Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

Revolve Around Office

2012-01-06T21:37:00.000+08:00

There are times, like now, when I wonder if I’ve ever been really competent at anything in my life. Not to say I’ve not been able to do some things well, and enjoy doing them; I’ve managed to win two NaNoWriMos in a row even if I’ve never been able to make it to the celebratory gatherings, and I still retain a little (very little) of my ability at the piano, and every now and then I even say something witty that I hadn’t just read somewhere and was waiting for an opportunity to use. But I never seem, come to think of it, to really have been good at whatever it was that I was being expected to do.

At least, I don’t think I was ever a good student. And now, even three months after starting work and having been confirmed as a passable worker, I don’t think I’m anything like my own definition of competent. It’s possibly personality; the way I think bleeds over into the way I work, and there’s very little I can do to stop it; the same goes for my co-workers, of course. My senior is the slow, methodical type, and given a blank slate the first thing she would do would be to get all the documents to prove that somebody had been authorised to give it to her and had got all the documents in place, signed and stamped and filed, and even then she would insist on getting emails to say what she was supposed to be doing with it and who was going to verify that she’d done with it what she was supposed to. Which is all very admirable, even if it sounds rather horrible (I’m always afraid that someday she’ll ask me what I think of her, and I’ll say she’s very slow and very careful and asks a lot of questions and she’ll take it as an insult). I’m not quite like that; I seem to be the kind of person who likes a sort of idea of how things work and why and what makes them tick and go and stop, which may mean I’m a rather weird fit for the position I occupy but does mean that when it comes to generating documentation and data I’m quite proficient. Which my boss said, when I asked for her opinion of my performance—that I’m terribly careless and I tend to just tell people what I’d like, very nicely so as not to stress them out, and then what I want doesn’t happen because people forget things when not reminded constantly; but I do generate wonderful documents.

I’m just being a little depressed today, maybe. It’s been a rough couple of days at work, what with things going wonky with various things that really shouldn’t be going wrong and all sorts of sudden changes and bits of news and things; just yesterday there were at least four different crises that came up over the course of the day, and today two of those crises just went on unsolved and another couple popped up and the upshot of the whole thing was that I was blamed for responding wrongly to a couple of crises (one from last week and one from three weeks ago), though the blame was probably at least slightly deserved since I ought to have noticed and told somebody. It’s just that one of the hardest lessons to learn is that one should never trust one’s own judgment, even when independence is supposedly a valuable trait, and one has to keep on telling other people when things are going wrong or else one gets flak for covering up stuff. It’s a lesson I’m still learning.

Not that work is entirely a vale of tears; I do enjoy it, which I thank God for. The co-workers are great people and I’d much rather they chew me out than just shrug their shoulder in silent resignation and deal with everything and slowly reduce me to the level of my abilities—at which point I’d never grow more; the work is challenging and fun, and every now and then there are assignments or situations that force me to be all creative or clever or something and those are fun too. And then every now and then one gets unexpected little compliments or things and that tends to brighten the day up a bit. But work does take something out of one: energy, at the very least. I don’t know how anybody manages to both work and manage a family; when they ask if I feel lonely at nights the natural first response is to wonder where I’d have the time or energy to do anything of the sort when I constantly leave the office after seven and sleep by eleven, with chores and computer games and videos and books to occupy me.

…posts like these are, I think, the main reason I will never ever add anybody from the office on Facebook. Google+, maybe, but not Facebook, just in case they get a curious streak and go reading through my posts; it would do weirdness to my reputation.

My self-consolation strategies are simple, though; I sit and eat and read and listen to music or play a game and eventually go to sleep. It’s probably not very healthy, but there’s something comforting about just sitting around and having somebody croon something soft and slow and sad over my laptop speakers while I munch on something sweet. Though I’ve stopped eating dinner more than twice a week, after reading somewhere that if one is an office worker then one can jolly well survive on two meals a day or less. It saves time and money at least. Tomorrow I’ll probably go swimming—get out to the pool around five and sit around in the pool soaking up water ‘til eight and drive back with cramps in both legs or something; I’ll need to buy goggles though, since I lost my old pair somewhere.

Sleep is a very valuable thing these days.

