Song and Glance

I'm spending this weekend in the ancestral place--originally I had two items on the agenda, which were 1. get a haircut and 2. get the car door hammered back into place (I put a rather bad gouge in it while leaving church a few weeks ago, which has a rather straight and narrow gate that opens pretty much directly onto a ditch--the city planners have some things to answer for--and it's been on the To Fix list for awhile now); so far I've only managed to get the haircut, because apparently mechanics don't work very reliably after 11am on Saturday and I couldn't get hold of the family people who know mechanics before 11am.

But this is going to be less of a what-I-did post and more of a what-I-think post, though the things I think are brought on by weird things that happen while I do things... so it'll be a bit of both, really...

"Let us converse."

I've been acclimatising quite well, I think, to work and life and the people at the local church, though not without a few hiccups along the way; I've made a few adjustments to the way I go about my business that seem to be working out quite well, I'm making friends at church, and my life is going along relatively smoothly, if rather occasionally being full of aches and pains and general oddity.

Last Sunday, for example, when I went and played badminton for a couple hours with a bunch of the people from church, and decided that the great thing about playing sports with people is that you get some idea of their personality from the way they play. I, for example, play way beyond my expected endurance because the other guy seems to be enjoying beating me down even if I haven't played in two years and am already gasping in side-splitting pain, and I gloat a great deal when I win, but do it politely; some of the others take the game as an opportunity to give a sort of running tutorial, and so forth. I found it quite enjoyable for the most part, apart from the resulting soreness; and I got a reminder after the whole thing was over about my tendency to be less than perfectly prepared--I'd expected to drink about 1liter of water throughout the entire thing, but ended up drinking a fair bit more than that and was quite fortunate that other people had gone and bought water from the store at the badminton courts (which, I must say, had horribly jacked up their prices to nearly extortionist levels) and didn't mind me taking a few gulps; and I also forgot to make sure my car keys were with me, and again was extremely fortunate (thank God for small miracles!) that they had fallen into the bag of the guy in whose car I was riding--to save petrol everybody had carpooled as much as possible--and he'd noticed but left them in on the off chance that they might be useful.

And they were, very much so.

All the same one feels a distinct... cultural difference, at least; maybe I'm just being oversensitive to these things, or maybe I'm a lot less Malaysian than I should be (though, I must say, "being Malaysian" is a very difficult thing to define indeed), or something. This was particularly brought home to me on Sunday evening, after badminton; I and several people (most of whom had also gone to badminton, which is how I got invited along) went to a local karaoke place, apparently one of the most popular in the area--which should mean it would have the best local selections of songs, right?

(I should note at this point that I have been to karaokes before, in Spore, and my thoughts here are very much the same about those, except more, if you get the idea.)

I think karaokes could be greatly improved by having websites on which they provided information like a list of songs (arranged by language or performer or whatever, similar to iTunes in layout perhaps) that they had available, and made them available in advance: they have online booking services, don't they? Might as well have a playlist of maybe three or four songs ready for when the party arrives and then the singing can start immediately without everybody wanting to let everybody else choose the first song. That way you could also see in advance whether the karaoke had the songs you wanted to sing, and you could submit suggestions on bands or songs you thought would be a good addition--I don't know where karaokes source for their tracks and videos, but it would be nice. And all this is because on Sunday night I went with a bunch of people to the karaoke, and I was (I think) the only person there who knew nothing at all about Mandarin songs and instead knew a whole bunch of relatively (over here) unknown English performers and didn't like the more well-known and popular performers, due to always paying attention to lyrics.

And that led to the other people picking songs about angsty, pale, too-thin people starving to death in isolation on an island full of dead trees while the corpse of their presumable ex floated downstream accompanied by withered branches and leaves, and me looking back and forth at the song list that was all too devoid of performers like Scissor Sisters or Plain White T's or Jonathan Coulton and settling for the Beatles' O-Bla-Di-O-Bla-Da. And then getting weird looks from everybody else. And then realising that, if I'd had the choice (and had picked) Maxwell's Silver Hammer, I'd be getting even weirder looks. And from then on all my songs were Michael Jackson (and the MV had not got subtitles, which says something about the target demographic of that karaoke chain) or Green Day (which got me weird looks again) or SCANDAL (and the subtitles were in kanji instead of romanji which rendered the song unsingable). It's probably a good thing, usually, to stand out from the crowd, even if hippies have made that much less desirable than it would usually be; but at karaokes the whole idea is to get everybody singing together instead of getting people looking at you in wide-eyed wonder and then having them later on comment "...well, you've sure got unique taste, don't you".

This was later expanded on by my senior officer, because the whole department goes out for lunch together (we're that small a department) and I happened to mention that I'd gone for a three-hour karaoke session, though most of it was spent listening rather than singing. And then she commented on a favourite artiste of hers, later on after lunch in the office, and I said I didn't know who that was. Upon which she went "how can you not know X, she is pretty and has a wonderful voice" and I shrugged and tried to grin sheepishly, which probably didn't have the mollifying effect I intended for it to have.

At the moment I don't know if this disparity in musical tastes (the only English songs they picked out were things from the Pussycat Dolls and GLEE, which is worrying) is emblematic of some deeper difference that'll be a problem later on in getting to know them better; I've already swathed myself in enough commitments here that I don't want to just up and leave. But the fact that the idea has already occurred to me is telling. Not that I'll be telling any of them any of this, of course; if they've been observant enough to notice then they'll either ask or wait for more information, and if they aren't then there's no need to stir things up.

(My father is convinced that I'm some kind of miracle people-reader at the moment, I think, since he keeps tending to ask my opinion of people we've both only just recently met. I haven't any idea of whether he wants a second opinion on his first impressions or if he wants to be corroborated or if it's something else he wants. Still, it's nice to be able to talk to him and feel like I'm actually contributing something to the conversation--and this being a fairly neutral topis of discussion there's no problem with us both dragging out the big guns.)

In other news, I'm going through my second root canal; the root canal proper was completed last Tuesday evening, and the next two visits to the dentist's will be for the crowning, which Wikipedia assures me increases the lifespan of the now-dead tooth by up to six times, which is rather enticing even if it does take a quarter of my salary.