are incredibly grateful.

The Do-Agains

1. Peter Luger

We basically ate our way across Manhattan, from street cart food, to diner food, to ethnic nooks and Michelin-star restaurants.

The biggest do-again, however, was in Brooklyn. Every Singaporean I know who has been to New York has raved over this institution of steak in delirious and near-incomprehensible Facebook postings, and I now know why.

Peter Luger, my friend, is where it's at. The Zagat ratings on the wall make some reference to the 'brusque service' and 'shortness' of the waiters every year without fail, which must put pressure on the staff to keep up the surliness every year for the sake of consistency. When we were there, they were very nice in the New York-sort of nice - that is, they didn't snap at you, so I don't know if the Zagat can say the same thing next year.

In any case, there is very little I wouldn't put up with for steak like this:

It was amazing, this massive porterhouse, amply charred on the sides and unfailingly pink throughout on the inside. I don't know what they tell folks who order their meat 'well done' at this establishment, but I sure hope it's something very rude.

Anyway, this portion in the picture was what they called 'steak for four' - an understatement that is often uttered by most Asians with a tinge of hysteria, the subtext being: how the hell will we finish it?

But somehow, four out of five of us did, simultaneously doing Malaysia and Korea (also maybe Germany) proud.

There'd also been the bacon, the most luscious, mouth-watering strip of meatly goodness I'd ever seen. I will never eat bacon in Singapore again.

The Boyfriend and I actually went back to Peter Luger several days later, just to try their prime rib which was, in relative terms, a little anti-climactic.

But that was all made up for by this mountain of crispy onion rings.

All was forgiven, after that.

2. Katz's Deli

I don't know why anyone would go to a place where burly men brandishing sharp knives stare at you under knitted brows, but this pastrami sandwich is reason enough.

As is this brisket sandwich - cooked so well and for so long that the meat had become indistinguishable from the fat, texture-wise.

The Boyfriend took to it with such enthusiasm that he hoovered up a portion as large as his face in 20 minutes. I think I ate too fast, he'd said, with the look of a man who has not yet decided if he should throw up.

The sandwich having successfully been kept down, we remembered the whole When Harry Met Sally association (which by then had been reduced to an afterthought).

And using a still from the movie as a reference, we'd replicated the scene at the same spot.

3. Shake Shack

This place had even the locals excited when it first opened and thanks to it, I won't be eating burgers in Singapore for awhile.

This was our very first meal in New York and as we'd sat at the Times Square outlet, we could feel the ground trembling every time a train went by underground. I'd reacted in knee-jerk fashion - This would not happen in Singapore, I'd said. And that thought had seemed so silly because in front of me was this peanut butter-fudge-pretzel concoction of a milkshake. They call it a 'concrete', because, presumably that's how your stomach feels after you've finished one.

4. Annisa, Jean Georges and Del Posto

These three are kinda lumped together because they went by in a blur of degustation menus and tastings, being in the Michelin-star category. Jean Georges has 3 stars, while Annisa and Del Posto have one each.

It was slightly satisfying to be able to turn up in tourist-style sneakers and sling handbags while everyone else sweated it out in jackets and three-piece suits. Honestly, how do you seize your lamb cutlet with both paws and gnaw away for all you're worth if your friggin cravat is in the way?

There are no pictures of Annisa because it'd been our first uppity restaurant and we'd been unsure about the whole photo-taking protocol. The restaurant itself is rather nondescript and in a bohemian part of town. Look for the signage at the bottom of the window if you don't want to stand around on the street for a good 5 minutes, squinting like an idiot.

By the time we'd hit Jean Georges for lunch, all inhibitions about our camera had vanished to the point that even the china wasn't spared.

The amous bouche

The foie gras brulee, which was unbelievably good.

Mushroom risotto

Filet mignon with squash

Crusted snapper in jus - probably the best part of the meal.

The chocolate-themed dessert.

And the strawberry-themed one.

Del Posto, which had great mains, outdid itself in the dessert and petit four department.

This is its olive oil-filled chocolate bonbon. It sounds deceptively hideous in writing, but actually comes together quite well.

What was amazing, though, was just how packed all of these restaurants were, filled with power brokers and ladies with pearls - well-dressed people ordering whole bottles of Moet. There might be a recession, but not in New York.

In any case, I don't think it's possible to recommend just one restaurant out of the lot. If you are pressed for time or money, just close your eyes, pick one and keep your mouth wide open.

5. The nutella pizza at Pulino's

I'd found this place the same way I'd found most of the other places - at seriouseats.com. It's a cute bistro-style Italian place on a street corner, with a bathtub that's used as a communal sink in the bathroom. How do you not like a place like that?

What I hadn't planned on ordering, however, had been the nutella pizza because, well, it's nutella pizza.

It was lovely, though, the combination of nutella, olive oil and sea salt.

If that's altogether too adventurous for you, there's the breakfast pizza - sausage and runny yolked egg on a thin crust.

6. Beacon

This had been a last-minute addition to the itinerary, after The Boyfriend had gone through my restaurant list, read about Beacon's bone marrow special and howled How come we haven't gone there?

And so we'd trekked there with Michelle and Shay so that The Boyfriend could have what he calls 'God's Butter' - which is saying a lot, considering he's an atheist.

And then there'd be the second steak of our stay - the porterhouse for two. A little heavy on the rosemary, but still excellent.

Also, smoked oysters, which the waiter had enthused over as 'sensational'. We'd thought it an overwrought description, at first, but he'd turned out to be right.

There'd been this liver and kidney dish, which I'd appreciated as much as a blind man appreciates Matisse. But I'm sure innard lovers will approve.

For dessert, there'd been the coffee creme brulee, which had triggered off a round of "big, black and sweet" jokes from The Boyfriend.

While the food had a rustic, country quality, don't go there underdressed. I had, on a Thursday night, shown up in my pink 'Take Me To Your Ruler" t-shirt, which stuck out very embarrassingly in a sea of soft lighting and designer suits.

7. Empire State Building

After we got back from New York, we'd been having breakfast on the balcony when the sound of drilling had drifted towards us from the terrace house that was being renovated a street away.

And The Boyfriend had said I can't believe they've been at it for more than a year. I should tell them that even the Empire State Building took only 13 months to build.

Remarkably enough, that had been how long it'd taken.

There had been, I must admit, an initial temptation to skip this. I hadn't been to New York before, but the idea of paying a fortune so that I could look down on some poor shmuck's rooftop garden hadn't seemed very appealing.

The Boyfriend's enthusiasm and my basic tourist ambition had prevailed, however, and we'd found ourselves on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building on a clear Friday morning.

It's quite something else, looking at the tops of the buildings that you've just scurried under every day, the distinctive ones like the Chrysler building and the Flatiron rising out of the ground like celebrities.

The Boyfriend, however, had Freemasons on the brain, so, a typical conversation snippet on the observation deck had gone something like this:

Look at that triangular dome. Isn't that a Freemason symbol?

Hon, there're triangular domes everywhere in the city.

That's because the Freemasons own most of the city!

You're being ridiculous.

How about that building? Isn't that the Freemason logo?

That blue thing? That's a rather tacky shade of blue for the Freemasons, don't you think?

Shh, they can hear you!

In the end, the joke had been on me, however. Enlarged, the blue logo had actually turned out to be a Masonic logo for one of their halls:

But just as The Boyfriend will never let me hear the end of it, I'll never let him hear the end of this howler.

After spotting this, he'd said What's M-A-C-Y-S?

Just for the conversation alone, the jaunt up there had been worth it. Also, we think Colin Goh took our picture for us and we are now working up the courage to email him and ask if that was really him. Er, if anyone reading this is Colin Goh's friend, would you mind asking him?

8. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

So much has been said about these two things that all I have are pictures and a recommendation that you get the audio tour. The commentary on the audio device is rather informative, save for the annoying constant reminders to return the device at the end of the tour. Why, I felt like I was in Singapore all over again. Either that, or many Malaysians have made off with the devices over the years.

Now that I've insulted both nations, I shall leave you with photos. All decent-looking photographs taken by The Boyfriend, who's quite the whiz with the camera.

9. Ducks at Central Park

It's become something of a tradition for us, feeding animals on our last day anywhere - like the geese in Hyde Park and the swans in Berjaya Hills.

On our last day in New York, we found the ducks in Central Park. I couldn't resist telling The Boyfriend that Blair Waldorf would feed ducks in Central Park in Gossip Girl - and The Boyfriend, bless him, didn't judge me for knowing something like this.

10. The American Museum of Natural History

Getting there was a bitch-and-a-half, through no fault of the museum's. It'd rained heavily for a good part of the trip and by the time we'd schlepped into the museum, we were soaked, exhausted and owners of an umbrella that had been turned inside out by the wind.

It's all worth it, though, especially if you're into the awesome geekiness of space, meteorites, human evolution and dinosaurs. In fact, there were 3 whole halls, just for dinosaurs, much to The Boyfriend's delight.

11. New Yawkers

There had been some trepidation about the rudeness that the natives are famous for, but rudeness is a rather simple term for what is a much more complex behaviour.

I'd quite taken to it, actually, this brusque and businesslike attitude that was topped off with a nasal twang. These were people who knew where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there and if you didn't, God help you. I can respect that, a lot more than I can respect this passive-aggressive simpering nonsense that other cultures have.

We had gone to watch La Cage Au Folles starring Kelsey Grammer (which was superb), and when we were there, some girls sitting near us had started cam-whoring in the theatre.

The usher, this angular man with a goatee, had stomped over and told them off for taking pictures. And when they'd giggled, all stupid-girl-like and asked if he could take a picture of them, he stared and said simply, No, before marching off.

Right then, I'd decided that I liked New Yorkers.

Not-So-Do-Again

1. The Subway

To be frank, I was expecting much worse. Other travelers had told me horror stories about the subway involving hobos and bodily fluids - and sometimes the two were even related.

What I'd taken the most issue with hadn't been the smells (of which there had been plenty) or the liquids (during one skin-crawling moment, water had dripped from a moldy ceiling onto my face).

What had been most objectionable had been the sheer noise. There is no aspect of taking the subway that doesn't involve noise, it seems. The barriers emit a high-pitched shriek when you go past, the train clangs over every single railing as it approaches you, the brakes scream when they come to a halt and the doors between carriages slam shut repeatedly when passengers switch carriages. All of this makes for an unrelenting cacophony that makes you hate mankind.

By then end of 3rd day, I'd succumbed, worn down by the noise, and begun wearing the earplugs that The Boyfriend had pressed on me.

And the irony of it all is that the driver's announcements about service disruptions and station changes were barely audible.

Still, the subway did make for some pretty pictures.

2. Phaal Challenge

There are certain things that come with being 25 years old. Stupidity being one of them, coupled with boundless optimism about the robustness of your digestive system.

And it was armed with these two things that I decided I could make like Adam Richmond in Man v Food and take down the Phaal - the hottest Indian curry known to man at the Brick Lane Curry House.

This is the same curry the cook wears a mask to make and caused one poor sap to have a nosebleed, as legend has it. Naturally, that made me want to have it all the more.

And so, with Michelle and Shay and The Boyfriend cheering me on, I set about devouring the Phaal in under 30 minutes.

Not much can be said about the experience (partially because all the organs related to my mouth are still on fire), but this picture should do it.

This is a not-do-again, not because the food wasn't great (it was), but because I am 25 and stupid only once.

3. Times Square

Times Square is kind of like a rollercoaster. It's shiny and exciting-looking, and everyone there seems to be having fun. And then you join in, and everyone is screaming, and you wonder why you've paid money to feel like this.

We'd made the trek there 3 times - once for Shake Shack, once to buy tickets and another to watch La Cage Au Folles - and by the second time, I understood why native New Yorkers don't go anywhere near the place.

The first time, however, was made rather enjoyable by good company and beer.

4. The Guggenheim

We'd really, really wanted to like it. Who wants to be the person who doesn't 'get' the Guggenheim, right?

Maybe it was the photo exhibition that was on that week, or the emphasis on installation art. But after looking at a Warhol print that repeated an image 14 times and listening to the audio guide say things like 'this depicted the artist's inner conflict that morphed into the actual conflict he saw in reality, juxtaposed against...', I'd lost count of the number of times The Boyfriend and I would look up at each either and smirk.

When we got off the elevator at the end of the whole thing, this lady with crazy hair in front of us had, without preamble, asked us outright: Did you get any of that?

And when we'd said no, she said, Good, it's not just me. I thought I was just OLD.

Maybe, it's just crap, I'd thought. Far be it for me to tell anyone what good art is, seeing as to how I can barely draw a 3D house without the walls caving in on each other, but, uh, no.

Nice building, though.

***

The round-trip flight had taken almost 50 hours in total and the visa application process had been onerous and stressful. But we're already planning our next visit and The Boyfriend has brought back with him a hybrid Joe Pesci-Robert de Niro accent.

Which pretty much says everything, really.

Making Your Bed

2010-08-09T22:35:00.003+08:00

This piece was originally supposed to be about something else.

But I've realised I have little to say about anybody that is kind, my job having rubbed me raw of any patience or sympathy. And I have to bite back the specifics, lest I burn even more bridges than I already have.

I would just like to say, though, and this really applies to the lot of you - that almost without exception, you are in the difficult position you are in because you've done something stupid.

Stupid is a harsh word, I know. But if you've taken a course of action that's ultimately not beneficial to your self, I don't know if there's any other word I can call you.

Sometimes you're where you are even though you haven't done anything stupid. You simply haven't done anything at all. That, too, is stupid.

Just sayin'.

When 9 Years Become A Massive Gap

2010-07-04T23:38:00.003+08:00

This was too good not to share.

(after reading a joke posted online about Creed and Nickelback)

The Boyfriend: Who's Creed and Nickelback? Are they the, uh, Vampire Chroni- no, the, uh, Twilight characters?

As an afterthought, it's probably for the best. The man, to his credit, couldn't recognise Britney Spears in How I Met Your Mother and found the last installment of Harry Potter impossible to follow.

What is it like, to be free of the burdensome awareness of the shitstorm that is today's pop culture?

I suppose the only solution, apart from having been born in the 70's, is a lobotomy.

Doors Closing

2010-06-10T23:40:00.005+08:00

You know how some people have road rage? That's so noughties, I think. What's en vogue right now is elevator rage and I have it.

It boggles the mind how many ways there are for people to misbehave and conduct themselves in the most idiotic of fashions in the 15 seconds you share with them.

It all starts from the time they get on the elevator with you, of course. There's this particular breed of elevator users I particularly hate - they are the sort who can't seem to decide if they want to board the damn elevator. So they hesitate before stepping on ahead of you, while you die a little inside, knowing that they're wasting precious seconds before the elevator doors slam shut on you and tear you into a million little pieces.

And of course, they're always infuriatingly poised just in front of you, at an angle that would make your cutting in front of them look very rude.

This people tend to be a certain type. They're rarely ever men. It's mostly the girls. It must be some kind of evolutionary trait passed down from asking 'does my ass look big in this?', that's resulted in their contemplating their goddamn existence at a time when they should be getting into the elevator. I might be a girl myself, but when it comes to certain situations like in public bathrooms or during weddings, I loathe them. They take forever, are incredibly self-absorbed and agonise over the smallest things in complete disregard of everyone else.

And this disregard extends to entering the elevator. If you're slow to enter it, it tells me one of two possible things. You either have no clue that there are people behind you who want to use it too, or you don't care. So you're either stupid or inconsiderate. Both are slappable offences.

Of course, none of this angst over whether the doors will close on me would be necessary if people inside the elevator learned how to press the 'door open' button for people getting on. But on this island, that almost never happens. Back home, I'd taken it for granted that people would simply do it out of common courtesy, just like saying 'thank you'. But I've realised here just how rare that action is. As rare as saying 'thank you'.

And that brings me to the class of idiot who stands at the button panel, hands hanging limply at his sides, staring off into space as he ponders the state of COE or ERP or some similarly asinine thing. Would it kill you, asshole, to hold the door open for people as they get on, huh? Are you hoping to carry out some kind of self-driven population control by causing elevator-related accidents so that COE prices can be lower?

Within that class, of course, is a subset of larger idiots. The assholes who lean on the 'door close' button as other people are getting on. That's not smart, because we can see you doing it, fucktard. And for the next 3 or so storeys, you will be getting the evil eye from everyone else.

And then there're the fuckwits who've made the journey a largely uneventful one, before getting off at a certain floor but not quite exiting the car, with one foot still in it. And then they do the whole double-take and uncertain-glance move because they have the wrong floor or because each time the door opens, it must be their floor since the world revolves around them. Well, you know what, you only get one chance, my friend. If you lunge towards the door and then decide you don't like that floor, it's the 'door close' button for you. For people not smart enough to keep track of the floor they want, the only award they deserve is the Darwin one and I'll do everything I can to make sure you qualify.

Really, I have never met a group of people more vile than when in an elevator. Except for at the escalators. Now, that's a whole different blog entry.

Note: I know it's been awhile since the last blog entry, but you know how they say happy people write less and sad people write more (there's some study on it, look it up)? That's how it's been, because life has been going swimmingly. So, lack of updates aside, that must be some cause to cheer. Till the next missive.

Murtaugh's List

2010-05-09T23:26:00.005+08:00

I am beginning to develop a "Murtaugh's List". The Murtaugh's List was referred to in Season 4 of How I Met Your Mother, in which Ted has a list named after the Roger Murtaugh character in Lethal Weapon played by Danny Glover. In Lethal Weapon, whenever something blew up or gunfire occurred (which was fairly often, considering how loud noises were substitutes for dialogue), Roger Murtaugh would grumble in classic surly-black-man style, "I'm gettin too old for this shit".