The Wanted Nail

2011-12-19T20:24:00.002+08:00

It's raining again. I think that's appropriate, even if it's not terribly comfortable; I like rain more than I like the sun, but I'd rather have a little of each than a whole lot of just one. As it is, it's constantly cooling and sleep comes easy, but the laundry will probably never quite dry out and certainly will never have that particular smell that comes from having been in the sun all day. I actually don't know how that smell comes about; I think it'd be an easy experiment to conduct, but a quick Google search says that apparently the smell is ambient pollution. I'm not too sure on that.

I'm a little... higgledy-piggledy inside, at the moment. There's not really a terrible lot of stuff to be done at work before the long Christmas weekend kicks in, but it'll be a welcome break; work's not proceeding terribly smoothly for me at the moment. I suppose one part of it is that I'm more trusting of people than I ought to be--which is to say that since I put a fair bit of importance on trying to do what I promise, I tend to assume people will actually carry out the things they say they will... which, of course, is a bad assumption. (I remain staunch in my conviction that anybody who tries the "makes an ass of" line will feel my best attempt to hand their ass to them.) So today was like that, somewhat... stuff happened that I needed somebody to do, and pointed them at it and let them wander off to find somebody to do it with (because apparently it was a two-person task) and when they couldn't find anybody else they didn't tell me, and the long and short of it was that three hours later it still wasn't done and it was my fault that something originally minor blew up into a massive horror, because I hadn't been there every step of the way to make sure they did what I wanted them to do. It got me a long lecture on how I ought to have learnt from the last time and been more frantic about the urgency of the stuff I wanted done.

It's probably a good lesson to learn; that I do need sometimes to not assume whatever other people are doing is more important or urgent than what I want them to do for me, and to just make them do it--more important to get the job done than to always be the nice mild-mannered man, I suppose.

Other things I'm learning? I'm learning the temperaments of the people I work with--not that they're complete strangers to me, not any more (although I still never recognise the voice of the GM on the intercom and keep mistaking him for other people, which if I'm lucky he'll just shrug off as a running in-joke), but there's nothing like stress and pressure to show up people's colours. So far it looks like the second-youngest guy in the office (I hold the strange position of being the youngest) tends to catastrophise, while my senior tends to micromanage and worry; the manager apparently goes for comfort food, since the last two times I saw her really angry she also ended up going out of the way for nicer-than-usual food. Personally I just withdraw, which isn't difficult since I live mostly in my own head all the time, but isn't a good thing since distancing myself from the problem doesn't help me solve and avoid the next iteration. It's probably a needful pain, this whole business. And then, of course, I vent here, which is about as safe as it gets since none of my colleagues are friends with me on Facebook or MSN, and nobody I know on either of those is likely to know my colleagues well enough to tell 'em.

But then my life is full of needful pains, I think. Even now my shoulders and thighs ache from the swim I had on Saturday--the first I've had in three months, and I've lost my goggles somewhere and so all Sunday my eyes were sore from chlorine--and my wallet's hurting from my expenses because I never expected fillings and new pants to be quite so costly--and of course there was all that trouble I went to to get to this point at all, and I'll be unmentionable if I let it go now that I've got it.

The GM asked me what I liked about the job, and I said the people and its stability. And then he asked me to define those... "The people" was easy enough. I get along relatively well, I think, with the others--although of course it's entirely possible that they're just hiding their intense dislike of me deep enough, and I'm oblivious enough to not notice--but "stability"? For come to think of it, there really isn't very much of that in the job... every week is a new game of "fix the bugs", of rushing to get things done before the schedule steamrollers over everything, of trying to get business done as usual in the middle of all the little weirdnesses that pop up. No, it's not a stable place. Rhythmic, perhaps. Or predictable? for every time things seem to be going well, something comes along to upset the apple cart, and so every week is a sinusoid of up and down and smooth and rough.

He Whose heart is kind beyond all measure

Gives unto each day what He deems best

Lovingly, its part of pain and pleasure

Mingling toil with peace and rest.

It's one of the lines I like best. You just can't find writing like that these days.

...in other news, I went to the local church this Sunday with the boss and her (fiance? boyfriend?) and made a number of new friends. It was very enjoyable, especially because one of them speaks good English (and horrible Chinese, just like me!) and another is a fan of manga and Final Fantasy and we bonded in mutual hate for every arc since Soul Society of Bleach. And fanboyed over Hunter x Hunter and Fullmetal Alchemist and One Piece. And another thing I learned was that apparently the tune of "Frosty the Snowman" was put to a Christian Christmas song in Mandarin, which made me snicker a bit. But it was a good time, and I think I'll quite like it there. I'll only be there regularly next year onwards, though--Christmastime I'll be in Singapore, and I'll spend New Year's with the ancestral folks since I've got some administrative car-related matters to take care of down there.

