Colin's Journal

6:07pm: Bottersnikes
Bottersnikes are the laziest creatures, probably, in the whole world.

Being overly slothful, they find that the sheer proposition of tunnelling into the ground with the intention to construct a burrow as rabbits do, seeking out hollow trees in which they can dwell like the small animals, or assembling a nest is out of the question, and an impossible task taking into consideration their capability.

As an alternative, they take refuge in rubbish dumps. They favour damp garbage heaps in which bacteria thrive, as these creatures' diet primarily consist of the fungi that grow on their skin. These herbivorous eating habits, in addition to the fact that they have two hearts, both of which need an equal amount of energy, are probably the reason for their lethargy.

The Bottersnikes are often delighted at the discovery of a pile of refuse and crawl in. They thus inhabit the rubbish heap, spending a large percentage of the time sleeping. Owing to this practice, they have a preference for dumps along the dusty roadsides of the scarcely populated Australian bush, where they can sleep for several weeks without any or much disturbance.

On one occasion, in a similar mound of refuse as those aforementioned, a foul rancour wafted through the air as two long black ears appeared from within a mouldy watering can. The head gradually came out after the ears because it was half the length of the latter. The creature's hideous green face revealed his slanted eyes and the minuscule toadstools above them.

A nose akin to a cheese grater and an orifice that exposed rows of serrated teeth graced its countenance. The enamel protrusions from its mean mouth glinted brightly under the rays of the merciless sun. Its wrinkly skin was dry and coarse, unlike the moss that streaked it an ugly green, capturing the length of time the creature had spent in slumber.

This was the King of the Bottersnikes. He squeezed out of the watering can. However, he had not emerged from his abode without reason. He could sense a threat unhurriedly making its arrival, in the form of kerosene, the ignition of which was fatal to Bottersnikes caught unaware in their homes. He issued a piercing screech so shrill it could not be picked up by human ears.

Bottersnikes, one after another, poured out of every container conceivable, each partly disgruntled at having its slumber disrupted. As hastily as possible, they vacated the area, leaving the human being to douse the refuse mound with flammable liquid, converting it into a bonfire with the aid of a matchstick.

Half a dozen times in the same week, the human beings had made the decision to raze the garbage heaps in their backyards, leaving the Bottersnikes homeless or, even worse, burnt to death. As the King of the Bottersnikes yet again inspected the cluster of grieving Bottersnikes, both his hearts sank as he realised that yet another of his colony had lost his life to the flames leaping up from their previous residence. Nevertheless, they had to trudge on.

The search for a new garbage heap continued, with the muddy-green creatures clambering over fences and inching between gaps in railings to progress to the next house. It dragged on for hours, the group repeatedly pausing to devour a fungus growing on their foreheads, to no avail. Eventually, the exhausted Bottersnikes lay down onto the pavement, much too fatigued to persist. By then, it was evening.

The King of the Bottersnikes caught a whiff of a dreadful stench coming from a massive vehicle, although to him, that disgusting odour spelled hope. Again, he emitted a shriek. He indicated the vehicle to his fellow Bottersnikes - apparently, a human was loading refuse from within various vessels onto the vehicle.

The eager Bottersnikes scrambled onto the back of the vehicle unnoticed. They then opted for the receptacle of their choice, and wriggled in. They instantaneously sank into languor because of the exercise they had carried out during the day. They did not wake until they had been unloaded onto the conveyor belt of an incineration plant.

The King of the Bottersnikes jerked into consciousness. How long had he been asleep? Where were they? Would the vehicle never stop? Determined to have his queries satisfied, the curious King peered out of the fractured amphora he was in, only to discover that he and his men were no longer on the vehicle. Adding to his mounting horror, his olfactory nerves caught a trace of the smell that he could now distinguish with ease, the smell of fire, growing more distinct by the second.

His life and the lives of his partners were in jeopardy; any moment now, they would plummet into the fire. He squirmed out of the amphora, screeching as he did so. Relieved to see that the others had registered his message, he safely jumped off the moving platform to the floor. His contentment was short-lived, for it was too late. The King watched powerlessly as his comrades were reduced to ashes alive.

He stood there for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, he clambered back onto the moving platform. Closing his eyes, the last of the Bottersnikes plunged into the blazing abyss.

12:28am: Slow down, you crazy child /You're so ambitious for a juvenile
The allure of magic lies in the supposed ease behind its grandeur. We are consumers long before we are creators, and the true elegance of science, art, engineering is how well they hide the work of their intelligent designers. Therein lies the magic: there are no tears, sweat and broken hearts; only genius, words that flow from pens in poetry...

There is a legend that Oriental carpeteers left a flaw in their intricate designs; only God should weave perfection. I need more willing flaw-makers; I am the child caught before the artists' illusions. I seek godhood: I don't need to fear being human as well.

10:41pm: ORD Story #2
"Start with the classics," said Yi Xiong. "They've stood the test of time, and so are less likely to be a waste of yours." He would've known. When I first encountered Yi Xiong, he was sitting on the bunk bed opposite mine, his face buried in a novel. He was well-versed in the greats, and blazed through books far more quickly than I did. He was also a straight-A student who left the army camp on various mornings for yet another grueling round of scholarship interviews: today it was for a leading commercial bank, the next it would be for a major industrial developer. In other words, Yi Xiong was, without an apparent ounce of effort, the kind of overachiever I had always wished I could be.