"Is that a sombitch semi-mullet, Riggs? That got old way back in Lethal Weapon 3, dude. Goddamn, I'm gettin' too old for this shit"

And so, Ted had started keeping a list of all the things he was now too old to do (like pierce your ear or do your laundry at your mom's) - a Murtaugh's List.

I'd never had a Murtaugh's List up till 3 weeks ago because of a career-changing development which was, ironically, a function of getting older.

In the interest of being as vague as possible so as to not bring the wrath of HR upon myself, all I can do is allude to increased hours of glad-handing, booze-drinking and elevated levels of testosterone - other people's, of course, for I'm as hysterically female as they come.

And so, by midnight, I'd find myself gazing at my bleary-eyed reflection in the ladies' through a haze of alcohol, irritable because it was past my bedtime. And through the cloud of smoke and noise - the raucous trademark of people paying to have fun, I'd found myself thinking, "I'm too old for this shit".

Oh, it'd all been fun when I'd still been in university. Then, I'd stayed out till 3 am at Durty Nelly's or Muddy Murphy's or various other Irish pubs featuring individuals of dubious hygiene standards in their names, and downed shot after shot of liquid poison with my friends. And together, we'd done our rounds of becoming instant friends with complete strangers at the bar, laughing loudly at whispered jokes from hot men and being unpardonably cruel to the ugly ones.

It'd all been fun then, and while my feet had hurt in 3-inch heels, I'd once walked the stretch from Muddy Murphy's in town all the way to my apartment near the Selegie side, drunkenly lurching from lamp-post to hydrant, singing Michael Learns to Rock songs with fellow miscreants.

But now, the sight of the Boyfriend's car rolling up the hotel driveway after a long night of drinks makes me want to cry with relief. I spend my weekends baking. And really, when people ask me what my favourite position is these days, I say, "horizontal and asleep".

This shouldn't be happening. I'm only 25. My liver has plenty of room for additional abuse.

But hangovers take 24 hours to recover from instead of 12. The sickening taste of caramel from too much wine lingers even after I've brushed my teeth. Every morning after another 3 am night out, I inspect my reflection, desperately trying to ascertain if the network of lines beneath my eyes have become more complex. And I've gone from spiky heels to wedges - much more sensible, you know, what with the corns and all.

I'm too old for this shit.

Note: If you have never heard of Lethal Weapon or can't identify the white guy next to Danny Glover in the photograph, you're too young for this blog. And no, I won't explain what a mullet is to you. I'm too old for this shit.

Ilhamku

2010-04-25T10:50:00.004+08:00

I found this video through another blog, the other day, and I realised while I was watching it that I haven't heard a Chinese person singing in Malay for a very long time. For too long, perhaps.

Kau Ilhamku had been big when my generation had been in high school. It had been one of those emo love songs with lyrics that sounded poetic in Malay but paradoxically cheesier than a Backstreet Boys song in English. We'd sung it in class while working through math problems, in the canteen on dusty afternoons after school had let out and in the prefect room as a group, surrounding the one sensitive male with the acoustic guitar.

It had not been so much the refreshing nature of watching a Chinese kid spout something other than broken English, Hokkien swearwords and bastardised Mandarin, but rather, all that it'd stood for. Maybe the Chinese Thais feel the same way towards other Chinese exports who speak only Chinese and English, and speak them both badly.

It is so easy here not be mindful of other races, and when you are, it's usually a respectful tip-toeing around that which you do not understand. But back home, regardless of the shit-stirring politicians did, those racial lines had been blurred, our speech a lively mix of Malay, Cantonese and even some Tamil. The boys in my generation (and I'm sure, even the ones that followed them) had mastered the Indian headshake that accompanies every mid-sentence utterance. I had grown up in Malaysia utterly at ease with starting a sentence with 'Dey!'. Here, I'd have to explain the term and then, explain myself.

The lines blurred all the more with food. I remember sitting down at a coffeeshop in Johor with a group of Sg bikers on a morning breakfast tour, all of them grown men and a good decade-and-a-bit older than me. And when the makcik had arrived to take our order, the lot of them had swivelled to me as one, unsure for the first time in their lives how to get across 'kopi o siu tai' and 'teh c kosong' in what was essentially a language they had never spoken.

I had been amused then, but I had also almost wept, for they had missed out on so much. I used to rail against having to learn all my subjects in the Malay medium in school. It had been and still is, quite frankly, a language ill-equipped to deal with the lightning-quick demand of time and technology (ask anyone to tell you how to say 'download' in Malay and see if you don't piss yourself laughing).

But the difficulties and initial resentment about having to learn that language had taught me things other than Malay. It'd taught me how to make space for negotiation in a country where politicians have portrayed the struggle between the races as a zero-sum game. It'd taught me when to keep my elbows to myself out of cultural deference and when to use them, because I was after all, a descendent of a loud mainlander. There had been a grace and easy cadence to the Malay language that had tempered my hard-driving nature, which, I suspect had been the same for most Malaysian-Chinese.

I remember when the boyfriend and I had been stranded in Kelantan after our bike had broken down. And we'd met this kind soul called Mat Nasir who'd loaded our bike (with tremendous difficulty) onto his vegetable truck in the driving rain. The next morning, he'd shown up at 6 am to take us to the train station, never having once asked for money. This is a man who earns, net of costs, RM50 after each 24-hour round-trip of delivering vegetables around the peninsula, mind. And when we'd offered him payment for his trouble, he'd said "Tak payah lah, hari ni awak susah, besok saya susah" ("No need. Today, you're hard-up, but tomorrow I might be hard-up too").

The boyfriend, who'd grown up in Sg, had been struck by the beauty of the logic and how it'd been phrased. (We paid him, in the end)

Here, 'relak one corner' is used as a parody. But back home, we'd used 'lepak' in earnest and had been active proponents of the activity, being shiftless teenagers. And really, for the most part, we'd just been teenagers - not Chinese ones.

There is simply something about having to make mental room in your mind for another language that helps you to make room for other races in your consideration, as well.

In the years that I've been away, this room-making seems to have come under threat. Churches have been burnt down, mosques have been defiled and cows' heads have been paraded down the street.

I remember reading the news of the Perak PKR government's destruction on a flight from Milan last year and crying silently because I had been part of the 2008 elections when we thought that we'd finally made a difference, that a Malaysian Malaysia had been born that day.

We'd been wrong.

I watch this video and then I read the papers. And I wonder what went wrong between the kid with the guitar and the man in the parliament building.

What went wrong?

Bull-Run

2010-04-07T22:42:00.007+08:00

For days, the boyfriend and I have spent our time in front of a screen watching the ups and downs of a volatile entity, with open-mouthed greed as it spiked to dizzying heights and with unbelieving horror as it came crashing down to depths we had not thought it could plumb.

I wish I could say that we'd been watching the stock market and have some kind of glamorous high-stakes wager with option and butterfly spreads.

But we don't.

We have been watching the window showing the Internet download speed of our dongle modem.

Which is a little sad, but I can explain!

It had all started when the dongle speed had slowed down to a crawl - some ridiculous molass-like number like 20 KB/s - while we'd been in the middle of a Judge Judy streaming marathon.

Stymied and a little put out, we'd watched the window for a bit, as the line graphing the speed jiggled infuriatingly between 15 and 20 KB/s.

Up till that point the consensus between us had been that the dongle had overheated - there are only so many white trash arguments and catfights on Judge Judy a poor semiconductor could take, after all.

I wonder what would happen if we put the dongle in a bucket of ice, I'd said.

It'd short-circuit, the boyfriend had replied with the long-suffering patience of a man used to dealing a girl who thought that the laws of science did not apply to her.

I wonder what would happen if we put the dongle in a plastic bag and then put it in a bucket of ice, I'd said, with the doggedness of someone willing to go to absurd lengths to avoid looking absurd.

Now, that was something the boyfriend could get his head around, something he could actually do. So, like the hunter-gatherer he was, he was gone and back in a jiffy, clutching the dongle in a makeshift tie-wrapped bag in one paw and a tub of ice in the other.

And so we'd plunged the dongle into the bucket of ice and sat back to watch with the anticipation of people who have done far sillier things.

Lo, within five minutes, there was a noticeable uptrend in the graph line. From 20 KB/s, it climbed jaggedly to 30, 40 and then to 80 KB/s. Judge Judy had begun loading past the intro.

Like a pair of rabbits in the spotlight of a car, we'd sat there unblinking, watching the download speed line.

At some point, I gravitated toward my trader background and he turned into the fundamentalist investor.

Like when the line had briefly breach 100 KB/s and we'd both lunged out of our seats as though Tottenham Hotspur had scored a goal against Manchester United.

It's broken resistance! I'd crowed.

That's irrational exuberance, he'd said, settling back and clicking his tongue.

For a heart-stopping moment it'd fallen back to 20 KB/s. Black Monday, I'd exclaimed.

And when it'd returned to a higher speed but didn't seem to be increasing anymore, I'd bemoaned how the speed was 'trending sideways'.

What does this all mean in tangible terms? the boyfriend had said, moving over to check on Judge Judy.

I'm trying to watch the speed, I'd said, trying to duck around his head to keep the screen in sight.

If that wasn't an example of the means becoming the end, I don't know what else is. And so instead of watching Judge Judy, we'd watched the speed, that day.

In any case, the consensus is that the ice bucket does work.

Right now, the dongle's speed is a measly 50 KB/s and I don't even know how I'll upload this entry. But the boyfriend's out and the fridge just seems so far away....

Angrying Up The Blood

2010-03-24T00:51:00.002+08:00

On my day off from work courtesy of a worrisome hacking cough that won't go away, I've spent a very pleasant hour reading updates on Overheard in The (my alma mater here) Facebook group.

For the unintiated (and totally uncool), it's a collection of the most retarded and funniest things overheard by students. A little bit like Stomp, if you will, except the posters here are literate.

In any case, the sheer hilarity of students asking the Samba Masala group to STFU and the oft-quoted professor who's bursting with sexual innuendo aside, I like reading the updates because they remind me of how much the latest cohort has evolved from mine.

The people posting on the group these days (bearing in mind the effects of selection bias) appear to be razor-sharp, mercilessly cutting and in possession of a wicked sense of humour so lacking in my day.

For one thing, it'd never occurred to anyone in my cohort to set up a Facebook group like this because we'd assumed that stupid things being said were the norm, and clever things being said were so terribly rare that any Facebook page would be a white and forlorn space.

But I would have loved to have been in this later cohort, where stupidity is mercilessly called out and parodied.

In my time, there hadn't been any fun in parodying anybody stupid, because that would've been the entire freakin campus.

There had been the girl in my first class of freshman year who had been seated next to a dusky-skinned classmate. The conversation had gone something like this:

Girl: Where're you from? India?

Dusky youth: No, Bangladesh.

Girl: So, you're from India.

Dusky youth (rapidly becoming pissed-off youth): No, I'm from Bangladesh.

Girl: Yah. Bangladesh is part of India!

At which point I'd begun rolling my chair away from hers, in case dumb-assedness were contagious.

And then there'd been the time I'd gotten locked into an epic argument with a girl who had confused hard and soft copy.

Me: So, could you email me the soft copy of the slides?

Idiot: Yeah, I'll send you the hard copy.

Me: What? No - I just need the soft copy.

Idiot: Why can't you print it out yourself?

Me: I AM printing it out myself. That's why I want the soft copy!

Idiot: So I'll just email you the hard copy, right?

Me: Uh, the copy that's being emailed is the SOFT copy. The one on paper's the HARD copy.

Idiot: No, it's the other way around. Paper is soft. So, soft copy.

"Paper is soft!". Something else had been soft that day. Her brain, leaking out from her goddamned ears.

I'd wanted to make a larger point tonight, but now the memory of that conversation has angried up the blood and I need to go to bed before I put my fist through something.

Goodnight.

Hired

2010-03-11T21:47:00.007+08:00

Dear Mr Cab Driver,

There is a Chris Rock stand-up routine where he makes a spot of social commentary. Fat girls, he said, can openly hate skinny girls. But skinny girls can't openly hate fat girls. Fat girls, can call skinny girls, 'skinny bitches'. But calling someone a 'fat bitch' is just mean. And so the double standards of political correctness apply, based on just how disadvantaged someone already is.

Fat girls, he said, can say this much (hand held at shoulder-level). And skinny girls, he said, can say this much (hand held at waist-level).

And that is the reason, dear sir, I have held my tongue in your cab. It can be any colour, your cab. Blue, yellow, silver. The experience is by-and-large, invariable.

You will always ask me how I'd prefer to get there. And I'll always tell you, "Whichever way you want," with the hand-wave of someone who can afford your shittiest possible route-taking, and more importantly, with the hand-wave of someone who has no idea which highways go where and will forever be doomed to read maps upside-down.

But this is never good enough for you. You'll look at me in the rearview mirror and say, "But how you want to go??" And then what will follow is a string of bewildering acronyms, "AYE, CTE, PIE, WTF".

And after we have established, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I'm not one of those passengers who will harangue you over an extra $0.20 in cab fare because you took a route of your own choosing, you will be overtaken with a burning desire to validate the complexity of your profession.

You will glance in the mirror again and I will sigh and take an earphone out of my ear. This gesture, of course, will be lost on you. "I can take the CTE and then go to Braddell. Or maybe I go Toa Payoh Lorong 4. And then I make U-turn and do go pass the petro (sic) station. And then I ...."

By this time, I'm looking into my wallet, for a 5-dollar-bill I can offer you in return for absolute silence. But of course, it is impossible to find anything in my handbag, what with the cab lurching violently forward and back like some kind of epileptic patient the entire time. You, my good man, drive a stick-shift, of course. And for some reason known only to you, you have decided that the clutch and brake pedals are things to be stomped on, as though they were plastic chipmunk heads in a Bishi-Bashi arcade game.

It occurs to you, dear sir, that I am going somewhere most people of a certain profession go. And with a glance in that oft-used mirror of yours, you ask me if I am what you think I am. And of course, I wearily confirm it each time. The alternative is to say that I work in marketing. And, dear sir, even Nazis will never get me to say such a thing.

Of course, the moment I tell you what I do for a living, the floodgates open. You tell me that my job is futile, that we're merely mouthpieces for another entity and that everything that is wrong with Singapore is our fault (when it isn't the fault of the gahmen's, of course).

You stare in the mirror again, hoping to bait me into a lively argument so that you and the missus will have something to talk about at dinner, but I lean back and start massaging my temples.

I don't tell you how to drive, sir. Or how not to grind that poor gearbox into a dozen pieces. I don't enter a cab and immediately rant about your colleagues who never stop for me when their cab is clearly empty or hang around waiting for peak-hour surcharges to kick in before they'll take passengers. I don't ask you why you chose this profession, sir, why you didn't study harder for your PSLEs. I know better than to make a set of assumptions about you, a person I don't even know and have no wish to see again.

You have plenty of peers who make cab rides a pleasure, who understand that the best cab-rides are the uneventful ones, and who know just how to get somewhere even when I don't. So, because of that, I don't tell you about the one fellow who fell asleep at the wheel with me in the cab (oh yes, he did) and ask you to make excuses for him.

But you, dear sir, are doing exactly that to me and my profession. It's uncalled for, it's unpleasant and changes what, exactly? Do you expect an epic counter-movement that results in a publication called Gahmen's Fault Daily?

I understand that you might be lonely. I hear there's a very good shortwave radio system these days. By all means, use it to trade saucy stories with your cabbie friends. Do it loudly in Hokkien and with utter abandon. It must be near impossible to drive any worse than you already do.

But please, spare people your life story, brain droppings and various bitterness. Yours is the only job in which the person paying you also has to listen to you, captive and in an enclosed space. The only other people who enjoy that kind of position are pastors, and in that case at least, there's a chance of going to heaven. I'm not asking to go to heaven, I'm asking to go to Pasir Panjang Road. Now, will you kindly shut the fuck up and get me there?

Also, turn off that song you're playing. It's shit.

17

2010-03-07T21:06:00.003+08:00

There are very few things in life that I believe cannot be helped. So when I occasionally encounter the ones that cannot, I am more than a little thrown, to say the least.

For the longest time, I had thought that it'd been possible to rise above the events that have shaped you. Not the fleeting moments that just graze the clay that you are, but even the rough, brutish thumb-marks of life that leave the naked ridges of fingerprints on your soul.

Maybe it's not possible after all. There are so many things I cannot help, so many things wired wrong for so long, they might as well be DNA.

Last time, in high school, when my best friend had been a girl called Tiffany - who had real Carl Sagan as 'light material' and 'National Geographic' when she was feeling frivolous - our biggest fears had been that we would change.

That 15 years down the road, we would become suburban moms, lives governed by our children, run ragged from trying to do everything at once. We had feared that we would forget that we'd wanted to backpack through Europe, look at the stars through telescopes and rise to the top of penthouses and boardrooms.

We had feared being told by men and families just what sort of girls we should be. The ones without loud, rude opinions. The ones who would roll over silently and not burst into spontaneous song on the street. The nice ones. I don't know about her, but everything everyone ever told me, is slowly and frighteningly turning out to be true. It is the nice girls people want to marry. It is the ones who rush headlong into child-bearing who get approving nods at the dining table and the altar.

8 years have passed since we had been younger and crazier, but the world hasn't changed one bit. Every trite thing dripping with sadness that every grown-up has ever told us - "Do it this way because that's how everybody does it", "Who will take care of you when you're older?", "You must always know where you come from", "Life is not about your own happiness" - is turning out to be right.