Fire, Fire Sabot

2011-12-06T22:46:00.000+08:00

Today is not a good day to be me. Admittedly neither was yesterday, nor was last Saturday or Friday or Thursday; we would save a fair bit of time by simply admitting outright that my days have not gone well for nearly a whole week, and it’s a mishmash of my fault and others’; but mostly mine. I suppose it’s a mercy I’ve had two uneventful months of steady slow peaceful working, and it’s only now (in the last month of my three-month probation period at this job) that these challenges are piling on and turning into a crisis; at the same time I wish there were no need for such events to occur. But let us go back and trace everything from its root cause.

Work has been going quite swimmingly, apart from the odd worry or two about timings and things like that; perhaps those should have been an early warning system to me, because even odd worries become signs of danger when they pop up during a period when one’s hands are supposed to be being held by one’s senior officer while one acclimatises. But my faults are many and my accomplishments are few, and so those worries came and went and I tried to get better. Perhaps not quickly enough, or not better enough to achieve the standard at which I ought to be already; my temperament is turning out to be more the plodding kind that slowly feels around the edges of things and does best when things change only a little, and not the explosive fiery kind that vaults towards and over challenges with snorting nostrils. I don’t know. But I digress…

Adjusting to working life has been both fast and slow. I’ve adjusted fairly easily to living on my own and providing my own meals and driving and doing my laundry by hand and occasionally even mopping the floor of the house that I live in; I’ve never yet needed to wash the car because of the daily torrential rains, but I shall soon need to pay my first road tax ever; the personal side of things seems to be falling easily enough into place, even if I am still effectively friendless here (apart from such friendliness as I receive from the colleagues). It’s the professional side of things that’s going a little more bumpily; maybe I started off somewhat well, since most of the people in the company know that my father is friends with the CEO; maybe that caused them to expect more of me than they would have of other fresh graduates; maybe it caused them to have lower expectations of me. I worry a lot about other people’s expectations, mostly because I have so few of my own. So I’ve tried to learn as much as I can and remember and do and work as well as I can; maybe I could do it better if I tried harder, or changed my approach, or something. In any case I’m learning to live with sudden changes and rushing people (and being rushed by people), and even though the environment is so quick and so malleable I still need patience and carefulness and all sorts of things. It seems rather a self-contradicting sort of demand, doesn’t it? There’s certainly a lot to adjust to in any case: languages, because Mandarin and Malay are far from my first languages; people, all of whom are strangers to me and all of whom I still don’t quite fathom; work, because (as I mentioned) I need to be both fast and responsive, and yet slow and steady and patient, and I haven’t quite struck the balance between the two; and the various demands of my personal life, such as they are: a church to go to, friends to sit around with, doctors and dentists for the inevitable breakdowns of my body, places to buy groceries and the various little miscellanies of life. And two months has just sped by so quickly that I hardly feel as if I’m ready for anything.

Responsibility is a heavy thing to bear, especially responsibility for other people. I’m a purchasing officer and therefore rather in the forefront of the supply chain; what this means is that mistakes that I make don’t tend to show their effects until it’s too late to easily fix them. Like a couple weeks ago, when I asked for a delivery to be delayed, and then forgot about it; in the meantime circumstances changed and it was nearly too late for the delivery to be brought forward in time to meet our needs. I never before was responsible for so many other people; at the very most, one or two perhaps, in university… It causes one to understand, at least, why it’s desirable to have been in a position of leadership in extracurricular things: they’re a safe place to fail, though failure even there is (these days) becoming serious. And then today I was basically the point of failure in three different chains of information transfer, in three different ways—one by misreading an Excel file, one by confusing two different items with each other, and one by simple forgetfulness—and when combined with last week’s failure to anticipate the shortage due to the delayed delivery, my record is very tarnished indeed. It does not thrill the heart to be asked by one’s manager if one could possibly make any worse mistakes.