My own achievements, up to that point, felt nowhere as impressive. My proudest moment had been back in grade 9, when I won Best Debater with a fiery speech at the Moot Parliament Debates. After that I spent three years attending the high school debate team's practice sessions, thrilling to the intensity and rigor of their speeches, but getting to represent the school just once and losing. I stepped up as producer and co-writer of my school faculty's play, only to bear a shut-out on awards night despite the dedication of our cast and crew. I was chosen to represent the school in the Singapore Physics Olympiad, but failed to make it through the semi-finals. Eventually I became well-rehearsed in "It's the journey that matters, not the destination," but in my lowest moments, that adage would reek with the tang of sour grapes. Yes, it was pointless if one did not savor the journey, but I looked up to those who got to reach their destinations as well.

So, like we do with the people whom we admire, I began to observe what Yi Xiong did that might have contributed to his successes, and tried to learn from them. At his example, I redoubled my efforts to read more, and more widely. I noticed how he tossed off judgments on a book right after he closed it, never worrying that he might have missed anything that would invalidate them. I learnt that he would sometimes ignore his own advice about canonical works, jumping into off-the-wall reading choices with glee. Above all, I found that Yi Xiong wasn't paralyzed by his knowledge that there was always more to read, to learn, to discover, always believing he had something of his own to add. If any of those qualities rubbed off on me, it was because he possessed such generous drive and confidence.

Thus I was taken aback when one afternoon Yi Xiong came to me, stricken, to ask for my advice. He had been offered two scholarships, one by the civil service commission and another by a government statutory board. It was near the deadline for him to pick one, but he had yet to make up his mind.

"Which career would let you do what you want more?" I asked.

"I love both," he said.

“Yeah, but which do you love more?”

“I love them equally.”

"You can’t love both equally. What is it you want to do with your life?"

He replied, "I want to achieve success."

His answer surprised me; I fought to keep calm. "Do you think you will be more successful in one job than the other?" I asked. "If not, then it doesn't matter which one you pick. Or you can just pick the one that allows you to switch career paths more easily, if you don't quite feel fulfilled there after you have served your bond."

He pondered this. "You're right. I can be as good in either, so the choice is rather arbitrary."

I tried not to reveal it, but his words had knotted in my chest. When you're a person of Yi Xiong's class and caliber, you can achieve "success" anywhere; what matters is that your heart is in it. That he could not choose between two highly competitive scholarships did not seem to me to reflect Yi Xiong's equal and conflicting loves for both, but his lack of abiding love for either. Perhaps I was upset, too, because I thought I knew what it was he truly wanted, since I believe that our hobbies reveal our inner loves more than our career plans do. However, Yi Xiong had left open the insinuation that he would not pursue a literary career because it did not fit his notion of success.

These were hasty conjectures on my part, but at the time they seemed to align with my discovery of that chink in Yi Xiong's armor of certitude: all of his immense drive started to feel like it had been in service of an unsteady centre. It was this that led me to realize that none of my achievements mattered if they were not guided by a sure direction. Of course, this did not diminish all that he had taught me, and slowly I came to find myself guilty of having treated Yi Xiong as an ideal, only to later find him wanting: a duty that no human being deserved to bear. Eventually, as the time came for us to part ways, I told Yi Xiong that I thought he was an extraordinary person.

"Hey," he said. "So are you."

He told me that, in our time together, he had been impressed by my confidence and eloquence; I was struck by the sincerity of his remarks, and their incongruity with the way I had seen things. What they made me realize was that where I had thought myself on the receiving end of Yi Xiong's experience, the feeling might have been mutual. I began to see the flip side of our earlier interactions: it wasn't so much that he was confident and I was not, as much as that we both exuded confidence where we least noticed it, and nursed our deepest worries privately. Later, upon further reflection, I realized this meant that when Yi Xiong had come to me for advice, he had really been confiding his innermost fears, and I had betrayed that confidence by thinking less of him for it.

So it was that I first outgrew a good friend, and then learnt to outgrow the condescension that allowed it: we can all seem hopelessly blind as we chase down our paths to happiness. Perhaps what matters most, then, is that we don't have to go through it alone.

1:08pm: ORD Story #1
"Anthony, wake up. Your mother tried to call you."

He was lying on his bed, bleary-eyed, but he sprang upright at the mention of his mother. He grabbed his mobile phone from under his pillow, squinted at it, and started to dial. "I'll be in my office if you need me," I said, then made my way back down from the third-floor bunks.

I had rarely seen Anthony like this. He was the loudmouth among my platoon men, running a commentary over the nightly routine orders or yammering about unfair treatment with a wide grin. Some of the other commanders couldn't stand him, seeing his boisterousness as an affront to their authority, but I appreciated his perceptiveness and his easy way with a joke. His crass exterior, too, hid a pragmatic soul. After a week of indecision, he had chosen to sign on as a regular soldier, to capitalize on the recession bonus package. I'd asked him if he had considered an outside job with which he might be less dissatisfied. "Sergeant," he said with a smile, "we live in different worlds."

One evening, Anthony turned sullen without warning. He approached me to ask if he could leave the camp at night and report for work in the mornings. He said that he had a family crisis, not divulging more. I replied that because most of the men stayed in until the weekends, I could not make an exception for him without understanding more, even though I knew that he wouldn't ask to make the trip to and from our secluded camp for frivolous reasons. Anthony persisted, promising that he would be back on time every morning for his duties. I relented, and he never reneged on that promise. So while I noticed the circles under his eyes getting darker by the day, I let him be.

That is, until that morning when his mom called me. Her voice on the line had been frantic: "Are you Anthony's commander? I'm looking for Anthony—I tried to call him but he didn't pick up." As it turned out, men were after her because she owed them money, and she needed Anthony to fend them off. This revelation stunned me. It wasn't just because I'd never known anyone who had been pestered by loan sharks—never known the real desperation that creeps into their voice. It was also because Anthony had refused to divulge a perfectly legitimate reason for needing to stay out each night, even though he knew he could keep my trust, because he believed it was his burden to bear. Beyond learning to be grateful for my lot, I thus learnt from Anthony about the depths to which one could be resilient. It was thanks to people like him that I never once complained about being conscripted in the army, and did my best as a platoon sergeant to balance professionalism with empathy.