And then there had been the real clincher that had confronted the runaway pig from Babe - "This is just the way things are".

What slays me is that this isn't anyone's fault. It simply is...the way things are.

There is no penthouse, no telescope. And there are no stars.

Stupid Cupid

2010-02-12T22:29:00.006+08:00

Today, something happened to me. It had been one of those things that would've been funny if it'd happened to someone else.

The near-stranger who had been asking me out since December called again today, because being told that I have a boyfriend hadn't been an explicit enough message, I suppose.

I'd been rather short and curt with him today, as I am wont to do at 2pm while trying to file 4 stories at once (I shit you not, open tomorrow's and Tuesday's papers and count em).

"This is not gonna happen," I'd told him.

"Well, I thought I'd try one last time before I delete your number from my phone," he'd said with an injured air. (He'd tried 6 times, by this point)

And so I'd hung up, too distracted by work to have a good laugh.

But now that I think about it, it's not funny. It's quite sad, really. For him, of course.

And since Valentine's Day looms and so many of the male species are single and cannot begin to fathom why, I am going to take it upon myself to dish out some pointers.

If you're happily attached/married and find yourself disagreeing because this is not how healthy relationships are formed, please, go elsewhere. I hear La Cantina has very nice Valentine's Day dinners. Go on.

If you're single and disagree, well, what do you know, hmm?

Now, this doesn't apply to when you're already in a relationship. In fact, with the exception of numbers 2 and 5, you should probably do the opposite of everything prescribed if you aren't single.

1. Don't open a conversation with, "Hey, I thought you were gonna call me". It's bad enough that you've resorted to calling her, don't remind her of the fact that she hadn't been keen to speak to you. Also, what use is a statement like that? It just sounds accusing and a little pointless. Now that you're the one calling her, your assumption had obviously been wrong. Did you somehow expect her to set you right by telling you that she was going to call but had knocked herself senseless and forgotten your number? Move past it and think about how to get her to stay on the phone.

2. This point is related to the first one. If the situation has gotten to the point where you're sitting around waiting for her to call, she's not interested. At all. In the least bit. She's as good as being a lesbian where you're concerned, do you understand? In the dating game, the first impression is the last one. She's decided you don't stand a chance, and there is nothing you can do about it, no knock-knock joke you can tell her when you next call to make her change her mind.

(a) There is no use trying with the same girl. If she doesn't like you, she should at least respect you. Don't blow your chances at the latter one too.

3. Your life is awesome. It doesn't matter if your job sucks and you feel fat. As far as she's concerned, your life is awesome. People gravitate towards success and you, my friend, need to look like you're going places. When she asks you how things are, there're 2 possible responses.

You either:
(a) Launch into an exuberant and infectious 2-liner about the best things that have happened to you this month. (they have to be decently cool things, not loser things like 'My mom made pot roast last night')
(b) Smile enigmatically and a little smugly and say something like, "It's aight" or "It's alright" if you're one of those Chinese boys who can't do ghetto-speak without sounding ridiculous.

Whatever you do, don't unload your problems onto her. You're not a girl, man.

4. Don't treat her too well. (I see you opening your mouth to disagree. Did you get a date in those last 3 seconds? Thought so.) The whole Sensitive New Age Guy thing is over. This is the era of the Borderline Bastard. Sure, open the door for her or offer to carry her stuff - gestures that don't come at great expense to you. But don't buy her expensive gifts at this stage or take her phonecalls at 3 am. Girls can tell when they're inconveniencing you, believe me. And if you let them, you will quickly get stuck in the Friend Zone.

5. Hunt in your own league. Look, be realistic. Ask your female friends to rate the way you look on a scale of 1 to 10. Remember your number and never reach for more than a number below or above yours. Two numbers if you're very drunk, but that's it. There are very few girls who don't know how good they look. God knows, they've had ample time to examine every angle of their face with all those cam-whoring pictures they put up on Facebook. If you're a 6 reaching for a 9, you're wasting valuable hunting time that you could have spent chatting up all the other sixes or sevens. Saying that looks don't matter is like saying an academic degree doesn't matter. Nobody really believes it. The consolation of being a 1 or a 2 is that there'll be ones and twos out there for you. So, either adjust your expectations downwards, or get real rich real quick.

6. Always look like you know what the hell you're doing. Give her dinner choices for a date but keep the parameters under control and known to yourself. Nothing harshes your buzz quicker than standing at the shop directory in Vivocity surrounded by baby strollers and screaming children, trying to decide what to eat.

7. People (especially your mother) will tell you that you will meet The One, eventually, and that it will all work out. That is patently not true. Even from a statistical standpoint, thousands of people die alone every day. Dating might not have to be hard work, but it's work all the same. It is a game of signalling, evaluating and anticipating. It is a game of odds, above all things, and you need to stack those odds in your favour, so that the Venn diagram hopefully encompasses meeting The One.

This list could be longer, but I think I've made you cry enough.

As we hurtle towards another Valentine's Day, remember that if you strike out, there's always next year. Failing which, migration should be explored, for the larger dating pool and all that. Remember - stack those odds.

Tendering a Resignation

2010-02-08T22:03:00.006+08:00

Last weekend and today saw a concatenation of events jaw-dropping in the dimensions of the rudeness and sheer lack of consideration involved.

These were events that, when recounted later to other people, invoked the "She said what?!" and "Oh my god, she did not" sort of reactions, complete with the open gasp and wide-eyed sign of feminine commiseration.

Throughout this string of events, I had over-reacted or simply failed to react, at times switching in polarity on my opinion of which situations I had done either of.

After today's latest atrocity that had been committed against Good Manners and Simple Non-social Spastic-ness (it'd involved an asshole that I'd had to share a cab with - other than my own, I mean) , it'd hit me that the universe was trying to teach me something.

I think (and I could be way off-base here because the universe is a funny thing full of wormholes) that I'm supposed to start learning the difference between 3 types of situations caused by assholes - who might or might not realise what they are, to be fair.

There are situations in which I should either:

a) grow the hell up in a hurry and simply put up with
b) not tolerate and leave unceremoniously
c) give myself some time to properly understand before I decide to leave or stay

The last time I'd left a situation that had become untenable, it'd taken me more than a year after I'd realised that it had become untenable before I could bring myself to leave.

My departure then had been simultaneously drawn-out and a surprise, as well as unnecessarily - while unintentionally - cruel.

I am hoping that I've learned something from that situation as I take the time to make this decision this week. That this departure will have none of those three qualities, if it has to happen. That if it does come to it, I will be able to leave with the minimum of guilt, the utmost of grace and the least of drama.

I have thought long and hard about where I've fallen short of this bargain - the lack of selflessness, good-naturedness, enthusiasm for the communal, willingness to spend time on waiting around. There are times when I wish that I'd been born with less belligerence/backbone, depending on what sort of spin you put on it.

Maybe it will never be entirely clear whether I'm composed more out of belligerence or backbone, but a good friend had once told me this - "When you don't like the person you've become, you need to remove yourself from the situation".

I know it sounds ineffectual and unconvincing, but the last thing I'd wanted was to hurt your feelings. But I strongly feel like I will do more damage where I am than where I'm not. I don't like the person I've become. At a time like this, you, of all people, do not need this.

I'm not sure what I'm apologizing for in advance (which is always the worst kind of apology), but I will apologize unreservedly, for just about anything you think I've done (which is always the hardest kind of apology).

Sorry.

A Quarter of a Century

2010-02-01T22:53:00.004+08:00

I'd been having a birthday lunch with Rachel last week, when she'd called me an aberration - in the most affectionate way possible, of course.

I suppose she'd been right. For reasons various and best left undiscussed, I shouldn't even have seen my 25th birthday.

There's this book - Outliers - by Malcolm Gladwell. About all these seeming aberrations of nature like the Beatles and Steve Job who had, through what people thought to be sheer cosmic force, become who they were. The book, however, had teased apart all the lucky breaks and utterly random series of events that had delivered them to the doorstep of success, famedom and millions of screaming fangirls (or in Jobs' case, screaming fat nerds salivating over the iPad).

I had taken that book away with me to the beach in Kuantan last weekend as I'd contemplated getting older.

And I'd thought about all the little hidden boosts people and events had given me in my lifetime, that had formed the circumstances of my present day.

In some alternate and parallel universe, there is a Joyce who didn't see her 25th birthday. Who didn't manage to leave Subang Jaya. Who isn't a business journalist doing the work she loves and is surrounded by the best and brightest in the country. Who hasn't been to 7 countries in 3 years and seen Paul McCartney in concert. Who isn't with a partner who dotes on her to a near-ridiculous degree.

In that universe, that Joyce hadn't had all the people who had been willing to give her a chance. She probably hadn't had a father who had been willing to make outsized sacrifices for her at a time when the economy had been in freefall. There hadn't been a sensible and meritocratic neighbouring country to flee to. There hadn't been the kind Catholic principal who had granted her entry into a junior college when all the places had been taken. There hadn't been the home tutor who had pushed her into applying for scholarships. There hadn't been a scholarship giver prepared to barter dollars for souls. There most certainly had not been indulgent editors prepared to give her smart-alecky mouth a chance to run slightly amok across the broadsheet.

I owe so many people so much for this day, that it is impossible to comprehend.

Thank you, Lord, for my turning 25 and for my being able to do it this way.

Quickie

2010-01-29T19:54:00.001+08:00

I have resorted to blogging this from my phone, which I oppose on principle. Mobile-blogging is the social media equivalent of a quickie up against the wall of a broom closet - it's uncomfortable, tawdry and really, can't you wait till you get home?

But I have time to kill as The Boyfriend wraps up his radio show before the birthday dinner he's taking me too.

Also, my customary birthday post and list might be rather delayed, I suspect. I'll be taking off for Kuantan for the weekend and I might just decide to stay there indefinitely. (it's a close decision to come back, each time)

In any case, I will be uncontactable throughout (read: don't call) and if you are a telemarketer who is prepared to ignore the outstation ring tone on the offchance that I seem like someone who will buy insurance from you, a complete stranger, please know now that if you do call, I will hunt you down. And I will put you in a little room. And then I will track down every single one of your loved ones. And I will put them in that room with you.

And then, I will make you...watch the televised Budget debates. No one will hear you scream.

Doodle Argh

2010-01-28T00:11:00.006+08:00

Last week, I made the mistake of downloading Doodle Jump, this iPhone app arcade-style game.

The game developers had warned that the game would be addictive, but this is ridiculous. I haven't seen The Boyfriend's face in days, obscured as it has been by my iPhone. After he had ambled over last week to sniff at the app, he'd unceremoniously elbowed me aside and wrapped his grubby paws around my iPhone with the utmost of glee.

As I type this, he is lost in the passionate throes of gaming. Every so often, cries of, "Oh no, I missed a propeller beanie!" and "Where is my jet pack??" emerge from the tousled pile of hair peeking over my phone.

This is the jet pack in question:

It makes a 'whoosh' noise when it takes off. And Christ Almighty, so does The Boyfriend.

He's also taken to swearing with a Scottish brogue whenever he loses. ("Oh, for fook's sake!")

And as I near the end of my entry, he has, having died for the 300th time in the game, decided to curl up in a forlorn foetal position next to my knee, one woeful eye watching me from behind a pillow.

Surely, there has to be treatment for this sort of thing.

Block

2010-01-18T02:15:00.000+08:00

And now, it's finally happened. The day of the Rock-Bottom. Of the Trite and Tired.

Of phrases like, "not one to rest on laurels" and "another feather in the cap" and "going the extra mile", all the phrases earnestly penned by secondary school students or dashed off by hacks at women's magazines. (Sometimes, the two groups are virtually indistinguishable. No, don't defend women's magazines. Shut up).

In any case, I am very close to using one of these phrases or smacking my head repeatedly against a keyboard because Friday is the Promised Land and we're all still in friggin' Egypt.

While I'm at it, I might as well seize the bull's horns and grab it with both hands, and throw in a disgusting mixed metaphor.

Just Shut Up, You

2010-01-12T23:55:00.005+08:00

So, a collection of random thoughts.

First, I'm blogging this from my 4-day-old laptop which I got for an absolute steal at Audio House over the weekend. My old one had a cooling fan that had started emitting death-rattle noises and had recently taken to electrocuting me if I touch it in the wrong places.

It's quite refreshing to be able to use a laptop without jumping up and clutching your elbow while yelling, "Ow, fuckfuckfuck," I must say.

Second, the iPhone 3G S that The Boyfriend got me for Christmas is working like a dream. Already, I've gotten it a new case in red racing stripe colours and set about downloading a slew of applications from the iTunes store like a fiend. And then there's the screen protector which costs a princely sum. I swear, it's like taking care of a chihuahua, 'cept I don't look silly carrying an iPhone in my handbag.

Quite frankly, I fear escalation. New iPhone, new laptop, new iTablet, new nose...

Third, I've come across this hilarious article about same-sex marriages on Vanity Fair. (Why does such a great magazine have such silly name?)

The article's headline is "Just Shut Up, You", which is essentially the sentiment of pretty much everything I write. I find that nothing infuriates people more than the insinuation that they don't know what they're talking about. And most of the time, it's true, too. Unless that person is me. I know what I'm talking about. Oh, just shut up, you.

New year's resolution: Work in "Just Shut Up, You" for a column. I will get away with it, I will.

The Old Year

2010-01-04T22:23:00.003+08:00

My annual New Year missive (yes, I am that pompous) is incredibly late this year, but that's what happens when you have to put wagyu on the table and all.

I usually do a wrap of the spent year in retrospect, and all the lessons I've learnt from it.

At various points in 2009, I had written parts of this entry in my mind, usually when I had either been livid or in tears. And of course, all the things I had rehearsed in my head had been destructive, callous, angry things that once expressed, could never be taken back.

But the last 2 long weekends have been just the buffers that I had needed to put between myself and a year that had been largely a wretched one.

And so, what should be coming out angry and bitter has been tempered somewhat by God and perspective. And also, this saying: The secret to happiness is good health and a bad memory.

Good health, I discovered during an overdue medical checkup last year, I have plenty of. And I'm getting to the age where my older peers have caught terrifying glimpses of their mortality, so I'm duly thankful.

A bad memory, I can decide to have. And so for 2009, I have at will selected only the good parts to hold uppermost in my mind. To my surprise, even less all the bad bits, there have been plenty to remember.

My career, for example, had largely been the thread that has held my year and my sanity together. In one of PJ O'Rourke's books, he had interviewed a pit trader who had told him that after his divorce, it was only the thought of his job and having a trading floor to go to every day that had kept him going. 2009 had taught me just how much to relate to that anecdote.

There had been times when everything had looked like they were going to hell in a handbasket, and every day, I would pull myself together, get some lipgloss and my best phone-voice on, and take my seat on my cubicle where nothing had been moved. And I would know that I was going to be ok because I simply had to be.

Work hadn't just been there to make the bad bits look good; it had formed a large part of what had made the year triumphant. In 2009, I discovered a voice - I wouldn't go as far as to call it a literary voice, but it had been enough to make people laugh and take the effort to email the impertinent journalist behind the Soapbox column and give her their 2 pence worth.

I had learned how to write like never before - under tremendous pressure, in the worst of spirits or health and from scratch in terms of existing knowledge of the subject. I would sit down at my PC thinking, "You've done it now, Joyce. What on earth are you going to write, you green git?". And miraculously, there wouldn't be a square of white space beneath my byline in the paper the next day.

For all the trouble, I had been rewarded in turn - I know now the immense, soaring feeling of having a one-two kicker of a killer opening and punchline. I know how to sit very still with nothing but Lady Gaga playing, waiting for an elusive idea to combust silently in a corner of my mind, before luring it out of hiding by pretending not to care.

People at work had also crossed the line from colleague to friend, and old friends had returned to be colleagues too, for which I had been exceedingly thankful. Many a tea-time had been whiled away with jokes about certain banks, sovereign wealth funds and political parties.

2009 hadn't just been good for the mind, it'd been terribly kind to the tastebuds, too. This time two years ago, The Boyfriend had to teach me how to slice mushrooms. On the last weekend of 2009, I single-handedly made lamb curry, aubergine and chickpea pilaf and banana bread - all edible, thank you very much. The Boyfriend and I now have a slow cooker we'd hijacked from his parents' place and a pressure cooker they'/d given us as a Christmas gift, in indulgent amusement at our playing house.

I had toasted the remainder of the banana bread tonight as dessert, and as I'd bustled about the kitchen putting away the olive oil and nudging the jars of spices into place, I'd realised that I had begun to create my own space where there hadn't been any at first. Here, I knew my way around, knew where the flour had gone, where the pasta was kept, whether we had run out of milk. I was properly happy.

2009 had seen me making the most use of my passport, too. I had slapped it down on immigration counters in Italy, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and of course, countless times in Malaysia (where, really, they let just about anybody in).

In 2009, I ate at a Michelin star restaurant for the first time in Switzerland and the second time in London. I gazed upwards at the Duomo in Milan and admired the saints at Westminster Abbey. I sped around Tasik Kenyir in an SUV while The Boyfriend did the same with me in a BMW at Lake Como. And then just for the hell of it, we did an 11-hour bike ride in a convulted loop all over the Malaysian east coast on a BMW F800 ST.

I picked up an haute couture item in Modena and went bargain-hunting in London. We fed swans in Lake Como and geese in Hyde Park. There was Paul Merton's improv act in the West End and then Paul McCartney's concert at the O2 Arena. And of course, we got drunk all over the place - on the beach in Kuantan, at La Pesa in Milan, Conchabella in Switzerland and Belgo in London.