It’s a mercy I’m here really. In any other place I would probably turn tail and run—take the next three days off to sit at home and lick my wounds, stew in self-pity and fear and worry—if I lived in the ancestral home I would actually be encouraged to do that. That’s kindness, of course: alleviate the suffering due to happenings at work by avoiding the work (and therefore the suffering). But as it is I’ve nowhere to run but forward; be the path ever so thorny and twisted and dark, I still have to go on because I have no good path of retreat; I’ve gone through so much trouble to get where I am that I might as well go through trouble to stay here. And at least I know where I’m likely to fail again, since I’ve failed before (and in such a variety of modes, too!); and the room for improvement seems to have a few extensions thrown on every day. The thought came to me earlier that God would be a very convenient target for abuse at this juncture. After all it is, to a great extent, His fault (so to speak) that I’m in this position (or indisposition, to make a terrible pun); He brought me here and opened the way, and now the way has led into a valley of shouting and miserable admissions of one’s own faultiness. But He’s not to blame for my own humanity.

Even so, today is not a good day. Tomorrow will not be likely to be much easier on me; but these nights without Internet (for I have run out of my credit on my prepaid Internet service, and the shop that sells the top-up cards is not where the website said it should be) are time for me to do chores and think and reflect. Even if my thoughts are jumbled—this post will not be an easy one to make head or tail of in future, I expect—at least I have thoughts still, and a mind, and hope.

(And an ever more crippling fear, which I really should get over some time, of disappointing other people.)

Watch the Newlyweds

2011-11-12T15:53:00.003+08:00

I have finished my first month of work in my life--the latest of what seems like a string of firsts in this rather tumultous period of time--and along with this comes receiving my first payslip and a few other things. I've also taken my first (and second) leaves from work, both to attend weddings (which has gotten me the fisheye from colleagues and boss alike) and had a few disasters in the kitchen when experimenting with dubious recipes. I've had a couple close calls in driving, too; as it turns out I'm the kind of driver who pays more attention to potholes and the odometer than to the road and other vehicles, and so once I drove directly over a road divider (really, a little lump of concrete in the middle of the road to mark a junction) and once I had a passenger scream "BRAKE! BRAKE!" until I noticed the large truck about a metre ahead and barely skidded to a halt in time to not have actual contact between its back and my car's front. I'm alternating between calling the car an "old girl" or an "old boy"; usually I just pat its steering wheel when I think it's done a good job.

But let us return to the end of the month of October, which was when the last post left off and when this quite surprising string of weddings began.

I suppose it wasn't a surprising string; I'd known about the first wedding since August or September, and had started work knowing I'd have to apply for leave very soon as I had promised to help out. The second was a little more surprising, as it was only announced to me about two weeks before it was to occur--and it was set for one week after the previous, which meant that my first reaction to the announcement was a moan of "what, really?" rather than cheerful congratulations. I suppose that was something of a surprise to the family.

But let us establish context and background. You already know I left Singapore in late September to begin work in October; at least two or three weeks before that, I had been invited (and, needless to say, accepted) invitations and a request for me to attend and be the pianist at the wedding. The people to be wed were both known to me through the House of Bread; I daresay it was one of the few weddings I've ever attended where I knew both sides of the newly-formed family. It was a very enjoyable time for me; I took three days off of work, and Monday was a public holiday, which extended my little holiday to six days; in that time I met up with old friends and coursemates in Singapore, visited the church a lot for rehearsals and decorations and suchlike, lurched between eating too little and eating too much (more frequently the latter than the former), and generally was very jolly.

The second wedding was that of my eldest cousin on the paternal side (though he's still younger than I: I'm the eldest grandchild on this side of the family) to his longtime girlfriend (now wife), and it occurred yesterday. It was quite a jolly time, even if a little less elaborate (since the real, ceremonial wedding won't take place until they have a place of their own and have had a little more time and money to make plans with) and rather less cheery (because the bride's side of the family are apparently incorrigible introverts). I suppose it went off well, but then it wasn't really accompanied by very much solemnity or celebration. I don't know, really; mixed feelings, I suppose.