Five minutes later Anthony entered my office, grim-faced, and asked me if he could take the rest of the day off. I had prepared the necessary papers. I watched as he signed them and left, heading back into a world that I hoped to understand, but would never truly know.

10:39pm: Weekly Movie Screenings
Hi all, an update on my previous post: I'm having a few problems finding a proper screening venue, especially since I'm a bit unclear on the number of people showing up, so plans for the debut screening have stalled at the moment. Just a head's up:

If you'd like to attend these screenings, esp the first, which of the following timeslots would you prefer?
A: Friday afternoons (~ 3pm to 7pm)
B: Friday nights (~ 6pm to 10pm)
C: Saturday afternoons (~ 3pm to 7pm)
D: Saturday nights (~ 6pm to 10pm)
E: Sunday afternoons (~ 3pm to 7pm)
F: Sunday nights (~ 6pm to 10pm)
G: Other

5:12pm: Weekly Movie Screenings
Here's the deal: I have about 35 weekends from now till I have to leave for college. Every Saturday afternoon starting from Nov 27, I'll hold a screening of two related movies, usually classics. If you've always heard of or wanted to watch a movie but never managed to make the time for it, well, now you have an excuse.

This is the tentative list of movies that I've drafted up; please take a look and tell me if you'd be interested to join in. If you have any suggestions for movies that you'd like to watch, or directors/actors that you want to learn more about but don't know where to start, do comment as well. (Also, if you've a place to offer that's conducive for screening movies, or you have DVDs to lend, or if you think Saturday afternoons or double-bills aren't a good idea, please make yourself heard too!)

Filmmaker	Scheduled Movies	Owned
Directors/Writers
Ang Lee	Sense and Sensibility | Lust, Caution		✓
Billy Wilder	Double Indemnity | Some Like It Hot	✓	✓
Edward Yang | Hou/Tsai	Yi Yi | (to be confirmed)	✓	✓
Hayao Miyazaki	Princess Mononoke | My Neighbour Totoro	✓	✓
James Cameron	Aliens | Terminator 2: Judgment Day	✓	✓
Martin Scorsese	Taxi Driver | Raging Bull	✓
Orson Welles	Citizen Kane | The Magnificent Ambersons	✓
Pedro Almodóvar	Talk to Her | Volver
Richard Linklater	Before Sunrise | Before Sunset	✓	✓
Robert Altman	Nashville | McCabe & Mrs Miller	✓	✓
Steven Spielberg	Jaws | E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial		✓
Werner Herzog	Aguirre, the Wrath of God | Grizzly Man	✓
Woody Allen	Hannah and Her Sisters | Annie Hall	✓	✓
Woody Allen	The Purple Rose of Cairo | Bullets Over Broadway	✓	✓
Wong Kar-wai	In the Mood for Love | Chungking Express	✓	✓
Actors
Al Pacino	Scarface | Dog Day Afternoon		✓
Barbra Streisand | Judy Garland	Funny Girl | Meet Me in St Louis	✓
Buster Keaton | Charlie Chaplin	The General | Modern Times		✓
Cary Grant	His Girl Friday | North by Northwest	✓
Clark Gable	Gone with the Wind | It Happened One Night	✓
Clint Eastwood | John Wayne	The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | The Searchers	✓
Glenn Close	Fatal Attraction | Dangerous Liaisons	✓
Humphrey Bogart	The Maltese Falcon | Casablanca		✓
Jack Nicholson	Five Easy Pieces | Chinatown
James Stewart	Mr Smith Goes to Washington | Vertigo		✓
Julia Roberts | Meg Ryan	Erin Brockovich | When Harry Met Sally		✓
Katharine Hepburn	Alice Adams | Holiday
Laura Linney	The Savages | You Can Count on Me
Liza Minelli	Cabaret | New York, New York	✓	✓
Marlon Brando	On the Waterfront | Apocalypse Now		✓
Michelle Pfeiffer	The Fabulous Baker Boys | Frankie and Johnny
Meryl Streep	Bridges of Madison County | Postcards from the Edge	✓	✓
Nicole Kidman	Dogville | Birth	✓	✓
Tilda Swinton	Michael Clayton | Julia	✓	✓

11:05am: Twitter Consolidation, Vol 3
My Twitter posts since the last consolidation (username: colinlowyc):

Movies
DISTRICT 9: Bracing as a quasi-documentary on alien immigrants, and as a horror film on unwanted transformations; opaque as an action flick.

I hate that all the blogosphere buzz is over before the movie even arrives here in Singapore: first DISTRICT 9, and now INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

MOON: Thoughtful scifi for beginners: promising premise, predictable plotline.

The trailers for A SERIOUS/SINGLE MAN made me think: same film, gonzo marketing team.

Off to watch INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS while the rest of my family watches THE COVE. The movies' attitudes to violence are likely to diverge ;)

Never again will I buy a seat in a movie theatre on row F or closer. The screen is *leering* at me.

Caught PAPER HEART with Myf. One of my fave movies ever. Shades of WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, with clever, disciplined use of the handheld trope

Dining and snacks
Ate instant noodles cooked with McDonald's curry sauce. Tasted like a variant of Japanese kare ramen.