I also know better than to go back to Indonesia, but that's a whole other blog entry that will not be written.

Everything here would not have been possible or half as enjoyable without The Boyfriend, though. Many a killer line for my stories had germinated from our many hours of conversation and general horsing about. In Italy, he had planned every meal stop, determined that I should eat the whole of Italy, the rest of our group be damned. In London, he had made my every wish a command, if not a very urgent imperative. At home, he had been a good-natured guinea pig during dinner time, declaring every dish a resounding success.

And when the going had gotten bumpy, literally, with all that turbulence on Sri Lankan Airlines or figuratively like the time we'd broken down in Gua Musang, we not only hadn't clawed each other to bits, we'd actually emerged liking each other a fair bit more. He had been my confidante, editor and soulmate in the best and worst of times, enduring the worst of times with the utmost of patience and grace.

2009 wasn't supposed to have been a good year. I forget why, though.

From Italy

London Town

2009-12-29T22:25:00.006+08:00

Silver rain was falling down
Upon the dirty ground of London Town

- Paul McCartney and Wings

I'm not sure if any of my Malaysian contemporaries remembers this, but when we were kids, there used to be this ad in The Star about a 2-week study-abroad opportunity for Malaysian kids in the UK, for every child who had been keen to feel like one of the Famous Five. It'd offered the full boarding-school experience with all the sights like the Big Ben and a trip to the seaside town of Bournemouth thrown in.

I don't know about y'all, but I'd lusted after that chance, and everything quintessentially British that it had implied. No other country had such fun-named foods like spotted dick and bubble-and-squeak. For years when that ad had run, I had dreamt about getting to go and meeting Prince William (oh, shaddup, he's our age, and I bet all of us girls fancied we had a fair chance at the throne then).

That never happened, of course, and over the years, after being told to go home to China in Australia, getting stuck in a 3-hour traffic jam on the 605 in Los Angeles and almost being run over by indifferent Italian drivers in Milan, my enamourment with all things foreign had considerably dimmed.

Boarding school in England, as I had found out from my more privileged peers, involved a lot of cold showers and dull schoolmasters. Bubble-and-squeak had turned out to be tarted up leftovers. And so I'd told myself that I hadn't missed much in merry olde England, where it never stopped raining, apparently.

The Boyfriend and I touched down in London earlier this month for a concert-business meeting-comedy show whirlwind - and I realised that I'd been terribly, terribly wrong. I understand now why Faliq wants to live there and never come back, and why another acquaintance has gone AWOL in London and will probably never return voluntarily.

The Welcome
We had landed at Heathrow on an ink-dark Saturday night with the promise of a feast over at the home of The Boyfriend's close friends, Alex and Charlaine, where we were to make a nuisance of ourselves for the rest of our stay in London.

And what a feast it was, too. A and C had pulled out all the stops, with steaks large enough to use as weapons, parsnips and potatoes roasted in goose fat, a wonderfully fresh rocket salad and mulled wine to top it off.

From London

After all of it, The Boyfriend had fallen into horizontal surrender, with a top trouser button undone for good measure.

From London

The Shopping
On my first day on my own, The Boyfriend having buggered off to a Very Important Meeting for Very Important Publishers, I'd stridden out of Marble Arch station, where I'd been told would be the best place to start as I work my way steadily to Oxford Street and through my wallet.

As I'd emerged from the Tube, my eye fell on the entrance to Hyde Park on my right, and I'd felt a twinge of Tourist Conscience in my soul. Surely, I had to spare some time to see Hyde Park, this venerable place that could trace its history all the way back to the 1500's.

And then I'd swiveled left and caught sight of Primark, this British celebration of 5-pound blouses and 10-pound tailored trousers.

I'd spun on my heel towards this guild of shameless retail. Eff Hyde Park, I'd thought.

In short measure, this was how much damage The Boyfriend and I did - we'd arrived in London with two half-full suitcases and left with two bulging ones and two cardboard boxes bursting at the seams, that Charlaine had very kindly helped us pack, hopeless as we were with bubble wrap.

The Food
A lot of things have been said about British food, none of them complimentary. And with that in mind, we'd taken the snootiest possible approach to eating in London - only the foreign stuff or the top-end stuff.

And that is how we found ourselves stuffing our faces with Polish food at Camden Lock market.

Like this pierogi, which had come in an assortment of cheese and mushroom, meat, and potato.

From London

And this tomato soup with barley bits, its main redeeming quality being its warmth.

From London

Also, this hunter's stew.

From London

At some point on that Sunday afternoon, The Boyfriend had spotted Belgo, this pub in Camden and had ducked in as part of a desperate attempt to get away from the cold. Which had turned out to be a pretty good decision. Belgo had what every pub desperately needs - big steaming bowls of food, icy mugs of beer, and writing on the wall that bordered on the naughty.

From London

And so we'd settled in and tucked into thick-cut fries and beer, while watching Charlaine terrorise Alex with the business end of a furry scarf (photos available upon request!).

From London

On Monday night, Fortnum and Mason helped to firmly dispel any worries about bad British meals. I'd found this deal on Squaremeal.com, that got us a 3-course dinner with wine for 28 pounds a head at the Queen's grocer.

By then, I was rapidly finding out that the English waiter is more friendly than haughty, more helpful than aloof and often - not even English. The waiter who had served us had been Italian and enthusiastically so. There hadn't been any disparaging up-down looks at our attire or a discreet urgency to seat us next to the kitchen. You didn't have to be Elton John to be treated like a queen here, which was nice.

In short order we'd put away a goat's cheese souffle with onion marmalade that had tasted exactly like foie gras.

From London

A risotto with a generous shaving of parmesan.

From London

Fishcakes bursting with salmon and haddock, accompanied with a luscious spinach.

From London

Here was where my first culinary misadventure had occurred. The Boyfriend had already earmarked the sticky date toffee date pudding for dessert and as was our custom to try as many different dishes as possible, I'd absent-mindedly picked the other viable option on the set menu - the stilton.

Which really is just very smelly cheese.

From London

The plate and its contents didn't look very much different from the picture after I'd decided that I'd had enough.

Monday had also been earmarked as tea day at Liberty. Alex had promised us the sight of little old women with quavering voices huddled over tea cosies, but what we'd gotten instead were urbane women in 3-inch heels looking for a tete-a-tete after a marathon round of shopping.

We weren't complaining of course, because the arrival of this savoury spinach tart had caused us to lose all interest in our surroundings.

From London

This is The Boyfriend, one bite shy of making like the Queen and sticking out his pinkie.

From London

During the course of the week, we'd also done Gordon Ramsay's at Claridges. This time, the waitstaff weren't Italian, but Indian, which is the oddest thing, watching them stride stiffly about in coattails all stiff upper lip and speaking in Tamil to each other. By this time, my camera's battery had failed me, so there aren't pictures. But the place had a Michelin star, which says everything, really.

The Concert
After a close call involving missing tickets, we'd finally managed to see Sir Paul on tour. I can't blog about it because a print article is in the offing, but it had been everything it was meant to be, and then some.

Of course, the camera had thrown a tantrum then as well, so these camera phone pictures will have to do.

From London

The Weather
The Boyfriend has now been convinced by this trip that I am some kind of cold weather jinx. When I was in Chicago last year, I'd heralded what was to be its coldest winter in 50 years. And apparently, my presence in London has brought about an exceptionally cold spell, under which the Eurostar buckled in a spectacular manner when I was there.

I'd never seen snow, before this trip, and I probably saw it the best way possible. We'd just emerged from tea at Liberty, and had stepped out into a flurry of fresh snow. The initial delight flagged a little after I nearly killed myself slipping on ice, I must concede.

At one point in our stay, it hit a low of -7 degrees Celsius, at which point The Boyfriend looked ready to cry. For the rest of the trip, he'd shuffled about, a shivering puddle, pausing only to issue brief commands like "Button up nao!" and "Hood me!".

Like so:

From London

I'd darkly told him after the 14th request to 'hood me' that it'd sounded like the Hokkien 'hoot me', to which I would gladly oblige.

The Sights
Somehow, we'd found enough time to squeeze in all the touristy things. Like the Tower of London, where a 530-carat diamond is kept as part of the Crown Jewels. Exiting the Jewel House, you'd be confronted by a donation box, which The Boyfriend had pointed out was a bit rich considering what you'd just seen.

From London

But the tour was on the whole a very worthy jaunt and as result, I will forever remember that Henry VIII had a 51-inch waist when he died.

We encountered the Big Ben in the most Joyce-like fashion possible. I'd clambered out of the station and said, taking an experimental turn around, "Hey, where's the Big-" as the words died in my mouth and I found myself looking upwards at this thing I've only ever seen on postcards and the intro sequence to Have I Got News For You.

From London

I hadn't held much expectation of the Westminster Abbey, its being closed on the day we were there and all, but even as we wandered the grounds, it had been properly grand.

From London

The best of the sights, however, was Hyde Park because we'd turned it into more than a sight. There, we found flocks of ducks and armed with a huge wedge of lemon cake, we spent a good part of an hour feeding them. The Boyfriend, being a Friend to All Beasts, had been practically beside himself with glee.

From London

What they don't tell you about feeding ducks, though, is that other birds want in on the action, too. Other more aggressive, airborne birds that would start to fly to eye-level in a menacing fashion until you chucked them a crumb. And knowing how it would be just like me to lose an eye in Hyde Park, I'd made a run for it.

The People
We'd made more than 20 trips on the Tube, and I'd found myself saying something I'd never thought I'd utter - People here walk so fast! Back in Singapore, it had been all I could do not to punch dawdlers in their kidneys, but here I was the dawdler, often facing an oncoming 6-footer in a trenchcoat who is barreling towards me, my inevitably being between the 6-footer and his destination.

From London

The oddest thing, though, was how the trains had been as crowded as in Singapore and the people in a greater hurry, but everyone had been unfailingly pleasant. Whenever someone bumped into me, they'd recoil in the deepest horror and apologize several times. They were like the Japanese, but pastier.

It had also been lovely to see that some parts of England hadn't been phased out. On one of the busy shopping thoroughfairs, I'd encountered this elderly gentlemen in a flowing winter overcoat and hat, leaning on a handsome black cane as he pondered his next stop. It had been as rare a sight as a faithful Hugh Grant.

Over one of our dinners, I'd made the point to The Boyfriend that the British talked the way we did. And as if to prove my point, we overheard one of the locals exclaim 'For the love of God' several tables away. When was the last time you'd heard that being said anywhere else in the world that wasn't in a movie? Even the random fellow whom The Boyfriend bought a bike part on Ebay from had used capitalisation and full words in his text. (The typical bike forumer in Singapore sounds like this: wnt 2 mt @ bedok??? first cum first serve, tankz!!!). I'd never imagined that I'd actually have to go to England to hear English spoken, but that was simply the sad truth of it all.

***
London was, in inside parlance, a 'do-again'.

Special thanks to A and C for being the best hosts imaginable and stuffing us with all manner of foods and desserts. I believe we are still digesting them. The Boyfriend will have you know that we were the ducks to the Hyde Park of your apartment.

Boomz

2009-12-28T12:31:00.004+08:00

Just when airport security had been relaxed to near-reasonable levels - I 'only' had to take off my boots and not my belt at Heathrow this time - I come home to headlines about the foiled plane bombing attempt.

I've had lip gloss confiscated, but somehow, the airport personnel managed to miss the explosives strapped onto this jackass's leg, or wherever the hell it was he'd kept it on his sorry person. How is that possible? Riddle me that.

Also, another burning question - why is it, that a fair number of disgruntled people who can't wait to blow themselves up turn out to be the offspring of wealthy, bourgeouis and otherwise respectable people, who'd worked hard for their own money by playing by the rules of capitalism?

Maybe this dumbass wouldn't have been so quick to run off to Yemen and develop angry fundamentalist views about the state of things if he'd had to work at McDonald's like most kids to put himself through college, the spoilt little shit.

My greatest hostility is not held towards the growing unease of our times, or the political and economic train-wreck that has fostered terrorism - it's about the fact that the next time I fly off on a perfectly legitimate and non-bomb-related trip, I will be subjected to long lines and overly aggressive airport personnel - all because some misguided dipshit with too much time on his hands had thought that he could change the world by blowing himself to kingdom come.

Now, we'll be lucky if they let us keep our underwear on for airport screening.

Thanks a lot, asshole.

Everything

2009-12-17T22:41:00.004+08:00

Do people ever feel like they're living too fast? Not in the sex, drugs and alcohol way (because who has the energy for that kind of shit at 24?), but in the everything-happening-at-once way?

They can be all good things, too. People clamouring for the lunch slot of which you only have one. Being on the brink of being recognised for something, or not. Being days away from going somewhere you've only ever read about in Enid Blyton books.

I wonder what happens to other people after the immediate jubilance passes. Do they ever experience that discomfiting sensation of a vague sort of uneasiness that is cloaking me, now?

Life has become so incredibly strange. I go to work, and every day could make or break me. I come home, and every word could make or break someone else's happiness.

Everything, everything, is happening. People close to me are getting married, getting pregnant, going into labour, getting promoted, growing their business empire. Every time we talk, they have something triumphant to tell me, and so do I, likewise. And it's all so exciting, I can hardly stand it, and I forget to breathe, even.

Surely, there are people out there who live out their days in uneventful insignificance. Eventually, we hear about some of them on America's Most Wanted, after they snap in a spectacular fashion with machine gun in hand.

I have nothing to complain about. Life, over the long run, is going to be kinder to me than it will be to the majority of the world's population. I feel like I've won some kind of cosmic lottery and cannot decide if I should blow it on a sports car or go into hiding.

Does that make any sense?

Woods for The Trees

2009-12-05T09:59:00.003+08:00

Yesterday was probably the day that I felt the most charitable towards my job.

'Charitable' is a little on the miserly side, actually. I bloody well loved my job, yesterday. On the worst days, I still can't imagine doing anything else. But yesterday, yesterday was the culmination of a fantastic week from a professional standpoint.

And while I had been too busy trying to suppress premature jubilation and worrying about four simultaneous stories, it had properly hit me last night while I was filing a Soapbox article about Tiger Woods: someone is paying me to sound funny in print and make jokes about 'birdies' and 'focusing on the right holes'. Paying me!

Someone had asked me this week why I was a journalist despite the laughably microscopic salary. In all frankness, I had told them that it was a middle-class luxury, really. My father had near-killed himself working hard all his life just so that I could do a job that I liked. And what's not to like about a job that includes jokes about Tiger Woods?

Thank you, daddy.

Note: I would love to post the Soapbox on Tiger Woods here, but my paper's content is subscription-based, and like Rupert Murdoch, I believe that people should pay for what they read. Content after 6pm (Singapore time) is free on the website, however, so do drop by then!

Here's Lookin At You, Kid

2009-11-29T19:15:00.006+08:00

You know how when you were growing up, you'd wished that the grown-ups would take you seriously? That they'd listen to you for once, ask you your opinion on things?

You'd pipe up chipmunk-like - Can I drive? IcandoitIcandoitIcandoit! It'd been such a rare privilege, being listened to.

The real privilege, I've now learned, is to not be listened to, to not be consulted about weighty matters. To not be leaned on. To not be the person on whom a lot rides.

I'm just a kid, I'd wanted to say today. Don't listen to me, don't ask me what I think or how the math works out.

But it really wasn't an option anymore, not knowing how the math works out. Especially not when you're legally an adult with two degrees.

And so, this privilege that I would have killed for years ago, was appropriately priced today, Black-Scholes model-style. You're not in Little League anymore baby and it's expensive, I tell you.

Will it still feel like this when I'm 30? That where it really counts, with all the math and everything, that I am basically a kid? A kid with pretty shoes and free-flow champagne on the brain?

Sigh. Touch wood.

Wakeup Call

2009-11-24T23:32:00.003+08:00

I'd brought my gym shoes to Jakarta, having made sure that the hotel had a gym. And because today's itinerary was scheduled to run along 'executive hours' - basically, start at 8 am and finish never - I'd decided I'd wake up at 6 am for my run.

I haven't woken up at 6 am since I was in junior college. And even then, it'd never been to subject myself to the sweaty and groggy affair that is running.

Even so, hope sprang eternal in the young and stupid, and last night, I'd confidently told my room butler to give me a 6 am wakeup call,to the abject horror of my peers in the industry. Who wakes up at 6 am if a dead-body story is not at stake?

But! Millions of executive-road warriors do this all the time, I'd thought. Waking up at 6 to browbeat your body before browbeating others in a board meeting seemed to be the hallmark of most confident and overachieving corporate people. And I was confident if not smug, and overachieving if not annoyingly so.

I had forgotten, however, that I wasn't a corporate person. I was a journalist. A scruffy, grubby, laissez faire one. Corporate people might be driven, but journalists are just driven to drink.

And when the wakeup call had come through this morning, I hadn't bounced out of bed armed with a Blackberry like I imagine all those middle-aged white CEOs with six-packs do when on business at the Hilton or Hyatt or whatever.

Instead, I'd buried my head in my bathrobe, whimpered softly and rolled over. It had been, simply put, the most un-corporate I'd ever felt.

I did, in the end, go to the gym and chalk up another 5-km run. I didn't run purposefully with CNBC on the screen and the Wall Street Journal in one hand. I didn't juggle my treadmill session with a conference call with Japan. I just did it grimly, my lazy journalist body hurling epithets at me every meter of the way.