I'm still a little guilt-ridden over the constant taking of leave; about three days before Friday, the senior colleague commented that if it weren't for my extreme newness to the job and my replaceability I would never have been allowed to take the leave, as Thursday and Friday are the busiest days of the work week. Even Thursday night I was in the office until 6.30 rushing things out--a lot of last-minute stuff had come up--and I foresee that Monday morning will contain a lot of phone-calling and emailing and trying to get back up to speed; I usually spend the first hour of the working day trying to assimilate information and make a game plan for the day, and sudden incoming information either gets assimilated into that or takes another half-hour (at least) for the plan to be redone. In that respect it's a blessing that I deal with written words fairly quickly--verbal communication is another matter--but yeah, I'm probably a little slower mentally than people tend to make me out to be. (Fulfilling people's expectations of me, or what I think people's expectations of me are, is one of those things that I want to prioritise but never do, because the very thought of it fills me with the dread of failure.)

At any rate two weddings have occurred over the past two weeks, one Christian and one not, one filled with solempne and one less so, and... I wonder how they'll turn out; I know all the people well enough to think they'll work out, at the very least, but they'll probably run along very different lines. People have been asking me when I'll get married too; but I think I'll eventually have to tell them I think I'm what used to be called "not the marrying kind" and now is called a "confirmed bachelor"--at least partially because I can't even take care of myself well, right now, let alone anybody else.

So it's Saturday evening; my NaNoWriMo languishes in neglect; I'm a little bit worried about what will await me at work on Monday. Such is my life at present.

Musings Abroad

2011-10-29T13:38:00.001+08:00

It’s definitely been awhile since I last posted; considering I haven’t got any Internet up yet in the rented place, and I haven’t been online using the laptop in some weeks, it’s been at least—oh, let’s call it at least three weeks. But life goes on.

I should bring you up to speed on what normalcy has newly begun to mean to me in my life here, so I will. My weekdays begin at 7am, every day; I set two alarms, one at 7 to wake me and one at 7.30 to bid me leave. After I wake up I turn the electric kettle on and then dress myself while the water is being brought to boil; I usually finish dressing before boiling occurs, and so I check the car’s engine oil and radiator water and pat it and tell it what a good lad it is.

I often talk to inanimate things—the air, the car, my laptop, books—I have an urge to name the car, but haven’t any idea what to call it yet, and anyway it’s not my car to name.

But by the time the engine oil is checked and the radiator refilled with water, the kettle has usually already shut down because the water has boiled; so I make instant hot chocolate and eat whatever falls to hand. Usually it is biscuits; sometimes it is cookies, or bread; a friend in the House of Bread recently gave me four boxes (each containing six bars) of granola bars, and so that is what I’ve been having with the instant hot chocolate these days. I drink, and eat, in that order; in the morning my throat is always parched and I am very susceptible to sore throats.

When the drinking and eating are over, and I have washed my mug and stirring-spoon, it is rarely past 7.20am, so I do my hair—it is the suggestion of the boss, and I have a small thing (container? jar?) of something called Moving Rubber that keeps hair in place—and I never am quite satisfied with how the hair lies, but have to eventually stop tweaking with it because my arms are sore from being held up for so long. The alarm generally rings around then, and I unlock the gate and reverse the car out and lock everything up and head out, and usually arrive at the office somewhere between 7.40am and 7.50am if traffic is as usual for that road at that time.

Work begins at around 8am, interspersed by lunch from 1pm to 2pm or so; then it ends at around 6pm or later, depending on the urgency and interest of the task that I am working at; if it is either urgent or interesting, I stay to finish it; otherwise I leave quite punctually at 6pm, and arrive at the house between ten to fifteen minutes after I leave, if I have planned to cook that night. So far I have only gone on two night jaunts, once to the market and once for dinner; both of those trips added easily half an hour or so to the journeying-time, not including the time actually spent at those destinations; but cooking takes at least half an hour, and is more inconvenient as it involves preparation and washing-up and the risk of having it come out too salty or too peppery. At any rate I am always back in the house and somewhat at leisure by 9pm or so, and then I have about an hour before I plan to do my devotions and go to bed.

I call it leisure, but it is not. It is more appropriately called housekeeping-time, because that is when I do the mopping and washing of clothes (by hand and washing-board and small stiff brush) and ironing and sundry other things that need doing when you are the only person who lives in a house. Usually I end this time by showering and brushing my teeth, because housekeeping is sweaty work.

I do my devotions, often later than 10pm but not before 11pm, and sleep anywhere between 11pm to 12am; and then the schedule repeats itself the next weekday, and the next. I’m starting to find my sense of time wavering and often disappearing altogether as each day blends into the next with nothing but a long to-do list to tell me how each day has been spent.