Ice cubes, yoghurt + honey (2:1 ratio), bananas, blueberries, mint leaf, cinnamon powder, a scoop of rum&raisin ice cream: heavenly smoothie

Dictionazism
Pet peeve: Jokes that involve a suspension of disbelief that the "t" and "th" sound are homophones (http://xkcd.com/282/). They are NOT.

What's the best English term for "siap", that icky sensation you get on your tongue from unripe guava or the skin of black grapes? (Best answer I got: "tart")

TV Shows and ads
RT #NDP09 Rally: Children stayed away from their parents' funerals as carried out in a different religious tradition =(

RT #NDP09 Rally, in a projected vid of Marina Bay: "Trees! The instant trees have arrived" LOL PM's gibing the machine!

The judges on Singapore Idol have settled in impressively! Dick Lee: "I became a musician at 35. Don't ever say there are no more chances." Wow.

Is anyone else frustrated at not knowing what the words edited out of the driving instructor's rant in the GOLD 90.5 FM ad were?

Channel 8's new self-congratulatory ad is disturbing: so now the mentally-ill make for good dramatic actors?

Why is Mika prancing half-naked on a bed looking like Brüno? "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" indeed. I thought he wasn't out.

Christopher/Fann's wedding prep show proves that local TV needs more unscripted, non-"social issue" docs. It's actually heartfelt and real!

Books and other fictions
Just finished Sarah Rees Brennan's THE DEMON'S LEXICON... I'm breathless. Chekhov's armouries don't get any better than this.

Sat in Charm's class ytd in army uniform. One student's short story: "Withered roses scattered on a tombstone." Genius

Wisdom tooth-extraction anecdotes
It is surreal to not know you're falling asleep, then have someone wake you up to tell you the operation's over, your 4 wisdom teeth are out

I have so much cotton in my mouth, I'm mumbling like Marlon Brando in THE GODFATHER.

My jowls have swollen to the size of Jodie Foster's in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. I've never had a fuller jaw — eep!

Existentialist/academic musings
Isn't the fun of being a teacher in seeing how to get people excited about things — that is, in being a great recommender?

"Abstinence is a good thing, but only when practised in moderation." - Anon

Nothing is illusory — happiness, sadness, etc. — just because it is fleeting.

Happiness is a state of mind, not a state of affairs.

Me: "Why d'you always ignore me?" (pause) Sis: "Sorry, what?"

National Service
11 weeks to ORD: the first time in my army life that I'm wearing coveralls. #NS

Peanut gallery (after I grinned through a phone call): "You look like a guy who's in love & has just been f'ed" "You have a radiance. I can see the butterflies ard you"

Of the things I expected to do as a 3SG, presiding over people pissing and chatting with those who can't conjure enough was not one of them.

Random stuff
Switched over to Starhub's 8 Mbps broadband after a decade of Pacnet's 512kbps. (Holy talent, I've been had! Look at those speeds!!)

12:42pm: Twitter Consolidation, Vol 2
My Twitter posts for the last month (username: colinlowyc). And I can't believe it didn't occur to me to join the National Day Parade live feed! *pouts* (Russell Peters: "Not, like, a live feed... wouldja grow up?")

Movie Reviews
WEST SIDE STORY: (Romeo + Juliet's plot) - (Shakespeare's poetry) = Awful book scenes. Moreno sets her scene ablaze; other songs not well-lit.

Despite the subpar HARRY POTTER movies, I can't wait to see HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: the trailer spewed hormones, and they feel like old friends.

HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: Potter fatigue has caught up to me; all of J.K. Rowling's missed dramatic opportunities keep thwacking me in the face.

SILKWOOD proves that horror movies are scarier when they feel like a part of life, especially one you haven't the means to escape. *winces*

KATONG FUGUE: How is it that celluloid pianos so readily channel their player's inner desires? (cf. THE PIANO)

PUBLIC ENEMIES: Retreads BONNIE AND CLYDE, laced with the irony that even America's Most Wanted doesn't beat its citizens' self-absorption.

FIGHTING: A formula film w/o the formula's best parts: the sweat-soaked anticipation, the thrill of the win, or, y'know, the actual fighting

UP: Apart from the vignettes of lifelong marriage... eurgh. EURGH. Pixar at its most infantile.

Movie-related thoughts
Stars of the '00s: Joker (Ledger), Erin Brockovich (Roberts), Gandalf (McKellen), Miranda Priestly (Streep), Capt Jack (Depp), 007 (Craig).

Idea: Remake CABARET with Alan Cumming as Sal Bowles, Liza Minelli as the Mistress of Ceremonies, and Jude Law as a mute Brian Roberts...

Idea: Remake SWEENEY TODD with Barbra Streisand as Mrs Lovett - who else could nail her brand of rapidfire humorsong? Remix TODD with WEST SIDE STORY love songs for Anthony and Johanna's sidestory: "Every sight that I see is Johanna..." "Tony, Tony..."

National Service
(As I type out paragraphs from a text for later reference:) Solomon: "While other people are going to the gym, you're doing heavy lifting."

I failed my SOC yesterday. Again. This time by one second, instead of three. =(

Completed myORD quiz 3 months in advance. w00t!

Ran 21km at East Coast Park. Afterwards, I rested my head on a table at Carl's Jr and puked 100plus and glucose water into a plastic bag.

Two of my bunkmates (Bin, Han) are members of my country club! It seems my Saturday morning swims have been "too early" for chance meetings.

Semi-coerced into my first karaoke session... but I'm liking it! Turns out I like my disembodied voice more than the one I hear inside me.

Dining and snacks
I've discovered that plain yoghurt (a misnomer: it's sour!) works as a healthier, low-fat substitute for cream cheese in PB&J sandwiches.