Tomorrow morning, the ante will be upped. Ladies and gentlemen, the 5 am wakeup call! Somewhere out there, a corporate person needs to be beaten senseless with his friggin Blackberry.

Jakarrrrta

2009-11-23T12:53:00.002+08:00

I am due at the airport in several hours, and there are so many things I should be doing - making notes, trying to figure out story angles, researching the company that is hosting me, etc.

But all I can think about is whether there will be a Starbucks after the immigration point. Cos I really want one of 'em Toffee Nut Lattes that Jamie has been raving about, and I figure that there is no better place to drink it than at an airport.

The tradeoff, however, is that there'll be less time for duty-free shopping. Duty-free shopping, I tell you, bends the laws of space and time in your wallet. For some reason, a $400 pair of sunglasses from Fendi seem perfectly reasonable when you're about to leave for somewhere else, all jetsetter-like, surrounded by Eastern European businessmen in expensive suit from cities with more consonants in their names than you'd care for.

I, of the helium voice and Toffee Nut Latte ambition, am going on a business trip! I had a Bridget Jones moment earlier today: Note to self - am serious, hard-nosed reporter. And am going on very important trip on which self must exercise utmost of - Toffee Nut Latte! Huzzah!

Heh.

Jim Jones

2009-11-20T00:51:00.005+08:00

So I'm watching a documentary on the Jonestown cult (yes, it's what I do to unwind. I'm weird like that), and I know everyone probably says this, but I'd never have fallen for Jim Jones's spiel.

In one of the scenes, he's all up on the stage, saying things like "I represent a place where there is equality. Where there are no rich or poor."

See, I suppose the people who joined heard only the 'no poor people' bit. Me, my ears prick up at the 'no rich people' bit. I might dislike being poor, but I'd dislike the lack of opportunity to be rich even more. Also, studies have shown that you're only as happy as someone else is worse off than you. But apart from that, the larger issue is that I don't understand how anyone even remotely successful or happy could have swallowed that shtick.

Take another one of Jones's gems: "I represent a special place where all property is shared equally". Seriously? That's called subsidizing some freeloader who has less land, you dumbass. Bugger that, geez.

In any case, this might have worked in Guyana in 1978, but it sure as hell wouldn't work in Singapore in 2009 for a number of reasons:

Not enough land for a commune.
(a) And even if there were, just you try writing 'commune facility' in your application form to the Building & Construction Authority.
There is no way in hell anyone will be persuaded to sell off his property and put the proceeds in a communal fund. Skali en bloc how?
(a) There is also no way they'd open up their houses to other cult members. The maid's already taken the utility room next to the washing machine - you know, the one that looks like it's been built for midgets.
No one is going to do stupid roadtrips with everybody piled into a car for days on end because:
(a) The island can be crossed in 1.5 hours
(b) People are too scared to venture any further than KL
(c) Someone will get saddled with ERP, and of course, will have none of it
No one would have the time to listen to one man go on for hours on end on a stage before being asked to cough up money at the end of it. That's what churches are for.
Any cult here would never be able to get around to drink-poisoned-Koolaid-day because:
(a) There has to be a steering committee that needs to report to the executive committee, which will have to consult with its independent directors, but not before the overall oversight committee prepares a corporate governance report for the external audit committee.
(b) An anti-homosexual group would have staged a covert coup of the cult's leadership beforehand.
(c) EDB will decide that the group's activities are not 'value-added' enough and present little opportunity for Singapore to be a 'hub' or a 'test-bed'. All the members will then leave to work in 'integrated resorts'.

Space

2009-11-17T07:54:00.002+08:00

When did life suddenly become filled with things you don't want to do, people you don't want to see and phonecalls you don't want to take?

With PR people peering over your story to see if you've 'written your story yet'? I don't look over yours to see if you've finished putting out fluff for the day, do I?

When did your weekend cease to be yours and all about catching up on work and making other people happy? Not 'happy', even - just less unhappy with you.

I feel like I am living in some kind of figurative space that isn't completely mine. This needs to stop.

Gone Fishing

2009-10-28T23:03:00.003+08:00

My conspicuous absence from most online social activity has been because of this course I'm on, partly for the shorthand ability I sorely need, and partly because some time out will lessen the possibility of my bringing an M16 to work one of these days.

So, every day for the next few weeks, I will sit in a little room with a dozen other people behind a little schooldesk with my knees around my ears. I had a primary school flashback today when I found my nose about half a cm above my notepad, plastic pen clenched in one paw as I industriously scribbled away. I am still the insolent student, finishing before everyone else and refusing eye contact with the instructor. (I know I will pay for this smugness when I cannot remember the 'loop' symbol for 'f' in the exam).

But it's all good. There're coffees from Spinelli's and sugared cookies for tea. During lunch, our colleagues not fortunate enough to be on course are let out to play with us.

In between, I read a P.J. O'Rourke book and tell Jamie about the novel I am almost certainly going to write any day now. We make plans for Neil Gaiman talks and excellent dim sum lunches. And then, I come home and grill a kickass saba with potato salad on the side to feed a ravenous boyfriend.

Why do they call it 'earning a living' when you don't have time to have a life?

Fog of War

2009-10-21T12:35:00.000+08:00

I am in the middle of a massive freak-out session with four spreadsheets smeared with 3 different colours and numbers that will not quit, when Diondi makes this sage observation:

"See, this is why I'd much rather do war reporting. If I got anything wrong, I'd blame it on the wrong information because of the fog of war".

"But...I might get shot at," I'd said petulantly.

He's right, though. I'd like some fog of war. Hell, I'd settle for some haze, even.

Head Meets Keyboard

2009-10-19T22:22:00.003+08:00

I have been alternately wrestling with my spreadsheet and pitting my will against the Bloomberg Terminal.

There are some formulae that look decidedly dodgy, and some companies in my data set are stubbornly remaining outliers.

Also, I think they've turned the air-conditioning down, for some reason. So I can't tell if the beads of sweat forming on my back are from heat or from unadulterated fear.

So many interesting stories to do, so little time and so many ways to fuck up.

Also, The Boyfriend wants a parrot. A parrot! And this, after I'd talked him down from getting a crow, possibly the most evil bird in existence. I can't decide which is worse - dating someone who wants an animal that will gouge your eyes out as a pet, or a gamer.

I should have dated an accountant. He wouldn't have the imagination to want a parrot as a pet.

Also, he'd able to fix my spreadsheet.

Run A LaGrangian To Maximise Your Happiness

2009-10-14T23:59:00.003+08:00

This is probably a sign that I've been taking my work a bit too seriously. But I really can't help myself.

"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹²The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. ¹³The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.
-John 10:11-13 -

I just want to point out that this passage in the Bible describes a principal-agent conflict.

You know, the hired hand being the agent and the good shepherd being the principal. Also, the hired hand's running away is made possible by the existence of moral hazard.

And this part about Lazarus:

"His disciples replied, "Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better." ¹³Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. "
- John 11:12-13 -

The disciples were experiencing information asymmetry!

Heh. Sorry.

Meow

2009-10-12T16:15:00.001+08:00

Quick post.

It warms my heart to know that this applies globally.

Taken from Overheard In The Newsroom:

Editor: “I’m always amused when PR people try to show that they have worth. [cutesy voice] ‘Just wanted to make sure you got the press release! We can send pictures!’ ”

Heh.

Dummy

2009-09-29T21:47:00.003+08:00

For years, I've gritted my teeth and rolled my eyes in silence. For ages, I've forced the words 'how sweet' and 'so cute' through those gritted teeth.

But today, all you children Nazis have pushed me to brink, and I shall say the very words that will rock your little MPV world: I don't like children.

Maybe I haven't been clear. Because it is on good days that I don't like them. On bad ones, when one wailing, dirty and spoilt one comes within slapping distance, I downright cannot stand them. I would rather attend 100 condominium launches than babysit for a day, do you understand?

I am sick and tired of people assuming that other people automatically like children. No one ever assumes that other people like chinchillas, yes? Why the hell then do you make that assumption about children - who are, arguably, more of a problem than chinchillas? The last time I checked, a chinchilla didn't cost you ridiculous sums of money, derail your career and take away your sex drive.

I also take great and personal umbrage at being viewed as a lesser person for not liking children. A friend, who was a new mother at the time, had asked me whether I didn't like children and working distractedly at my laptop, I had nodded. In response, my friend had hit me with the utmost of outrage, as though I'd kicked a 3-legged puppy.

Let me make this clear. I don't like kids, I'm terrible with them and I have absolutely no inclination to change either fact. Not knowing how to carry a baby isn't a personal shortcoming. You know what a personal shortcoming is? Having to substitute words you don't know with 'boomz', ok? There are so many people out there who are colossal wastes of carbon molecules, and you're taking issue with me for not wanting to raise more Miss Ris Lows? (You might argue that my child could be the next Einstein. Look up 'atomic bomb and Einstein' and then come back to finish this discussion).

And as a slight digression, what is wrong with people who insist on putting their babies on the phone when clearly, you are on the line to speak to a sentient human being? Am I missing the incredible charm in listening to either silence or saliva-filled gurgling? And no, I do not appreciate being told that the baby was smiling at the time. I don't fucking care.

So there you go. Take your supersized strollers, your overflowing diaper bags and your sanctimonious say-yes-to-life attitudes and get the hell away from me.

In the event that I change my mind and decide to have kids, I still don't want your unsolicited advice on parenting. Clearly, if you find purpose in putting a baby on the phone, you're raising it wrong.

Peking Order

2009-09-21T22:12:00.004+08:00

China has temporarily banned knife sales after two stabbing incidents in Beijing, major retailers said here Monday, in the latest sign of official security fears ahead of National Day on October 1. - AFP

Now, most government actions don't make sense to me even on normal days. But this! This has sped right past making sense and taken a left past absurd, making a beeline for Crazyville.

How is banning knives supposed to stymie a would-be attacker with blood on the brain? First, who are these people who don't already have knives at home with which to perpetrate random acts of violence? Has the Beijing government somehow made the swift and cutting (sorry) analysis that the average profile of a knifer is someone who doesn't already own a knife and needs to buy one?

No really, please, someone explain this to me. Maybe let's just say that all these potential stabbers subsist on a diet of milk and cereal and maybe porridge - anything that doesn't require a knife in its preparation - are they inexplicably clustered on the high end of the Stupid Curve? Is fashioning something sharp from another non-knife object simply beyond them?

Third, if tomorrow someone were to bludgeon someone else senseless with a raw duck, would Beijing ban the sale of all ducks too? Beijing would have to re-do all its tourism brochures, wouldn't it?

As a slight digression, just how messed-up is your country if people are inclined to commemorate National Day with sinking a piece of metal into the flesh of a fellow countryman?

Also, think of all the other job hazards you're exacerbating! All those restaurant chefs labouring under the danger of a blunt knife worn down beyond sharpening. Sooner or later, someone is going to lose a thumb in the kitchen,then someone else is going to decide that thumb goes very well with Hoisin sauce and before you know it, we'll have blood on our thumbless hands!

It might help with that duck shortage, though.

Regroup

2009-09-16T00:49:00.003+08:00

This is paradoxically overdue but also the absolute soonest that I could craft this.

The last week was the toughest one I've dealt with all year (and hopefully, it will remain that way). It had been one of those weeks where you didn't think things could get any worse, but the next morning, you'd wake up and find that the ice you'd been standing on had cracked just a little bit more.

And in turn, I think I'd come very close to cracking, too.

Thanks to you lot, I hadn't, in actuality, cracked.

Thank you for the concern, the well-wishes, the feeling outraged on my behalf. And thank you all for the various prayers. I think that even in my darkest moments, I was aware that I was being prayed for.

This post, in particular, goes out to: Suan, Linda, Anis, Kyle, Lynn, both Kelvins, Boat, Matt, Isaac and Diondi.

Here's to the rest of the year not being a complete write-off, for any of us.

Bon Voyage

2009-08-27T00:31:00.004+08:00

On nights like these, when there is a little more time to be the person I used to be, I find that I've missed her. I've missed a lot of things, actually.

I've missed the people we once were, the friends we once were to one another. I remember with fondness the slavish devotion we had to each and every one of us in our posse, in the name of friendship.

But now, in a lifting of the veil and the shifting of the mortarboard tassel from the right to the left, all that seems to have disappeared overnight. We have our own lives, now. One day, we'll have children, and they will become our lives (the very thought strikes terror in my heart).

I miss the late-night chats and impromptu mamak sessions. I miss the emo drinkfests at Muddy Murphy's and proclamations of "I'll love you forever!". I miss getting ice cream everywhere on my face except inside my mouth, legs swinging happily above the ground, the conversation having nothing to do with salaries, relationship statuses or debilitating diseases.

Now, my words are guarded, my conversations measured. Some issues have to be dealt with in an undertone, some never mentioned. My name is no longer my own - it's become this alter ego in ink, a representative of a monolith infinitely bigger than myself. I now know hate like never before, and have wished things upon people that would have horrified my former self.

I wish you weren't going away for so long. You were one of the few people who'd kept me, me.

Blackberry

2009-08-16T22:28:00.005+08:00

Having finally succumbed to the demands of work and the pressure of an unreliable memory, I set about looking for the right Blackberry to get today. Currently, I live in perpetual fear of sleeping through a 9 am interview appointment or being stranded in Ubi Avenue without the contact number of the PR person because all of that is sitting in my work company's server.

I could, of course, print out press releases or actually take written notes of appointment details. But all that would make too much sense.

So, I'm reading tonight about the Blackberry Storm that was launched here in April, and I'm beginning to like it, what with a full touch-screen which is very much like my iPhone. It's very important that the transition to new phone is as uneventful and untaxing as possible. Already, at 24, I can feel the strain of learning to operate new gadgets on my grey matter, which I sometimes imagine to kind of be fraying at the edges.

In any case, where was I? (Sorry, this digressing also comes with age). The Blackberry Storm. I'm reading a list of its features in a review, and one of them causes me to furrow my brow.

"The ability to simultaneously talk and e-mail"

And this re-triggered the same revulsion towards the Blackberry that has long been the reason for my not having one already.

How is this feature desirable or even necessary? At which point in our frantic evolution of frenzied activity did we deem it absolutely essential to be talking to someone and emailing someone else at the same time? It is disrespectful, counterproductive and where men are concerned, absolutely impossible, given their inability to multitask.

If we're speaking to and emailing the same person, is it too much to ask that we hang up, email the document in question and give the person some time to receive and digest the email before calling back to hound said person about it?

It is a frightening thought, that we are becoming a workforce of people who need to know, right now, whether you've received an email and what you're going to do about it.

On some level, I already know that this feature is going to appeal to my Type-A personality. I am sure that one day five years into the future, I will be stuck on some island in the Carribbean without push-mail coverage, raging against the inability to talk and email at once. I'll be saying things like "Who has to hang up to email anymore?? Who?!".

Just you wait. The next time an email from me pops up on your screen when we're talking on the phone, you will know that sadly, I too have joined the harried Blackberry masses.

Why The Sky Is Blue

2009-08-15T22:11:00.005+08:00

This must be what it feels like to fight a losing battle.

From the cavernous depths of the Mercedes's backseat, a pipsqueak catches sight of a sign at the gas station.

The Almost-Four-Year-Old: "Ben & Jerry's A-vail-a-ble Here". Daddy, what's 'a-vail-a-ble'?

Distracted Father: That means you can get it here. It's sold here.

The Almost-Four-Year-Old: Oh.

(silence)

The Almost-Four-Year-Old: Daddy, what's 'sold'?

At which point, I decided that the education of any children I might have in the future will be left solely in the hands of a full-time British governess.

Because a conversation with my kid is quite likely to go like this:

Mummy, why is the sky blue?

Because green is a shitty colour for the sky, and pink clashes with my top. Any more questions?

And that's even assuming said kid manages to correctly identify the sky as 'blue', given The Boyfriend's desire to teach his kids the names of colours wrong just for kicks.

Between that and my intolerance for questions, it'll be a miracle if they don't turn out like Rob Zombie.

Just Dance

2009-08-13T22:45:00.001+08:00

"Just dance, gonna be okay
Da da doo doot-n
Just dance, spin that record babe
Da da doo doot-n
Just dance, gonna be okay
D-D-D-Dance, dance, dance, just
J-J-Just dance"
- Just Dance, Lady Gaga -

These days, when people several years my junior talk about 'finding themselves' or 'exploring the world', I laugh very rudely. Sometimes when they're within earshot, even.

What they don't tell you about your inception into the grown-up, tax-paying world is that you will have neither the time or the will to 'find yourself' - you will be too busy looking for your next paycheque, your next byline, your next big break.

Forget your five-year plan, you will be thankful enough to get to the weekend. And that will be how you will measure your life as well - in weekends. You will be obsessed with it - how many days to the next one, how quickly it's ending and when you can next have the much-treasured Long Weekend.

Suddenly, your dreams to backpack across Europe and change the world when you're not holed up in a dingy youth hostel are frivolous luxuries. You're paying your bills and getting your laundry done at respectable intervals, maintaining a relationship with someone who will help pay the bills and get the laundry done - you're living, baby.

"Go, use your muscle car-ve it out work it, hustle!
Don't slow! Drive it, clean it, lysol, bleed it
Spend the last dough, in your pocko!"

And then life takes on this frenetic, mindless dance. You're doing, typing, calling, being your cutting manic self, laughing, always laughing - hanging on until Friday night.

And when Monday comes, you do it all over again.