My weekends are, these days, scarcely more remarkable; I have been spending them at the ancestral home, where great amounts of emotional duress have been brought into play (on both sides) to decide whether I should be allowed to drive—as you probably know, I have managed to convince the family that I am a careful enough driver to have the car here with me—though if they ever found out how I’ve been driving sometimes, when it’s dark and I’m inattentive, that permission would be revoked in a moment. It’s only the most recent weekend that I spent in Singapore, practicing piano pieces for an upcoming wedding and going to the House of Bread (hence the aforementioned granola); that was a very nice weekend. I lived in the house of the person about to be married, but for now (while he is still a bachelor) he lives with three other men in a two-bedroom flat, and you can tell from the comfortable messiness that they are all bachelors (for now); the kitchen is chaos and the living room is a whirlwind of books and paper and half-eaten food, carefully/carelessly placed in Tupperware and then left around. I spent the weekend there, returned to Malaysia on Sunday night, and spent all of Monday in a haze of loneliness and missing them.

Sometimes the house feels too big for one person to live in; and I don’t think I will ever be able to live the way they do; mine is not, I think, to live with friends and sit around playing games and impulsively fry whatever falls to hand and call it Saturday lunch. Not when my foreseeable future involves me living alone, in this too-big space, for the next six months, and then to live with family—with all the conveniences and inconveniences that will imply—for years and years hence. Maybe that’s for the best, and maybe things will change. Half a year is a long time and many things can be unsettled in that time; but for now I look at the lives of people around me and I want their lives because they seem so comfortable being who they are.

Tonight I’m sleeping late; tomorrow is a public holiday, which means I’ll sleep late and wake late and then maybe drive around a bit to find out where all the nearest banks and petrol stations are and get an early lunch and then come back and get to work cleaning house: the floor is getting dusty and the car needs washing, and I want to wash the bathroom and wipe down the kitchen and maybe re-shine my shoes, and then in the evening go out for dinner (or I could finish off all the ingredients in the fridge and make soup) and come back and be in a too-big house all by myself.

Maybe I’m just being maudlin and emotional, but one does feel the loneliness of the silence pressing in; and the daily waves and smiles exchanged with the neighbours and the chitchat with the colleagues just doesn’t do the job… I think what I really want is to come back and for somebody else to come back, or be already in the house, and then we would talk about the day and the small ridiculous things that happen or the frustrations of being alive, and then eat and do chores and jokingly try to pawn off the most troublesome chores on each other, and generally hang out and mess around and chitchat and say the kind of things to each other that would make other people turn pale and suspect domestic abuse, but only make each other giggle a bit and retort with something even worse, and then eventually fall asleep—I think I’ve said this somewhere before—if it were entirely up to me I’d skip the courting entirely and go directly to being an old married couple.

But such is my life, as it now is; full of things to do, plans to make, and not very many people.

The Long Camp

2011-10-04T19:40:00.000+08:00

I’m typing this from inside the room I’ve rented to live in for the weekdays; there is no Internet, so my only available entertainment is playing games or listening to music or watching videos; I almost think I’ll revive my NaNoWriMo project one month early. Still, working is more enervating than I’d expected and so I’m taking my time acclimatising to the different living schedule. After all, I’ve got another twenty to thirty years, maybe even forty if I’m amazingly long-lived, of this sort of thing to go through.

I suppose it’s safe to say life now is decidedly different from how it was in Singapore; oddly enough, I find myself even more dependent on other people now than I was. There I had very little preventing me from, say, going off to lunch at one end of Singapore and having dinner at the other end, having wandered my way through the intervening distance through the evening; now I find that if I want to go to lunch at all I need to ask for help. In fact I find myself less free than I had thought; perhaps it is because of my natural instinct to swaddle myself with commitments and promises; perhaps it is simply the circumstances I find myself in.

They’re not all bad, of course. In fact a lot about my circumstances is good; but ‘tis the natural habit to focus on the flies in the ointment, and such is my tendency these days. But I shall start by telling you the past few days of my life, in which a lot has happened—not necessarily interesting telling or reading, but important enough to me to warrant recording.