Celebrated mum's b-day with spicy pork sausages, melt-in-your-mouth baked potato and juicy rosti at Paulaner Bräuhaus, near Suntec.

Glugged a Baileys Irish Cream on the rocks at the Esplanade, at my dad's behest. Turns out I'm a happy drunk! ^^

BreadTalk's green tea muffin has the musty fragrance and crumbly consistency of Play Doh left out to harden. (No kidding - it's uncanny!)

Plain porridge is tasty! Why would anyone want to sully that with condiments?

Dictionazism
Myf noted (via Jared Diamond) that "politically popular" is more accurately phrased than "politically correct". Guys, update your diction!

Isn't an excuse tantamount to a valid reason not to do sth? At what point did "that's NOT an excuse" mutate into "that's JUST an excuse"?

Existentialist/academic musings
We may not feel this until we're older, but the Aughts ('00s) are our generation's decade, from 9/11 to Obama and then beyond...

We busy folk thrive on content, but for my dementia-ridden grandma, every moment is like a scene plucked from a dream, bereft of context.

The evidence leaves us agnostic: hence when we choose our religion, we're picking the practices we wish to uphold! (Belief follows after.)

National events
inconversNation: Speakers had anecdotal evidence & vested interests. NTU president: "Can't speak for our education system, but NTU rocks!" They're not researchers, they're businessmen! Let them talk abt their experiences, don't hog-tie them to academic topics!

IndigNation: S'pore govt's illiberal pragmatism → liberalising of the arts → foreign-made films w gay content / S'pore gay self-expression. Hong Kong has gay rights (govt-imposed to slow Tiananmen-propelled emigration) but less social acceptance; S'pore has the opp.

National Day Parade '09: Creative director (Ivan Heng), visual FX director (Brian Gothong Tan), scriptwriter (Alfian Sa'at): second-class citizens celebrating citizenship. huh.

Random links
Are packrats animists? http://bit.ly/16usSF; IKEA's snarky rejoinder: http://bit.ly/puaFZ

Tales of a homeless father and daughter in The Sims 3: http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog... literally: http://bit.ly/5ECwG

Decent deals
Bought "The Little Black Book of Books" (1000 key moments/figures in 1900s literature) for $9.57 after 50% off @ Harris, Jurong Point!

4 spice jars (Rajtan, 150ml) at IKEA for $3.90; great for door gifts!

9:00pm: Twitter Consolidation
Lately I've been hanging out at Twitter (username: colinlowyc), whose 140-character limit, in enforcing pithiness, encouraged me to write more in fewer words. This is opposed to LiveJournal, whose blank "Post an Entry" fields have proved more daunting than liberating. Here are my cranial oozings from the last month, organised by their vague topics, with some conjoining and chronological swapping for added coherence:

Hanging out at LaSalle
No point to live music if you can't see them play! I'd love for The Observatory to weave its sonic textures around a proper narrative next. The Life! arts journalists ended up rating Invisible Room as the S'pore Arts Fest's Best Test of Endurance. xD

Charm and I lay next to each other on the LaSalle turf and gazed up at the canopy. Security uncle told us to please sit up, there are CCTVs.

Attended Short+Sweet S'pore 2009, a festival of ten 10-minute local plays, at LaSalle last night with Charm and two ex-ACJC blokes. Charm breathlessly whispered each new plot twist: incestuous siblings, former sex professionals, straight-boy crushes who turn out gay...
#4: 7 RULES, a taut reversal of 7 mafia rules by a rising assassin on the kingpin enforcing them, sullied by a comic-relief waitress.
#3: BIRTHDAY SURPRISES, warm in the company of old friends, shared song and memories; cruel at the notion of time passed too assuredly by.
#2: LOVE & ROBBERY, a Bollywood-tinged farce of a guy and girl who meet-cute over trivial acts of misanthropy while held hostage in a bank.
#1: THE FRUITS OF WAR, a side-splitting, fruit-splattering saga of escalation between a dark-skinned girl and the boy who ignores her.

Movies
Watched Ang Lee's THE WEDDING BANQUET in the wee hours before booking in for COS duty this morning. Queer domesticity warms my soft heart.

BOYS DON'T CRY: Rural America? Boring + treacherous. Avoid!
THE WEDDING BANQUET: Urban America? Work stress + domestic bliss. Avoid parents!

RATATOUILLE: Anyone (who can reconstruct whole recipes from scratch with just a whiff) can cook.

TAKEN: dooming teenagers worldwide to clampdowns on travel by their paranoid parents, who believe that kidnappers lie at every foreign turn.

Must rent THE SUM OF US ('94) as part of my crusade to hunt down and watch queer movies that err on the side of overtolerance.

Also, gotta try REVOLUTIONARY ROAD in silence, on Charm's recommendation.

INDY JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE: Sturdy pulp movie, with stars (Ford, Connery, Phoenix) that knew they were stars, and how to act as stars.

Verdict on the 007 tussle: CASINO ROYALE proved that Daniel Craig was a great find; DUPLICITY proves that Clive Owen was the better fit.

National Service
Cookhouse uncle blessed my future teaching career. Gestures like these remind me that we don't need God to be grateful for what we have.

Pillaged apples from the cookhouse fridge for dinner. So, heh, it could be said that I'm detoxing on public funds.

I'm now a platoon sergeant to 20 men. A fellow 3SG dubbed me "sergeant mama" because most of them are fiercely protective of me.

Having become a platoon sergeant, I know now why my ex-teacher cringed when we then-students spotted her with her fiance at KAP.

I live as though my worlds (family, NS, academia, romance) don't overlap. Perhaps I have no other choice.

L.L. tried to guilt-trip me into extending his book-in time so they could cut his dad's birthday cake. I told him to stuff it.