"Half psychotic sick hypnotic got my blueprint it's symphonic
Half psychotic sick hypnotic got my blueprint it's electronic
Half psychotic sick hypnotic got my blueprint it's symphonic
Half psychotic sick hypnotic got my blueprint it's electronic"

Politely Going Insane

2009-08-06T12:47:00.000+08:00

Sometimes, it sounds like the beat of a drum, increasing in tempo and urgency. Ican'tdothisIcan'tdothisIcan'tdothis.

Which is gradually replaced by a self-imposed mantra. OtherpeoplehaveitworseOtherpeoplehaveitworse.

And before you know it, you're blue in the face, fingers gripping the countertop to keep your knees from buckling, the sound of tom-toms fading away from your eardrums.

This cannot possibly be good for health.

On The MACC

2009-08-04T16:17:00.003+08:00

Because the incentive to write for free dissipates when you start writing for dough, this blog has been fairly inactive of late. Also, nothing quite beats the high of your name in print, seeing as to how we are in one of the few countries where the printing press remains mightier than the Internet servers.

In any case, this is a piece better represented in a personal capacity. RIP, Mr Teoh.

***
AS you read this, there is an ongoing kerfuffle on the other side of the Causeway over a political aide's death under unexplained circumstances.

Teoh Beng Hock, a political aide to an opposition party state executive councillor, was found dead, sprawled on the fifth floor of the building that houses the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), on the 14th floor, 2 weeks ago.

Mr Teoh had spent hours at the commission before his death as a witness in a corruption probe.
It is hard to imagine the sequence of events that would have taken a co-operative witness from the 14th to the 5th floor, by means more expedient and traumatic than the stairs or elevator.

This piece of news might have been buried sooner under the sheer chaos of Malaysian politics that often leaves one incredulous.

But Mr Teoh had been due to get married the day after his body was found.

The past week has proven that nothing makes an already restless public angrier than the suspicion that a man who was about to be married was nudged off a ledge. Well, nothing else except the knowledge that he had left behind an unborn child, too.

This sort of thing presses the same bleeding-heart button that raises anger to pitchfork-holding, flaming torch-toting levels.

Combine a story worthy of a Mediacorp drama series with a history of custodial deaths in police lockups, and what the authorities got was an outraged public gathered outside the MACC building, demanding answers last week.

Even though any conclusion at this stage is premature, one cannot help but wonder about the lack of judgment being used in this sort of hypothetical foul play.

In such a hypothetically ill-advised move, I am inclined to believe that the hypothetical forces driving such a tragic outcome were more bumbling than desperate, in classic Malaysian fashion. (And I say this as a Malaysian, the same way only you can say that your own mother is fat).

Maybe it hadn't occurred to them to check if he'd been expected to turn up at a crucial event the next day. Contrary to what most Bridezillas will have you believe, the groom is still an essential part of a wedding.

Or maybe, events of highly farcical proportions had transpired. Somewhere out there, perhaps, a fedora-ed figure is sitting in the shadows and berating a lackey. "When I told you to have him sleeping with the fishes, I'd meant for you to have a chat with him at a seafood restaurant!".

Ultimately, the facts of this case are so mind-boggling that one does hope that no foul play had been involved, that a series of rather unfortunate but innocent events had taken place instead.

But even that seems too much to ask. After finding bits of Mongolian model in the jungle and a cult living in a gigantic teapot on the east coast, the weary Malaysian public will believe anything but trust no one.

The authorities, at the very least, have a public relations nightmare on their hands even if they have done absolutely nothing wrong.

For one simple fact has dramatically altered this case. A man’s life ended the night before he was due to start a new one with someone else who was carrying his child.

To hurt someone in a combination of circumstances that is such a lightning rod for public scrutiny is not just both stupid and unconscionable. It is also unconscionably stupid.

Wheel

2009-07-23T13:45:00.000+08:00

So the last two weeks have been a period of near-insanity. I have learnt, among other things, that leave-clearing season is not your friend when you're not the one clearing leave.

Also, it is possible to file 3 stories, write a lengthy commentary on a subject heretofore foreign to you, power through a Kettlebell weight workout and then make your own cheeseburgers from scratch. Like so:

Of course, you end up sleeping at 2 am, but who's keeping time, eh?

All I can talk about with The Boyfriend and friends these days are the stories I'm working on, or about how someone had said 'tough titties' during a conversation and how it'd broken my heart that such a phrase would never see print. (Not only because it was a rude term, but because it'd be wasted on half the readers anyway.)

Over drinks at Ice Cold Beer, the conversation has evolved from GPAs to GDPs, from grade curves to bond yield curves. I'd wryly noted to Kelvin last night, that the hamster wheel might be different now that we've moved on to work, but we were still running after kibble.

The astonishing part, though, is that I love every stress-filled hour of my day. The near-incoherent phonecalls, frantic note-taking, and that soaring moment right before you figure out a killer lead to a story.

As repulsive as the yuppie dream might be, it's somewhat comforting to know that you're not alone, fighting the fight of the salaried person. And on any given day, it beats having to work with Bermuda-wearing idiots toting Crumpler backpacks.

King Midas in Reverse

2009-07-14T00:49:00.004+08:00

There are times when you wish you'd studied something different in school, irrelevant as I believe much of it to be.

What do they teach kids in J-school, anyway? I know that there are media law classes and ethics seminars. But do they prepare you for nights like these? For having to confront your conscience and finding a void instead of clarity? In very rare moments of humility, I think that it'd be comforting, maybe essential, to have someone tell me what to do - even insist on it.

For however idealistic and impractical a silver-haired fellow wearing elbow patches and tweed might be, he would have set some sort of yardstick so that even if you chose to sink low, you'd know just how far down that yardstick your grimy self has slid. Sometimes, it's better to know exactly what you've done wrong, than to be plagued by some vague sense of impropriety in an ill-defined grey area.

Some stories, on some very bad nights are like the aircraft you are flying. The navigational devices are your various newsmakers with opposing agendas, trying to convince you that only their own dial points true North. The information you are fed is the fuel and you can only pray it's not some ethanol crap with all sorts of impurities that choke up your engine.

And on extremely bad nights, you're flying blind with one engine sputtering. Those nights, you don't pray that your aircraft doesn't crash and burn.

You just pray that you can get out in time.

BBM and Bsc

2009-07-10T19:27:00.006+08:00

There is a lot that has been said about university experiences. I would like add to that sizable compendium, but my memory of most things in my undergraduate years has been erased by the copious amounts of beer I'd consumed.

As I get my degrees and fiddle with my silly-looking mortarboard tomorrow, these are the things I actually do remember, which I will immortalize as the Grand List of Inevitable Happenings at my particular alma mater:

Your group project mates will invariably be dumber, lazier and more annoying than you.
(a) If you are particularly unlucky, one of them will even have halitosis.
There will always be the one idiot with beauty queen aspirations or fictitious family members dropping dead like flies who will constantly have do be excused from group meetings and heavy lifting of any kind.
You will want to kill your obnoxiously peppy group orientation leader 5 hours into orientation camp.
It is quite possible to come back from the 15-minute break during class and sit there pink in the face from beer consumption along with your similarly inebriated friends and still understand the lesson better than your sober coursemates.
There will be a course in which you, having paid $6,000 per semester, might actually have to give a presentation on how sunscreen works.
(a) Or worse, you might have to sit through the presentation.
If you are pursuing a double degree, you will be caught in the limbo of having a Business degree so easy that even a monkey could attain, and an Economics degree that leaves you with a headache after calculating manually a multiple linear regression (don't ask, folks).
You will try to log in to MSN during class about 20 times on average before you get a decent connection.
(a) But class would have ended by then.
You will harbour homicidal fantasies about at least one other person in the library each time. That person will be:
(a) A braying and pasty exchange student making loud plans for her Koh Samui trip on her cellphone.
(b) A foreign student from one of those countries so big and highly populated that they had to shout to be heard, who doesn't realise that he's no longer there.
(c) One of the local swots loudly telling everybody how his life will end if he doesn't get a 4.0 GPA and an internship with Barclays.
(d) One of the overwhelmingly large number of morons with sinus problems who has decided that he will sit next to you and give you a very detailed and audible understanding of the workings of his goddamned respiratory system.
In every term, there will be at least one professor who will redefine incompetence and either put your GPA in jeopardy or make it laughably easy to get an A+.
(a) However good the professor is, the amount of knowledge you will use in the working world is close to nil.
Despite everything, you will have tremendous fun.

To the people who have made university life less of a futile existence, this is for you.

Why

2009-07-01T22:52:00.002+08:00

Every now and then, you think that people ought to be given a break. Especially good people.

But it doesn't happen and you cannot get your head around why the universe can be so monumentally unfair.

And you stand on the sidelines, awkwardly fumbling for the right words to say when there're none.

Every so often, you even walk noisily into the furniture that is standing between you and the person who desperately needs comforting.

There're 5 'W's in my line of work. The only relevant one right now is 'why?'.

Costa Rica

2009-06-29T09:55:00.000+08:00

Now, this is a news story that raises more questions than it answers.

It starts out like this:

"Interim President Roberto Micheletti has imposed an overnight curfew in Honduras, hours after being sworn in. The Congress speaker took office after troops ousted elected leader Manuel Zelaya and flew him to Costa Rica."

There is all this talk in the article after that about the ensuing chaos, but all I want to know is what specifically happened after they flew Mr Zelaya to Costa Rica. How do you eject a problematic former leader from a country?

Did they kind of leave him there on the Costa Rican airport runway clutching his suitcase, a forlorn dot from the vantage point of a departing airplane? Maybe they didn't even give him a chance to pack, and he was paratrooped from the plane into the Costa Rican jungle in an airsick and bewildered heap.

I'm sure it was probably something more mundane, like the flight being the product of weeks of negotiations and agreement, with a rather civilised arrangement of a Costa Rican bank account and some temporary accommodation arrangement in Costa Rica.

I still prefer the mental image of him flailing about in the Costa Rican jungle, though.

Milan (Uno)

2009-06-26T12:31:00.003+08:00

I have been told by the boyfriend, under pain of death, to blog about the Milan leg of our jaunt to Northern Italy, lest I forget.

We made the 3-hour drive from Varese to Milan to arrive bedraggled and more than a little ripe-smelling at the Hotel Romana Residence Milan, a narrow affair tucked amongst Milan's twisty little roads. The boyfriend had left me in charge of accommodation before we'd left Singapore, and it'd been the first hotel we'd booked in Italy sight unseen, the previous hotels handled by the press junket people. So I'd braced myself for crumbling brickwork and leaky plumbing, because stuff like that tends to follow me around.

It didn't help my trepidation any that when we'd pulled up to the driveway, the bellhop had gestured to the basement entrance of the parking garage and when we'd asked him how to pay for parking when we leave the the next day, he'd said:

"Oh, to go out of ze garage, you have to press ze bell so we know you're coming out"

No automated gates, no car sensor, no Cashcards. Just this bell. As though you were standing on the porch of your neighbour's house with a casserole in your hands. The boyfriend and I had looked at each other quizzically, and because we'd already been in Italy for 3 days, we did what had by then come naturally. We shrugged.

The room itself was a pleasant surprise, if a little on the cramped side. With room rates in Milan ranging from insane to outright ludicrous, 130 euros at the Hotel Romana gets you a room with a decently-appointed bathroom and access to a subway station about a 2-minute walk away. Which, really, is at good as it gets.

We didn't take any pictures of the room ourselves because it was almost 6 pm by the time we hit Milan, and we had a dinner reservation waiting for us at Trattoria La Pesa, thanks to a fortuitous encounter with a Milanese native in Varese. In true Italian fashion, he'd vociferously insisted that there was no other restaurant worth going to in Milan, whipped out his BlackBerry and wrangled a table for us on short notice.

And it was then that the boyfriend had uttered what would go down in our relationship history as one of the major famous last words:

"The GPS system says the restaurant is 5 km from here. If we walk there, we'll be there in an hour!"

And of course, an hour later, we were 2 km away from the restaurant, on foot in a dodgy neighbourhood with the sun rapidly setting on our hungry and disgruntled selfs. What they don't tell you about Milan is that when the city is not busy being a fashion capital athrong with waif-like models, it preoccupies itself with chain-link fences and graffitti, with trash liberally dotting the sidewalks.

The fear of being mugged propelling us into a cab, we spent the last 2 km of the ride there being called 'insane' in Italian by the cab driver for attempting to walk in the first place. This, from a man who never once took his eyes off the soap opera playing on the in-cab television unit the entire time he was driving.

But then, we'd arrived at the trattoria - this place that months later, we still talk about with awe. The Trattoria La Pesa, the restaurant that moved me to tears.

This was the pre-meal anticipation, fuelled by the glass of proseco.

The boyfriend had decided to vault over the antipasta and make a beeline for first course - the Il risotto mantecato con caprino ed erba cipollina - which, from our makeshift Italian, we inferred to be risotto with goat cheese. It was unbelievably rich, with a surprising tinge of saltiness which worked incredibly well with the cheese, for some reason.

And then, the main event - the L’ ossobuco in gremolata con risotto giallo alla milanese, which, roughly translated, was the Milanese-style ossubuco covered in pumpkin on a bed of saffron risotto.

The Milanese have kept up a lively debate over whether it is more appropriate to eat the risotto separately from the ossobuco (which literally means 'bone hole' in English), since the risotto belongs to the pasta group of courses, and the ossobuco to the main group of course. This just confounds me, though, because they all end up in the same destination as far as I am concerned and I am glad to see that La Pesa agrees with me, considering how they've served them together.

In any case, it didn't matter, because I was preoccupied with trying not cry from a combination of awe and disbelief that anything could taste this good. There are moments when you manage a glimpse of how the gilded crowd lives and you understand for a split second how very, very good life can be.

And I owed that glimpse to this bearded BlackBerry-waving Milanese man in Varese. Funny how life works.

When It's All Over

2009-06-17T23:18:00.004+08:00

When it's all over, you lie in bed and replay the day in your head. You think about all that copy that you've churned out, that will mean nothing to most of the world but matter so very much to a small group of people.

And after a whole day of asking other people questions, you begin asking a few tough ones of yourself.

Did I ask good questions? Did I ask enough of them? Did I do enough, understand enough, tell the story well enough? Will I do the reader justice when it comes out tomorrow?

And like the ghosts of sentences past, the copy begins to swim before your eyes as you mentally rip through your story long after it's been sent to print.

Maybe I should have put this paragraph above the other one. I could have used a much better word to describe that. Why didn't I say this instead?

But most of all, what weighs on your thoughts and haunts your dreams are the people. The people whose words you've taken to mould into a story. The people for whom these stories are more than words.

And when you lie unblinking in bed at night, your one silent and desperate thought remains.

Please, please let those people be ok.

Whether you want them to be ok in general or simply ok with your article is anyone's guess, really.

Even when it's all over, it really isn't.

5 AM

2009-06-16T10:15:00.001+08:00

I woke up during the pre-dawn hours this morning in time to see the rain pounding on the windows. And as I'd ambled groggily in the general direction of the bathroom, it occurred to me that this was the least worried I'd been in months. It was also the happiest I'd been.

At last, I could sleep easy without the fear of my world being upended, I was graduating summa cum laude with two degrees attained on a accelerated basis through 7 beer-soaked terms and my first commentary in the papers had been a hit. It also didn't hurt that I had spent the last three days tearing around corners near Lake Kenyir at 170 kmph in a 7 Series, aided by a free flow of cocktails courtesy of Club Med.

Years from now, when I am drifting along on the waters of southern France like the shiftless dilettante I am, I will be able to remember that I had once been funny and accomplished in the relentless rat race that was this hamster cage of a country.

It is the best feeling in the world, the certainty that life will always be good to you.

For the first time in awhile, I had fallen asleep without a furrow in my brow and woken up without any trepidation about the day ahead. And next to me, was the most wonderful man in the world.

It's a wonderful time of the day, 5 am.

Lilit Ubi

2009-06-03T23:58:00.004+08:00

I have a blouse with a back seam that had simply unraveled a few months ago. As with most things or people that develop flaws, I would have cast it aside, except that I'd bought it in the States and gotten very attached to it.

So, tonight, I hunted down a sewing kit and took the blouse out to the balcony to darn. (I'm assuming 'darn' is the correct technical term for fixing a hole in a piece of fabric with shitloads of thread.)

I had not voluntarily held a needle since Home Economics class in high school, and there had been a very good reason for it. I'd been 17, obnoxiously opinionated and a bane to Pn Teo, my HomeEc teacher. She'd taught us basic cooking, sewing and metalwork (because Martha Stewart's gotta know how to weld that mutha). And in every lesson, I'd had a blazing row with her about how girls no longer needed to know how to make egg sandwiches or French knots. And they sure as hell did not need to know how to handle a smelting torch. That was what the men were for, anyway.

Who will cook your meals and mend your clothes for you next time, she'd wanted to know. All the people I'd pay to do these things out of my massive paycheque, had been my retort. The massive paycheque I'd stand a better chance of earning if schools spend this valuable time teaching us about banking instead of hemming. The sheer waste of time and its impact on my future earnings infuriated me and I'd let it show.

And so all those years had passed, and thousands of girls like me went on to graduate, their fragile feminist values and earning power miraculously unscathed by hours of table ettiquette lessons. The world had gone on to major in finance in droves - male and female alike and churn out a multitude of bankers. (Now look where that's gotten us.)

I'd gone on to do the same and tonight, I'd found myself out on the balcony trying to thread a needle. The sobering thing had been that I'd been able to afford the people needed to take over the domesticity of my life - but I simply hadn't wanted to. I'd dredged up the old lilit ubi stitch we'd learned in Puan Teo's class, instinctively knowing that the situation had called specifically for it.