So you already know that I was learning from my cousin to drive, and practicing under his guidance at driving to regions nearby the ancestral home—which means regions not farther than about half an hour away from it by car, though with errands and everything else factored in, one of those runs took nearly three hours of driving, and left my passengers very worried for my safety (though also suitably impressed at my speed of learning and improvement). I didn’t think very much of their worry, being more in a hurry to get better at driving and prepare to move and start work than anything else. These usually consisted of a lot of worried and frantic praying and discussing possible options with people over Skype and emailing my soon-to-be superiors; but by Friday things seemed to have fallen into place, more or less.

On Thursday I had finally given up hope of living with co-workers and thus commuting back and forth by carpool, and so made some phone calls and sent some emails, and amazingly rapidly established a house-viewing on Friday evening, during which the landlord was established to be the son of the ex-headmaster of the primary school that my eldest cousin had attended; the room was seen and pronounced more than satisfactory, and it was decided that I would move in on Sunday night and collect keys and pay the rent and deposit on that day, and so forth, so Friday night I was quite buoyant.

My driving was established on Sunday morning to be good enough to go on most nearby roads without heavy assistance, apart from a tendency to not stop at junctions and to forget to signal before turning—which still weren’t too bad, given that I always remembered to do them once reminded. But in the afternoon I was suddenly besieged by three aunts and my grandmother and my paternal uncle, who had conferred amongst themselves and decreed that I was not going to drive up to work because it was unsafe and full of crime, and if I went up there in my car (it’s 17 years old, registered in a different state, and rather large) it was sure to be stolen regardless of how careful I was, or nails and broken glass would be sprinkled in my path while motorcycles raced up beside me and slashed my tires and the drivers emptied shotgun shells into my windows while kidnapping me. And all of this was entirely unpreventable through any amount of carefulness on my part; so the only thing to do (said they) was to stay home and call up and say so sorry for the amazingly late notice, but I wasn’t going to work unless they could provide me with armoured transport in which my safety was completely assured.

(I rather got the drift that they were more worried about the car than about me, given how much they talked about how precious the car was to my father and how horrible it would be to have to repair it or if it were lost.)

At any rate it was very frustrating trying to reassure them and being confronted with speeches of “if they want to hire you so badly they should just give you a car!” which I thought rather went against the whole “cars get stolen in minutes” speech… At any rate the upshot was that my cousin would send me up, and I arranged (saying the car was unavailable, which was true) for a colleague to transport me from the factory to the rented place and back; and so Sunday ended with me safely installed in my new surroundings, still dissatisfied at having learned to drive and apparently arbitrarily prevented from the end goal of all that learning—and so suddenly, and without any chance of negotiation at all either.

Monday morning I became a white-collar worker, and so far it’s been a good experience; I’m learning plenty about the job, and everybody’s friendly even if they do rib me a bit about being the youngest in the company and on my first ever job, too; I still think I want to drive up here eventually, sometime in the next month or so—if not then I’ll put some money together and go get myself a decent second-hand car, or else I’ll get a bike and then I’ll become very healthy indeed, though I’ll need a poncho in case of rain. I just worry that the family’s strange and rather unreasonable (I think) fear of me being in the city will last much too long.

At the moment, though, I’ll just learn all I can and work as much as I can and during the weekends I’ll try to find some way to persuade them that the car is just as safe with me as it would be locked away with them.

On the Open ROAAAAAAAD

2011-10-01T12:34:00.002+08:00

I see that I've neglected to post for nearly two weeks! I shall rectify this at once.

My last post was the Sunday night immediately after my last return to Spore; the Saturday before that I had attended a farewell hike for one of the House of Bread people, and that Sunday itself was all farewells and goodbye speeches. As it turned out, though, my packing went a little slower than expected (mostly due to the time it took to scrounge for boxes and finish off administrative things like closing down accounts and informing the house-owner of my impending departure) and arranging for transport, in between meeting up with friends for farewells: I expect the house-owner was happier with me (as a tenant) in that week than ever before, since I was often out of the house for upwards of five hours a day every day to meet people for lunch or tea or dinner, and all that human contact tired me out (enjoyable though it was) and so I always fell asleep relatively early.

(Though I should mention that on at least one occasion I woke up to find the door open and the house-owner's head stuck into the room to see if anything had been left turned on, and the head withdrew before I kicked the door shut on it.)