In the army, my words have grown artless. This scares me when I have nothing to hide behind, and comforts me when I have nothing to fear.

The worst way to spend any chapter of your life is to wait for it to be over.

Potential post-ORD plans: the Gibbon Experience in Laos (http://www.gibbonx.org).

Dining and snacks
Crispy chicken linguine (aglio olio) with nori + iced lemon tea + chocolate truffle cake for $15.50 at Ambush, Taka B2.

Chicken kebab for $5.50 at Sultan Kebab, Peace Centre; then silky soya beancurd for 60¢ along Selegie Rd.

The new Pringles Extreme: Blazin' Buffalo Wing Super Stack offers Tabasco-tinged chips for $3.95!

Random thoughts
Off-centre phrases of the day: "provoke harmony", "ceramic bafflement".

Laymen tend to use "momentum" as the converse of "inertia", as though the latter only describes a tendency to persistent INaction.

You know what would be a great name for a university? AFAIK!

4:15pm: Not a prison for privilege

Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.

- Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

Ten months into my army life, I feel the need to re-assert my misgivings about those adolescent issues that often surface in the midst of all this military drudge work: the existential crises; the fears about college, work and lost friends; the rage at the systemic abuse of our personal time. Winding through a near-silent camp grounds to our barracks one night, Bingqian asked me how I could be so chipper all the time. He said he had wondered how, in junior college, I could lie belly-down across a public bench to read a novel, oblivious to averted glances; and he said he wondered now why the army didn't seem to sap my enthusiasm, even though it offers few good reasons to be enthused. We spend a lot of time on small sacrifices now, to prove that we can afford them in an improbable war. We heave dummy loads. We slap on camouflage cream. We swipe at mosquitoes. We get grazed, and bruised, and slathered in sweat and mud and self-doubt. Worse, we have to put up with insufferable superiors, who are either smugly assured that even the time allotted to us for rest can be snatched away, or too absorbed with themselves and their omnivorous standards to notice.

"Partly it's just my disposition," I replied, quashing the niggling voice that protested that I did resent all those things, and that they often deflated my enthusiasm. Because I did believe that I was still happier than most people -- at least I wanted to believe it, since it made me feel special -- and so readily applied myself to the puzzle of why this was the case. I recalled how my boyfriend had noted that most people tread and retread the same paths in life, for all its endless variety, because they are hard-wired to react to certain situations in a given way: perhaps mine is to accept that life doesn't owe a coherent meaning to anyone, and pointless adversity is part of its complex tapestry.

I wonder how my army mates do it, other than by burying themselves in resignation or denial. Some of them complain at their peers, and when I once asked what the point is if your complaint isn't reaching anyone who could help to change your lot, one answered that it didn't matter -- it was a perfectly useful coping mechanism. But then it strikes me how much of this complaint stems from privilege, from the underlying assumption that you should be doing in life whatever it is you want to and are good at, rather than this soldiering thing that you've been forced into.

It reminds me of the people who can't simply bear it out to that fateful two-year mark, because they lack the money or smarts or the opportunity afforded by being born to the right parents in this country. When we were swabbing the interior of our vehicle, my driver once asked me "Why did you choose JC over poly?", as though it were a choice people had to think about. I listened to Clifford, one of my men, boast about the daring schemes they hatched in their childhood days to shoplift tote-bagfuls of Ferrero Rocher, or frozen meats for a barbeque, not for their inability to pay but simply for the thrills of it. When I expressed my admiration for their ease at such dangerous thrill-seeking, he replied, "Aiyah, sergeant, we live in different worlds mah." And I recalled that starless night we were waiting in an abandoned built-up area for our bus to arrive, and my staff sergeant asked us if we had any questions. One of us ventured, "Staff, what do you see for your future in the army?" My staff sergeant kicked at a pebble as he paced, and after a moment's silence, he said, in a subdued voice: "Don't ask that sort of question, lah."

These are the stories you miss, in the towers that meritocracy built.

(P.S. Sorry about the length. This is my post-JC rebellion against the influences of The Economist and my KI teacher, and marks my new influences of Dr Nick Davis, Pauline Kael, and a certain president-elect that needs no linkage.)

7:53pm: To our skyscraper-lined T-shirts (and minds), which never really caught on
The suspicion began when Miss Letchmi popped up on MSN Messenger, asking for "feedback from ex-iSpark boys". iSpark was our high school's name for the gifted education programme (GEP), a nationwide model that bundled "intellectually gifted" kids in classes and expanded their curriculum. Its aims were to deter these kids from mediocrity, indifference or disruptiveness in a normal class (where they lacked mental stimulation); and nurture them as "resources" for Singapore.

When I complied, she told me that the Ministry of Education would use the feedback to get a sense of the chances for interaction between gifted and normal kids. I smelt a rat – the harmless façade of an MSN conversation had roots in the ministry? The topic of choice signalled (to my paranoid self, at least) that the ministry wanted a reason to wipe out the GEP, and if the lack of interaction with other students was that, it would take it.

After all, this was the programme that sparked a furore in the Today newspaper forum over the elitism and ostracism it encouraged. With the advent of the Integrated Programme, that allows entire schools to bypass the O-level exams (but raises the selectiveness of these schools), I expected that the elitism of the GEP would be replaced by this other. I was right.

The GEP is dead.

I have qualms about having told her that I hardly interacted with mainstream kids in high school, and liked things that way. The GEP kept me in a bubble for seven years, and fed my belief that the world loved quirks and intelligence. I don't think this elitism was a bad thing, for the reverse made humanity bleaker and far more depressing. Cast into the mainsteam in junior college (where no GEP exists), and noticing a stark difference in talent between ex-gifted kids and the rest, proved this. Getting shunted to the top of the class killed my motivation, since I had always had someone to aspire to, but was left suddenly with nothing. In the GEP, the cream of the crop bested themselves. Outside it, they were always "good enough".