And after I'd finished, I'd torn up the entire row of stitches, wincing as Puan Teo's voice rang in my head, haranguing me for the crooked stitching, the stray bits of thread that showed. I remembered her as clearly as it'd been yesterday - a boney finger singling out indictment after indictment against your aptitude as a woman and future wife.

For the first time since I was 17, I'd agreed with that voice.

The injustice of it all can drive you to drink, really. You can take CFOs to task over weak balance sheets, grill full-grown men about their dodgy dealings in China and eviscerate a company's growth strategy on paper.

But as girl, you will always have your personal equivalent of Puan Teo in your head, telling you off about those damn stitches.

And I'd meekly started over from the beginning, my feminity hanging quite literally by a thread.

Italy - On Varese

2009-06-02T22:48:00.004+08:00

While we'd been roaming about Northern Italy, I'd gotten more well-acquainted with Italy's highways than was healthy. I don't know where documentaries get footage of the idyllic Italian countryside with wild bursts of colour, but it certainly isn't from where we had been. There, the highways had been a soul-deadening affair as we'd crawled from Modena to Lake Varese, filled by kilometer after kilometer of metal grating and 16-wheeler trucks.

I'd been curled up in the back of the car, a sleepy and disgruntled ball, while the men had taken turns to drive, when suddenly The Boyfriend had exclaimed, 'Look! The Alps!'. I'd bolted upright in time to see the majestic Alps for two glorious seconds before the metal grating lining the sides of the highway promptly hove into view, leaving us with nothing but a scenery of corrugated sheet metal for the rest of the way.

And so I'd fallen asleep cursing everything Italian and transport-related, woken up at Vecchia Riva Hotel, checked in at reception in a mood foul enough to rival that of any surly Italian concierge, stridden into the hotel room fully prepared to pick a fight with the next person stupid enough to speak to me - only to be confronted with this view:

Standing at the balcony of the room, residual pique wrestling with newfound delight, I'd managed, "The view is almost worth the drive."

And The Boyfriend, happily oblivious to the prospect of bloodshed, had said with classic pedantry, "But without the drive, you wouldn't be here."

A homicide narrowly avoided, we'd cavorted about the room, fiddling with camera angles to capture all the bits we'd liked about it.

These had been taken to show off the slanting ceiling of the bedroom, which I thought had been an inspired touch. I don't know why more bedrooms don't have slanted ceilings; they're so calming.

(I realised later that night that ceilings at an angle aren't that great an idea when you're lying in bed with a whole bottle of wine in your system, watching the world above you spin crazily - and at an angle to boot.)

Dinner took place next door at a restaurant whose name eludes me, because no one in our group had thought to take note of the name while we'd still been sober.

We had, however, the presence of mind to horse around the lake while the sun had been setting.

That's the Vecchia Riva Hotel in the background. At about 70 Euros a night for a double room, I cannot gushingly recommend this place enough. Amazing lakefront location, two fantastic restaurants to choose from and gorgeous rooms with fantastic ceilings when viewed sober.

Ordering dinner had been a minefield-like affair for us, given that the menu was entirely in Italian and various parties in our group had an aversion to cheese, pork, chicken and cream, sometimes all at once.

But once we'd gotten descriptive gestures and speaking very loudly in English out of the way (all you need to get a point across in a foreign language is to shout it, see), the procession of dishes had ensued.

This is a bruschetta dish, maddening in its simplicity and the best one I've ever had, solely because of the fresh tartness of the tomatoes.

This is gnocchi in saffron sauce. I'd never had gnocchi in my life, and had made it a point of eating a different sort of pasta for every meal in Italy. Gnocchi had been on the menu that night, and I'd thought, Why not?. Why not, indeed. Famous last words. 'Gnocchi' turned out to be a fancy Italian name for pasta made out of hunks of potato, guaranteed to defy digestion and induce a food coma. The restaurant had served my individual order of gnocchi in a large serving bowl, and after I was done with the portion in the picture, I'd turned to see an identical-sized portion left in the serving bowl, that even the boys baulked at finishing.

But in all fairness, the dish had been delicious, and if your stomach is forged out of cast-iron, by all means, try it.

I don't remember whose sliced roast beef this was, but I do remember eating most of it because it had been done nicely medium-rare, with the jus pooling on the plate in a delicious puddle.

Against better judgment, we'd ordered dessert.

This is the tiramisu.

And this is the end of the tiramisu.

We'd staggered back in an inebriated state to the hotel about 200 metres away, in the frosty May night, and reached the hotel's side door. And through the glass, we'd watched wide-eyed in the cold as an elderly lady shuffled over on the inside and locked the door, just as we'd been about to reach it - making eye contact with us the entire friggin' time.

And outside in the chilly spring darkness, in one of the most beautiful places in the world, wafted upwards a mixture of Hokkien swearing, drunk giggling and oaths about those 'fucking Italians'.

It'd been perfect.

Senior Moments

2009-06-01T08:35:00.001+08:00

There're lots of places old people shouldn't be. At a rave, for example. Or at a frat house kegger. But these are terribly obvious examples, and there has been no location as dangerously overlooked as the gym.

Every single near-death experience I've had during an indoor workout had been due to an old person who really had no business being there. There'd been the time in California when I'd been going 12 kmph against the treadmill when my gym towel had slipped off its railing and landed on the floor next to my machine. A minute later, a geezer ambled up next to me, proffering the towel and expecting me to break stride and take it from her.

People, if you think that it's possible to do anything but stay alive when you're going at that speed, you've never had a proper workout and should stop taking up valuable space in the gym. Go pretend to play football or something.

And so, unable to even speak, I'd waved at her to hang it on the railings of the treadmill, after which, the coordination-challenged senior promptly proceeded to entangle the towel with the cord of my earphones and send me hurtling off the treadmill.

Old people make gyms such dangerous places to be, because they do doddering, old-people things that, though harmless elsewhere, as just life-threatening when heavy machinery are involved. Having not seen the cardio-zone of the heart-rate spectrum in decades, they think it's perfectly ok to come up next to you and strike up an inane conversation about their cat when your heart is pumping just about all the blood it can muster to keep your limbs going.

It wouldn't be so bad if they were all bumbling but well-meaning like the old lady in California. But old people in this country are just hostile, as though everyone around them is responsible for their aging process and arthritis. And so I've gotten seniors in local gyms who march over to your treadmill and order you to turn off the air-conditioning even though they were there before you were and the air-conditioning had already been running then. You also have old people who assault you with hideous-sounding Chinese dialects when you clearly have your iPod on, all the while gesturing at random pieces of machinery.

I'd been on the cross-trainer today, when it'd happened again. This time the dialect was Hokkien and the object being animatedly gestured at was the ceiling, for some reason I will fail to comprehend till my dying day.

I'd squinted at the vitriolic old lady with her wrinkled finger in the air, wondering what on earth she could possibly want to say to me. She'd clearly finished her workout and obviously didn't need to be there anymore, unless she was just dying to benchpress 250 kilos.

What, what?! Is it the air-conditioning again? Is it too hot/too cold/just offending you by existing? Is there noxious gas leaking from it that will kill us all? Am I on fire?

No?

Then beat it.

I'd have said all that but I didn't have the lung capacity because unlike her, I hadn't been just taking up space in the gym.

Pennsylvania

2009-05-26T23:51:00.005+08:00

*Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time Filling out forms

Standing in line

Tonight, I understood properly how the combination of capitalism, ambition and love for speed could culminate in the roaring of engines and the growl of exhaust pipes.

Well we're waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard, if we behaved
So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all

It was a bit rich, I suppose, blasting a song about blue-collar workers when you're roaring about in a Z4 with the top down, for I'd never felt as privileged as I'd had tonight, to be born with the set of circumstances I'd been blessed with, to know the people whom I do today and to be doing what I love for a living.

But they've taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled away
Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face

But there's something about the wind in your hair and the G-forces pushing you back into your seat that makes you want to holler along to lyrics about union workers and useless degrees with delicious ironic relish, even though you are the sort of person that unions write angry songs about.

Well I'm living here in Allentown
And it's hard to keep a good man down
But I won't be getting up today
And it's getting very hard to stay
And we're living here in Allentown

There is nothing like being in a car like that to remind you of just how good your life is, or to emphasize unequivocally the gulf between those who have and those who do not. And thanks to winning the ovarian lottery, as Warren Buffett had put it, I'd found my Pennsylvania, without even having to slave away for it.

Anyone who's a Communist has never been in a BMW Roadster - or simply taken the Animal Farm approach to it.

*Allentown, by Billy Joel

Italy - On Modena (mostly)

2009-05-19T10:41:00.003+08:00

Colleagues and friends have been asking me about Italy all week - the ones who haven't been standing at arm's length because of their swine flu paranoia, anyway.

There had been plenty to say, but all I'd managed had been, It's like Malaysia, but more expensive.

People had laughed uncertainly because they couldn't decide if I'd been serious or my usual facetious self, but it's absolutely true.

Italy is a study in chaos, the way Kuala Lumpur is. Between their lackadaisical attitude towards business and the haphazardness of central planning, it's a wonder that anything gets done, or that nothing's exploded.

In Modena, for example, there'd been only two kinds of pedestrian lights - the red one and a blinking yellow one. The first time I was confronted with the blinking yellow one, I'd been perplexed to no end.

The cars had kept turning into my path, and other pedestrians occasionally crossed the road in a mad and suicidal dash. After awhile, I'd figured that a blinking yellow light had stood for - 'Cross if you want. Or not. We don't care. Shrug.'

Which brings us to The Shrug. The first thing The Boyfriend had warned me about had been the all-Italian Shrug, a body gesture designed to convey I don't know, I don't care and I'm just standing here thinking about lunch, all at once, calculated to drive the Type A person that was me clinically batty.

Excuse me, where do we park our car?

*shrug*

How long did The Last Supper take to be completed?

*shrug*

Your hair's on fire!

*shrug*

When you've been on the receiving end of the shrug for a whole week, you suddenly understand why the Duomo Milano took 600 years to build. 600 years of architects, contractors and bishops all standing around and shrugging at each other.

What you don't understand, though, is how they've managed to build some of the fastest racing cars on earth where the utmost of precision is required. Surely the Ferrari engineers didn't stand around shrugging about the exact ratio of air to fuel needed for optimum combustion.

But like the Duomo and Ferraris, most things are worth the wait in Italy (which is where the similarities cease between Malaysia and Italy). The first meal I had in Italy was at Ristorante Il Cavallino in Maranello, something I would gladly have waited 600 years for myself. Luckily, I'd only had to stick around for 24. Located opposite the Ferrari factory and near the Galleria Ferrari, Enzo Ferrari himself had a hand in the running of the place when he'd been alive.

And just so that you don't forget exactly where you are, they'd found a way to put the prancing horse on every square inch of the place, without the least sense of irony about the whole shebang. Ferrari menu, Ferrari wine, Ferrari plates.

That right there is triangle-shaped pasta filled with pumpkin cream, slathered in the local balsamic vinegar cream and topped with shaved parmesan cheese.

Another pasta dish, so freshly handmade, you could almost pick out the rolling pin marks on the edges of the dough. This one was filled with spinach-infused cheese, topped with dried ham and a liberal serving of 'Fuck-me-it's-good'.

This was piece de resistance, and the camera hadn't done justice to the awesomeness that had been this fillet steak topped with a balsamic vinegar cream so heady, that the fumes had made my eyes water when I'd leaned over the dish. Delinquent Italian teenagers don't sniff glue; they simply head to their mother's pantries for that 100-year-old bottle of balsamic joy juice.

And when you do get your face out of your plate of pasta long enough to look up, there is, oh look, Enzo Ferrari's mug on the wall opposite you, in case the prancing horse galloping on the rim of your plate hadn't been clue enough that this was Ferrari turf.

But if anyone deserves that mantle of self-importance, it's the Italians. Besides, they wear it so stylishly, too.

I'd ambled down to the Modena city-centre on my second day there, trying to gather material for a travelogue story. One of the greater-known attractions in Modena (and there aren't very many) had been the Palazzo dei Musei, that houses the art collection of the Este family, which had formerly ruled the place back when the men had worn tights.

To my surprise and slight dismay, though, all of the exhibits had detailed explanations that were entirely in Italian and no other language. Which had pretty much left me to hazard a guess as to what that fat cherub was saying to the other fat cherub in various paintings.

If the rationale had been that Modena couldn't be arsed to cater to non-Italian speaking people, I'd have been down with that. I could understand perfectly the desire to discourage fat American tourists from roaming the corridors in Hawaiian print shirts, and if blotting the English language from displays was what it took, then molto benne.

But then I'd happened onto a few empty pedestals in the museum, where some exhibits had previously stood. And there, on a little notecard, was printed very serenely in English: 'Work away at exhibition'. They wouldn't tell us what Cherub A was doing to Cherub B back in the earlier gallery, but they'd venture into the English language to explain an empty space to us? Now, that was just teasing.

I would have gone and asked the museum lady sitting at the counter what the deal had been.

But she'd have shrugged.

Grind

2009-05-18T08:56:00.002+08:00

I know, I've been remarkably tardy about the Italy posts, but there has been so much to do.

There have been column inches to churn out, media dos to attend and motorcross rallies to scream myself hoarse at. And then I'd closed my eyes briefly, only to find Monday morning staring me in the face, the new week deadline-ridden and packed with social engagements. And every other hour, I remember something that I'd forgotten to do, and bolt up with a small and terrified shriek.

So, it'll be awhile before a blow-by-blow account of Italy is up.

Also, I seem to have lost all sense of taste in my tongue, having eaten my way through the olive oil-soaked and cheese-heavy provinces of Northern Italy. Almost everything I've eaten in Singapore has borne an astounding resemblance to dry sawdust since. Help!

But, oh here, have a picture to tide you over.

Epic Win

2009-05-09T13:26:00.006+08:00

I am not sure at which point it becomes clear just how few things in life are worth worrying about.

Maybe it's when you're on a street corner watching a string of Ferraris streak by, as common as Toyotas, the roar of their engines reverberating in your ears long after they've disappeared.

Or maybe it's when you're gazing up at a cathedral's gilded dome, watching the origins of your religion unfold before you, painstakingly wrought by men whose faith will put yours to shame.

It might even happen several times, over and over again, because people need constant reminding that they worry too much. So every bite you take - of that medium rare filet mignon covered in aceto balsamico, or of the best osso bucco you know you will ever eat - serves to drive out of your cluttered mind mundane thoughts of swine flu, COE prices and the all-absorbing concern over What People Will Say.

The Europeans seem to have mastered the careless joie de vivre that precludes wondering what other people think of them. There is no time, anyway. They have mountains to hike through, snow to ski on and all the wine in the region to taste. We, on the other hand, have friggin Bukit Timah. Whining, instead of wining, has become the national pastime.

(Update: The OECD apparently thinks the same of the Europeans as well, even if it does have a different explanation for their happiness)

We'd been charging around Lake Como in a 3 Series yesterday, skirting the glittering lake that defies description and chasing the snow-capped mountains in the distance. And The Boyfriend had mused aloud with a hint of wonder, 'Can you believe that there are people out there who would give up seeing all this because of swine flu?'.

I hadn't thought about that till then, because there isn't time to think about people like that when you're trying to figure out which house by Lake Como is George Clooney's, but he'd been right. The Boyfriend, I mean. Not George Clooney.

Why the pharmacies back home have sold out of surgical masks, one can only conjecture. But since people weren't wearing them on the streets, I could only imagine that they were cowering behind them at home, the surgical mask their only protection from catching swine flu via the television screen carrying all that alarmist news about Orange Alerts. They certainly weren't traveling, or showing any signs of being well-traveled, puerile and hysterical as their reaction has been to the current situation. How could people be worried about losing their lives if they aren't really living to begin with? Maybe, letting a disease that has not - as yet - shown up on your shores dominate your conversations and lifestyle is an upshot of leading tiny lives in tiny houses.

I am not saying that the flu is something to be sneezed at (hah!) or that it won't hit our neck of the woods, ever. And if it does hit, I trust that we will handle it the best compared to our neighbours, because that is simply how we roll. But the flu is, as with most aspects of life that will kill you, just something else to be navigated around. With as little hollering and hand-wringing as is possible.

Besides, COE prices might have finished you off long before.

Note: Not back yet. Also, I have ended up in Switzerland. Neither of us knows how that happened. Plenty of pictures to come.

Quelle Droghe Non Sono Mie

2009-05-04T00:02:00.003+08:00

It'd occurred to me less than 48 hours before departure that I knew very little Italian. Apart from knowing that 'lavatoria" was Italian for 'toilet' (very important when you've had too much pasta, this), I didn't know any Italian for 'Where the hell am I?', 'No, it was broken when I picked it up. I don't want to buy it', and 'No, I don't want to give you my number.'

So this morning was spent brushing up on all manners of Italian phrases that The Boyfriend had downloaded for me on his iPhone. The application, from WorldNomads.com, had contained all the usual greetings and platitudes travellers use while tiptoeing on the periphery of the vast and scary wilderness that is a completely foreign language.

Platitude-spouting traveller that I was prepared to be, I learned how to say 'good evening', 'you're welcome', and so on.

The going had been pretty staid until I'd opened up a subcategory titled 'Travel Safety'.

And listed there, was the Italian phrase for 'Those drugs aren't mine!'

My knee-jerk reaction had been to scoot off and show it to The Boyfriend so that we could both have a good laugh over the absurdity of needing to know something like that.

And then I'd remembered my run-in with the Narcotics Bureau in the Sydney airport last year.

Sitting meekly back down, I'd recited along sheepishly with the audio guide.

"Quel-le drog-he non sono mi-e!"

Fuhgeddaboutit

2009-04-30T00:11:00.002+08:00

It's funny how you always know where you are geographically, even when you're on the Internet.

I'd been looking for Michelin Star restaurants near Lake Como, seeing as to how some free time had opened up in Italy because of schedule changes, when one restaurant's website had emerged, priced not in Euros but in Swiss Francs. The domain prefix had also gone from '.it' for Italy to '.ch' for Switzerland.

So it'd taken a bit of bemused squinting and some mental-spatial adjusting to fully process the fact that you could wander just 200 metres away from an Italian lakeside town and suddenly find yourself in another country, and one as drastically different as Switzerland, too.

It was a bit like bumbling from Johor Bahru into Woodlands, but without the Causeway to prime you for it. Squatter house, squatter house, squatter house....HDB!

And so the Swiss restaurant's website had been, well, overwhelmingly Swiss. With a detailed degustation menu, instructions for parking and an overview of the wine cellar.

I'd left the Swiss site with its clean borders and precise wording to look up another Michelin Star restaurant, just a kilometer away, but this time on the Italian side of the border.

All I found on the Italian site was an animation of a mustachiod man with a shovel and the words "Under Construction".

Go figure.

Apple-Induced Raving

2009-04-21T22:58:00.000+08:00

I want to take some time to express some bewilderment at just how interesting my life suddenly got without any prior warning.

Suddenly, there are all these people to call and flights to book and re-book. I'm not complaining, because it's all good news. There's even a yacht involved, I think.

Although, I have picked today to go on the apple detox diet, of all days, for reasons I am no longer coherent enough to remember. Which isn't the best of things to do when you're juggling things that are happening several weeks into the future alongside things that need to happen now. Also, I am unsure as to how to make the things that need to happen now actually happen, even as I daydream about all manners of edible things that aren't apples.

But not to fear! I've had tighter deadlines with completely unreasonable story angles involving newsmakers that had seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth.

This will be a cakewalk. Mmm....cake.

Slam

2009-04-15T22:21:00.004+08:00

There are some days where nothing goes spectacularly wrong. You finish work without incident and trudge home without getting hit by a bus.

Those are the days that are the most dangerous, actually. Because when you're not busy putting out fires, you have more time to think about all the little and average-sized things that are wrong with your life.

And then, egged on by an empty stomach and an immune system that is under siege, everything that you have pushed out of your mind through prayer and work starts to snowball into a boulder that threatens to turn you into a sticky stain on the pavement.

The rage starts to build, then. And you think that you should have raised your voice that one time, you should have hung up on that one caller, and you should have slammed that door if only so that you wouldn't feel like slamming it again and again in the future.

But you didn't. Because you haven't raised your voice in 4 years and counting. Because you haven't said 'no' to a favour being asked for so long that you've forgotten what that word sounds like rolling off your tongue. Because you're the helium-voiced girl in the flippy dress.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you want to throw something clear across the room and have it strike someone squarely in the face. You want to be cruel to someone whose biggest mistake is simply being there.

You want to be as callous with other people's feelings, the way they have been with yours.

Is it too much to ask, to not have to justify the way you feel about everything? To simply say, 'I don't want you to do this because it makes me sad' and to be indulged without being made to feel small? I don't want to be rational all the time. I want to be a girl.

Maybe that's why some people shout so much. That's the only way they'll be heard.

Material Material

2009-04-13T23:27:00.002+08:00

A century from now, when most of us have tumbled off this mortal coil, I suspect that financial statements will sound drastically different.

While I am all for thoroughness and precision of expression - especially where a whole lot of zeroes are concerned - I believe the verbosity of existing financial reports is unnecessary at worst and at best, hard to sustain, given how kids today already have the attention span of a fly on crack and the verbal ability of a gibbon.

Which is why something that looks like this now:

"there has been a breach of the covenant on outstanding convertible notes, triggering the immediate redemption by shareholders" etc...

will sound like this years from now:

"so, they totally whinged on the deal, right, and now, right, we're gonna gang up with everyone else to shake them down".

And instead of the carefully worded 'underperform' that analysts use to describe companies, I think the more impatient and informal generation of the future will go with 'in deep shit'. There'd be no waffling about - your company either sucks or it doesn't.

Poncy terms like 'emphasis of matter' will be replaced with the header 'Look, this is important shit'.

If the current credit crisis were to happen in those future times, labels would be so much more descriptive and apt. Bernie Madoff would be called a 'thieving jackass' instead of a 'financier' and instead of calling credit debt swaps 'unsecured' or 'high-risk', we could call them 'a fucking stupid idea'.

It'd be a new era of simplicity and brutal honesty, which will ultimately benefit suckers - oops, investors, I mean.

Dilbert

2009-04-09T00:20:00.005+08:00

What people don't tell you about getting a paycheque full-time is how it drastically changes how you feel about something you'd do for free anyway. Most of the time, the irony of it is that it changes for the worse.

Today, though, between coughing fits and the world swimming in and out of focus, everything that I'd been beavering away at came sharply into focus instead. When you've taken ill and are at your cubicle simply because you want to be there, things of monumental importance before seem trivial now. You call up people you wouldn't have dared bother before. You bound up to people and pitch ideas you'd usually be too reticent to bring up.

Being somewhere you weren't really supposed to be because the in-house doctor had sent you packing with a 2-day MC felt liberating. And a little naughty. Like playing hookey, but the other way around.

For the first time in weeks, I was hitting both my stride and every ball out of the park. I'd been too busy fending off dizziness to think about that paycheque - and that had been the moment of golden realization today. Work is kind of like running - the extra mile you run after your quota is up is usually the easiest.

Funny how when you feel like you're working for free, it ceases to become work.

Deliverance

2009-04-05T22:10:00.006+08:00

After my 4-day holiday, I now know several things:

It costs $179 ringgit to send a 1100 cc bike from Gua Musang (read: Rural Bumblefuck, Nowhere) to Johor Bahru by train.
On the east cost, someone's idea of a city is your idea of a pissy little town consisting of one main street.
(a) In such places, asking for a tow truck is like asking for a space suit - absolutely impossible and people think you're mad for asking.
Very few people know how to deal with a pushy helium-voiced girl in full biking gear who is trying to commandeer their truck in rapid-fire Malay.
When you are trying to explain your predicament to someone over the phone, that someone, despite being of absolutely no help, will want to know what kind of bike it is, out of idle rural curiosity.
(a) At which point, you, being at the absolute end of your tether, will want to explode into profanities that end with lei ge lo mo!
It could be raining buckets, you could be stranded in a town where in-breeding is highly likely and you're on your last few minutes of iPhone battery life, but you will look over at your soulmate and double over with laughter at the absurdity of the situation.
Taxi drivers in Gua Musang will try to charge you RM200 to drive you a couple hundred kilometers.
(a) At which point you will tell him exactly where he can put his taxi.
On an 11-hour train ride that neither of you had planned for nor desired, you both see all of the vegetation and scenery worth seeing in Malaysia by the fifth hour.
It is actually possible to be so shaken by a situation that you do not realize that the man you are speaking to has 6 fingers on one hand.
You could call KTM Berhad, the Malaysian train company, and ask 8 different employees the same question but get 9 different answers (one of them contradicted himself).
(a) And none of them will be right.
Being hit in the shin with a bike's kickstand hurts like a motherfucker.
(a) And leaves a massive bruise, while taking some skin with it.

And oh, we might be going back for seconds over the coming long weekend.

Crack-Thump

2009-03-31T22:13:00.004+08:00

I've been hearing this sound for the last couple of weeks at my new place now. The crack-thump that explodes somewhere in the ceiling area above my bed, where my head is. A sound so loud and sharp, it reverberates in my ear canal for seconds after.

The first few times, I'd distractedly chalked it up to having very noisy upstairs neighbours. On the fourth or fifth time that it'd happened, I'd bolted out of bed, wide-eyed with the memory that in the new place, I was on the highest floor. There weren't any upstairs neighbours.

And so my imagination had practically fallen over itself to conjure up the absolute worst of images. Alone in the apartment close to midnight, I'd pictured the building's water tank being located above my unit. And the kid from the Dark Water horror flick that had come along with the water tank. [Aside: Watching that movie years ago had put me off having baths and having kids. I have since reconciled myself with baths, but not kids].

As the hair on the back of my arms stood to attention, I briefly contemplated fleeing over to The Boyfriend's. And then I thought about the apartment and how hard it'd been to get. I thought about the designer kitchen and rain shower in the bathroom. I remembered the newly remodeled feature wall and slick marble throughout the unit.

I realised then that I was like a New Yorker in a rent-controlled apartment: impossible to evict. Not even by the supernatural thought up by overactive Japanese minds.

And I slid back under the covers and went defiantly back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that whatever crawled out of that water tank would be met in the face with great force by the plush white chaise lounge in the living room.

Bleep

2009-03-26T19:06:00.003+08:00

I would love to say that I would understand if there were to be a fuss. (So far, there hasn't been.) But here, I should make like an accountant and err on the side of conservativeness. (Although, we do not pay accountants to 'err'. Not intentionally, anyway.)

When in Rome, etc, etc.

So, in deference to whatever it is people think they are deferring to - it's no skin off my nose.

Gag

2009-03-13T22:41:00.000+08:00

When I'm not doing my job, I'm thinking about it. How to do it better, how to minimize the accompanying stress, but mostly, how to keep it when everyone else can't seem to get one.

Most days, my job contaminates my thoughts and bleeds into my dreams. And it's not even because I'm some wunderkind workaholic - merely not messing up takes up a surprisingly inordinate amount of time and energy.

And so, when I sit down to blog, all I can think about is my job and all the things that were said and done which cannot be immortalized for public forum.

So, as my thoughts usually revolve around how to keep my job, the void of things to say on this blog has grown steadily - precisely because I'd like to keep my job.

Bear with me, folks, as I negotiate this unexpected terrain.

Sophia

2009-03-08T22:35:00.003+08:00

Old neighbourhoods, like most old lovers, find a way to move on once you've left them. And to my chagrin, I saw just how nicely mine had moved on half a year after I'd packed my bags and left it for Los Angeles.

I'd been back in the neighbourhood for the first time since I'd left, for a work event. And I'd wandered Selegie Road eyeing the sparkling building that had replaced my favourite nasi lemak haunt around the corner. On the other end, where it'd previously been a construction site with a 91.3 FM billboard on the scaffolding, stood this granite-and-glass affair called Wilkie Edge.

So I'd stood and stared, unsure whether to be happy for it or resent that it'd gone and gentrified itself in my absence. On some levels, I'd felt more for it than I had for most old lovers. It'd taken me in and loved me back as uncomplicatedly as I'd loved it. There'd been the cab stand down the street where Swati and I had belted out Michael Learns to Rock songs while inebriated, doubtless making everyone in the vicinity question our upbringing. There'd been the numerous side alleys I'd stumbled home through alone after a late night out, secure in the fact that no one would harm me, because this was Singapore. And there'd been the tau huay place around the corner where I'd accompanied many a friend in deep shit at 3 am, listening to their problems over glasses of cold soy bean.

This had been the place where I'd lived on the 23rd floor and gazed down on the magnificent and glittering city, lost in euphoria, sadness, despair and thanksgiving, depending on what had transpired that week. There, I had loved fiercely and lost tumultuously. And there, I had made that transition from mini-skirted college student to suited worker bee.

As I'd walked hesitantly down the once-familiar pavement, heels clicking on the tiles, I spotted the ponytailed Turkish kebab guy whose stand I'd regularly frequented in the past. I'd used to hop onto one of the high stools at the kebab counter and he'd listen to my day as he'd made my lunch. And with my legs swinging against the counter and inches above the ground like a schoolgirl's, I'd told him about stupid groupmates, idiot local people and disastrous first dates. And as unbelievably hot as he'd been (aren't all Turkish men?), he'd acted avuncular enough for me to confide in.

He'd been having a smoke across the street as I'd walked past him, and he'd squinted startledly, unused to my office getup. And we'd waved hesitantly at each other, a whole world between us now.

And I walked on without looking back at my old neighbourhood, the way you walk away from old lovers.

Peace Mansion, I'd loved you.

"Nothing"

2009-03-03T20:31:00.003+08:00

I'd always wondered about the way grown-ups would sit at the dinner table, morose and deep in thought. You could ask them what they were thinking, and they'd mumble 'Nothing', despite the wealth of things they were thinking cluttering up their faces and giving it an overcast pallor. You could ask them how their day was, and they'd grunt, 'I don't want to talk about it'.

I never understood why grown-ups didn't want to talk about their problems. I always liked talking about mine. My best friend and I must've burnt up several SIM cards during our adolescence talking about our problems and our days, no matter how rotten.

I understand now.

There are problems, and then there are grown-up problems. And now I have grown-up problems with no grown-up ways to fix them, because when you turn 21, no one hands you an orientation package that tells you how to deal with people acting in unacceptable ways. And throughout your 22nd and 23rd years, you get lessons that come packaged with tears and wrapped with pain, but with no instructions, not even the ones written in terrible Japanese-English.

So you'll enter your 24th year with all these ad hoc pieces of lessons and instructions, but a string of completely new problems in an endless series of permutations hurl themselves at you.

And one day you will find yourself, a full-fledged taxpayer with 3 sets of keys for 3 different houses, sitting silently at the breakfast table with the eyes of your concerned family on you. You realize then that they can't help you and it'd be more trouble than it's worth acquainting them with your private hell.

And all you can say in response to their anxious questions are 'Nothing' and 'I don't want to talk about it'.

Spiderpig

2009-02-26T23:49:00.003+08:00

The brain is a wonderful thing. It shuts off pain signals during extreme moments so that your body can focus on the pressing and immediate. It acts as the switchboard from which you drive your car, talk on the phone and flip off other drivers all at once. And even for the most mediocre of us, it governs the intricacies of the act of putting on our pants, one leg at a time.

And so it was today when I discovered a new and fascinating thing my brain was capable of - something I'd like to call a 'music defense reflex'.

The last few days have been, to put it mildly, pretty fucking awful, with wave after wave of appalling developments, both on the professional and personal front.

This morning, after 48 hours of sustained crap, I'd stumbled into work dazed and bug-eyed, dead certain that this was exactly how that postal worker must've felt the morning he, er, went postal on his colleagues with a shotgun.

As I'd dully eyed the panel of elevator buttons in the lift, it happened. Deep from within the recesses of my brain, the song that Homer had sung in The Simpsons movie emerged and elbowed its way to the front of the jostling throng of anxiety and anger in my mind.

And from my soul welled up the most glorious outpouring of song that wended its way through my lips- "Spiderpig, spiderpig/Does whatever a spiderpig can!"

For those 5 seconds in the lift, I'd filled every square inch of that space with the exuberant ode to this porcine hero, my voice quavering with the hysteria of someone in grave danger of cracking.

I kept on singing it, too. At my desk. At lunch with my colleagues who were strangely understanding about it, mostly because they must have suspected that the only other alternative would have been to be shot in the face with a 12-gauge.

The Spiderpig ditty has now become my avenging mental theme song, for all times shitty and for all shitty people.

So, thank you, brain.

The Grass Is Greener Here

2009-02-22T21:20:00.004+08:00

I've been at work all of 3 weeks, and already, it's hard to make out what material my desk is made of, because every square inch has been covered with a layer of chaos only ever glimpsed at Ground Zero.

And so it was from this mountain of press releases and earnings reports that I'd come up for breath sometime last week for some Facebook therapy (If anyone from the newsroom's reading this, I was on the site for...research. Yes, market research! Um.). And some pictures of schoolmates still a term away from graduation had surfaced against the backdrop of a campus I'd grown to know and loathe in my 3 years there.

There had, apparently, been a Milo truck on campus that day, and a free-Milo carnivalesque atmosphere had ensued, my friends posing with their frothy cups of Milo in tiny, tiny skirts and sexy milk moustache pouts.

It'd all seemed the very epitome of youth and fun, their eyes narrowed in genuine laughter, not a bit of crow's feet in sight.

I suppose I should've been envious of their apparent carefreeness and freedom to wear the tiny, tiny skirts I miss so much in this weather.

But I'd remembered instead the stifling crowds and overly loud music that had assaulted my ears whenever some corporation had decided to show up on our campus and coerce us into having fun. I remembered the feckless girls who giggled as a substitute for coherent speech and gormless men who had absolutely no game and, with the exception of Mo and Zee, were fugly beyond all redemption.

I also remembered all my project groupmates, whom, if we'd combined all their grey matter, would have been unable to produce more than two braincells to bang together. I did not miss them. I did not, in particular, miss the hideous Singlish-Army hybrid that every local male freshman refused to leave behind in his barracks. Or the group of students from a particular country who thought it their very right to turn public places like the library into a noise-filled ghetto.

I might be stressed out now and on the verge of pulling out my hair over errant newsmakers and 5-hour press conferences. But I've existed in this state of anxiety for pretty much most of my life. At least now, I'm getting paid for it.

And I'd sunk back into the paperwork at my desk gratefully, surrounded by cold coffee and deadlines, so glad to be part of the civilised world.

Dropping The Ball

2009-02-19T22:52:00.002+08:00

There are nights when you will wonder what it is all for, when the myriad and countless ways you could have handled something better will plague you all the way home.

And by then, it is irrelevant because you're already miles away in every sense of the word, your tired calves shaking in tottering stilettos on an uneven pavement.

There is no time to regroup, no energy for a post-mortem. And really, all you'll want is to be left alone.