At one point, I became so desperate that I flirted with dropping physics (a subject that I was secure in) for the humanities programme (HP) classes, in a bid for the same atmosphere that filled the GEP. For the HP is similar to the GEP, more than any other programme in junior college. For one, it is isolated from the cohort – where most classes settle on benches, leaving their bags there during breaks, the HP classes are given an air-con room each – much like how our GEP classrooms were rarely in the same building as the mainstream classes. For another, the people are much the same, having hailed from the GEP in high school, and they seemed to have imported the lively and charismatic mood, and that sense of challenge. They were ostracised, but that I could handle, having dealt with coming out to myself in secondary two. The GEP, for one, bonded more strongly due to it, like soldiers against an unjust commander. Still, the decision would have been wrong, but that illustrates further how addicted I was to that environment.

A case could be made that the GEP was a drug – intense and fleeting, but unhealthy – and that I shouldn't escape the humdrum of reality. Yet the more books I read, films I watch, and plays I see, the more I find this conception of the world as a boring place is narrow and wrong. The world holds genius, and the GEP was only the tip of that iceberg – and maybe not even that. Singaporean students need to try harder, and we needn't bend for them.

Thankfully, I settled for a better place, in my present knowledge and inquiry (KI) class. KI is a mixture of philosophy and critical thinking, and at times, lessons rage with heated debates over the veracity of one argument over another. Already it has taught me a clearer sense of structure, and with The Economist it has encouraged the cleanliness of my style and speech. Impressive for only the first year of its execution. Ironic that, in two years, we should have to witness an execution of a different type.

I can't believe I told Miss Letchmi that the GEP should be removed in name, if for the prejudice that surrounds the label alone. It pleads blindness to the differences that separate us, and that would be wrong. I should know that, being part of a minority group. Miss Letchmi did mention how we should not ignore Indians by pretending they don't exist. Yet is that analogy proper? I told her, then, that it didn't mean we should segregate the Indians from other races if we noticed they differed. Truth is, I don't know if the GEP was for better or worse. But I care for what it stood for.

Now in junior college, I seek comfort in KI. Back in high school, iSpark may be affected minimally, since it is school-based and out of the ministry's reach. Yet this new phase of education in Singapore will chug on, leaving the GEP behind. And I can't help but feel that a piece of history will be missed.



Follow-up

7:38pm: My (not very) graphic (but rather) novel escapades
In a corner of Jurong Regional Library is a bookshelf stocked with comic books, none of which are in order. Scan the shelves, and you can spot the different volumes in Frank Miller's Sin City series scattered everywhere but on the shelf labeled "MIL". As you can tell, this makes locating any book a total bitch. Worse, the library staff has given up on this kippleized nightmare; yesterday, I watched in horror as one of them stuffed a handful of Japanese manga in the lacuna of the English section.

One day, I shall banish every book from that shelf and replace them as they were intended. I suspect it will spiritually resemble a scene from a Batman comic -- with myself attempting to restore order, the police trying to curb my vigilante justice, and none of the citizens giving a damn. Oy vey.

Nonetheless, I have managed to plough through a primer in graphic novels:

Watchmen by Alan Moore
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
Maus (vol 1) by Art Spiegelman
Sandman (vol 1 and 3) by Neil Gaiman

(Unfortunately, all copies of V For Vendetta have remained on loan since the film's release, neither vol 2 or 4 of Sandman are in the library catalogues, and I can't borrow my ex's copy of Maus vol 2 because n2greg has been hogging it for a year now.)

After the first two in that list, I am officially sick of Cold War themes. Up next: cold war!

***

Today, in a hearty "fuck you!" to the torrential rain, I cycled through it to return both The Dark Knight Returns and Sandman (vol 3) to my local library. To do so, I sheltered the bicycle basket with a retractable umbrella, clamping its edges between my thumbs and the handlebars, and started off.

However, along the way -- my glasses speckled with raindrops -- I failed to notice that the next segment of pavement was jutting higher than the current one. (You can probably guess what happened next.)

WHUMPH.

Out went my umbrella. And my handphone. And the two graphic novels.

With the rain pouring around me, I snatched the first two items, depositing them in the bicycle basket. Next I spotted The Dark Knight Returns; thankfully, both graphic novels had plastic jackets, so the damage to it was minimal. I returned it to my basket with the other two--

-- the other one. My umbrella was gone, blown away by the wind. And Sandman was nowhere in sight... when I noticed something residing in the drain.

Yup, my copy of Sandman had fallen into the drain, rainwater sluicing all over it -- and yet, for some reason, it was largely unscathed. I have little idea how this happened, but I praised the Lord for plastic bookjackets. With all but my umbrella recovered, I raced to the nearest void deck, soaked and cold.

At that point, my handphone beeped. It was an SMS from a friend: "Happy birthday, Colin!"

Ten seconds later, the rain stopped completely.

9:51pm: A short gripe
You don't know how sad it is when a hall of students laugh at our math lecturer when he pronounces "parabola" correctly.

(ETA: Granted, it's worse when he gets that right, but mispronounces everything else.)

10:48pm: Cycling in the neighbourhood, settling at the classbench
As I type this, some tented vaudeville for elderly folks is going on downstairs, and I am displeased by this intrusion on my night-time solitude, which I hold in highest regard. This tempts my inner brashness, but insofar as I have goodwill for humanity, I will maintain my self-control.

This evening, after the rain had stilled, I went cycling around the neighbourhood, a cathartic experience unrivalled by the same activity transposed to a park. Trips in residential areas are far more revealing: I passed office-workers with worn faces, aunties with grocery bags, children with a blindness for incoming bicycles, scolding parents of said children, and inevitably I felt more relaxed as I observed them from the distance afforded by my humble vehicle. No park can offer me this -- their constructed setting holds a place only for recreation-seekers, and the acknowledgement of such a purpose lowers me to a level where I am incapable of finding what I seek.

Of course, I realise that this is biased and largely psychosomatic, but this is my display of anti-establishment leanings in the vein of jez_hex declaring his reluctance for the social conventions of hunting romance (aka Project Twenty-One, or "half of the meaning of life", as he puts it). Well wishes for his endeavours, and may V For Vendetta incite post-film conversation for him unlike my own experience, wherein my companion ancal clammed up after offering his single-sentence summary of the film ("It's about social revolution without the social!").

In other news, I have concluded my subject-combo escapades by settling on Physics, Math, Economics and KI, which has reaped various effects:

1. Classmates in Charmaine and Qintan, girls with most cheery and optimistic dispositions, as well as dementist_xer0x, whose gloominess and evil are buffered by his cynical intelligence. As the last of them points out, my social dysfunction impedes me from interacting with all my new classmates, but nevertheless I am succeeding better than I did in S6H.


2. Knowledge and Inquiry, in which we read people like Descartes and Hume (or pretend to when we don't get them, then wait for the lesson-time summary) and then discuss philosophical issues in class! It makes up for the vibrance and intellectual challenge that I missed from GP, not to mention that our tutor Mr Melvyn Lim is vested in the entire affair. Also, it has offered me another stab at writing a paper, and this time with fewer creative limitations than I was comfortable with in the major research papers of high school.


3. Dropping of Literature, which I regret slightly because Mr Augie Wong has grown more comfortable in his teacher's skin, and has become a pretty decent teacher. This is remedied because the gaping hole in my timetable, left by my classmates flocking to Chemistry, accords me the freedom to crash his tutorials! Other than that, I am glad to have rid myself of the subject, which I dislike as a student because I cannot perform well in essays when the text fails to move me, and that is threatening to my grades. This is not helped by the prescribed texts - postcolonial Indian novel The Guide and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi - to which I am lukewarm.


4. Unfortunate tendencies of girls in my class to have atypical reactions to my sexual orientation, which is not helped by dementist_xer0x's divulging of it. Generally, though, I just walk into these situations. -_-||

Overall, much yay, excluding instances like number 4.

10:10pm: The problem is choice
I can't believe this dilemma is rearing its grotesque head again, with the impending release of the GCE O Level exam results. hongyu has barefacedly tried to lure me into applying for the Humanities Programme, and I can't deny that I am tempted. But little has changed since I picked the science stream last year, apart from the acquisition of my experiences in it so far, and the dilemma still remains. It lies in the dichotomous nature of the arts and sciences in our academic system, particularly troubling for me since I have inclinations to specific disciplines in both, but I can only select one track. Even if I should choose inaction, I will still be ridding myself of certain failsafes, so it makes sense to evaluate and choose those I am more willing to shed. But gosh, am I stumped.

When I entered the science stream, one thing that struck me painfully was how lacking the atmosphere was compared to that with my erstwhile classmates in the (unofficially dubbed) "humanities class". Given some of their responses this year, I'm convinced that only the Humanities Programme classes can match that former vivacity, if not surpass it. I hold no contempt for that familiarity, having seen the dreary offerings elsewhere - and having fans of Quoridor (and other quaint intellectual pursuits) in your immediate vicinity helps, too.

And I despise the pigeonholing that I have been facing - I have been labelled a mugger, simply because I'm lugging a book around much of the time, and this apparently confers upon me mystical qualities of excellence in all my subjects, and oratory skills to be feared. Well, nada. The only benefit from this is that it gives me license to skulk and indulge in a few eccentricities. But I'd rather have classmates from whom I can learn, and with whom I can discuss subjects of interest without them being waved off as "too cheem" simply because I pursue them - even if I were to feel intimidated in the process (since, as I have been told, I get easily intimidated anyway).

My first problem with the Humanities Programme, though, is its prerequisite subject combination of H2 Literature, and a further two H2 subjects chosen from among Geography, History, Economics and Chinese Literature. H2 Economics would be a lock since I already read it, but I am ambivalent about the other subject choice. This leaves me with three more points for other subjects - most likely Knowledge & Inquiry, which would place my combination on par with everyone else.

But here lies the rub: with such a combination, I would have entirely shut myself out of the science department in university, since I need to read both mathematics and a science to qualify. KI removes any points to do so; without it, the tripartite of math, science and GP atop my three H2 humanities subjects would slay me.

My second problem lies inherent in the system of choosing subjects. See, I have little confidence in actually getting into the Humanities Programme despite my efforts - my creds are near-absent, I will be rushing to scout for testimonials at this late juncture, and when the superior dementist_xer0x couldn't make the first cut into HP at the year's inception, I'm certain that I can't, either. And it is likely that, should I not make it into HP, the administration will simply shunt me into a peripheral class in the arts stream, and dump upon me the subject combination I wanted to read if I managed to get in.

However, HP and its benefits (the most appealing of which I have mentioned above) are the motivation for my selecting these subjects - were I not to head down that path, I would much rather have a subject combination that better reflects my pursuit of the sciences evermore. This would most likely be KEMP or LEMP, similar to my current combination. Alas, I fear that the administration may not be as flexible as to accomodate such a varying choice.

Oy vey. :(