At any rate I went a-walking a lot in those days, and on at least one occasion I was accosted by people doing roadside surveys who thought I was a high-school student, which set me off on worrying whether I'm too young-looking for this job and whether it'll cause me heaps of trouble trying to be taken seriously. Then again, maybe it'll help in that the mistakes I make will be put down to boyish bobance and bounce, and I'll be let off relatively easily.

So the slew of farewells went on until Friday night, and on Saturday at around 3pm I (and all my possessions that I could remember) left Spore and arrived at So Hour around 7pm or so, to a mixed reaction. The people seemed quite happy that I was around, but definitely were shocked that I had brought quite so much stuff with me--in fact if it weren't for me having lost a substantial amount of weight over the past few months (nearly 5kg, according to the scale in the store) I shouldn't have been able to fit into the car with all my stuff. As it was, though, I fit in, albeit barely; and it was a distinctly uncomfortable ride.

The next day I and my eldest cousin fetched the family car down from my Fifth Aunt's house, and since then (that would be, I think, Sunday) I've been learning to drive. It's a distinctly less frightening experience than before, which I attribute to puberty already being conclusively over and my having been to very fast rides at theme parks (which make moving at around 20kph much less fearsome). As it turns out I'm still not terribly coordinated and I do still have issues with telling my right hand from my left--an hereditary trait, since a number of cousins have such issues too--but so far nothing terrible has happened, apart from nearly running over the foot of somebody standing by the roadside (I was concentrating on avoiding the hedges and the motorbike on the other side) and meeting three lorries in a row on one of the one-lane stone paths.

In between all that I've been emailing and Skypeing and making phone calls, and the upshot is that I've got a rather nice place to stay, about ten minutes' drive from the factory and with a very agreeable landlord who also happens to be the son of the ex-Headmaster of the local primary school, who taught my eldest cousin; it's a rather nice room, too, and I'm quite pleased with it. At any rate I'm only going to need the room for about six months, which should give me plenty of time to familiarise myself with driving; and in about four weeks I'll have to be good enough to drive down to Spore for the wedding. (And I'm getting a GPS today to help with that pesky lack of sense of direction--RM400, which is a bit pricey, but it'll be worth it with all the driving I expect to end up doing!)

And so? Things seem to be falling into place, apart from my irritating bank account still not being activated despite me following the bankers' advice and manually depositing money into the account; the website says I should have been withdrawing instead, but they don't open on weekends and their weekday office hours are very short, which will make things very tricky. It's quite irritating. But otherwise things seem to be going smoothly, which I thank God for; it's true of course that He's seldom early but never late. It's just one of His more annoying traits--one I call His sense of dramatic suspense. But at any rate it looks like I'm going to end my period of unemployment on a happy note.

Dial Down Velcro Cling

2011-09-18T20:26:00.003+08:00

So it's now Sunday night and I'm a little bit depressed. Not that I don't have good reason to be: I've just three days left to do all my packing and say all my farewells and settle a few administrative niggles, though with a little planning and careful use of time I certainly should be able to do all of that. But it remains that I'm essentially saying goodbye to everything that has been familiar to me for the past four years (plus three months) and going somewhere that I've never actually lived in.

Because you shouldn't get the wrong idea. For all that I talk about going back to So Hour, my experience of the place is extremely limited; I go there often, but I only know my extended family there, and of them I know maybe a handful well. I know nobody outside the family and I don't even know the geography of the place--I know the public transport but only as far as it concerns getting to/from the ancestral home (as I've started calling it)--so as far as I'm concerned the job may as well be in a completely foreign country that just happens to not need a visa or permit. Even the language will pose problems: I know no dialect, I speak very broken Mandarin and Malay, and the locals don't quite speak English. At least not the English I speak. So it's going to be a time of massive adjustment.

And the whole thing of course is that I'm giving up my comfortable familiarity for something completely unfamiliar; if I had to describe what my situation looks like, I'd say that I'd been walking down a long road knocking at a series of locked doors, and then one that I simply knocked on out of sheer let's-give-it-a-try opened up and I stepped through only to find that it was a springboard with a lot of empty space underneath, and the door has shut behind me and I have to jump whether I like it or not. And I don't yet know what the landing is going to be like.

I've never liked unfamiliarity; it's ironic therefore that nothing in my life is ever stable. But then nothing in the world is ever stable, which doesn't stop me from envying people who've lived in one place their whole life and grew up surrounded by the same people from kindergarten to university and have childhood friends (a completely unfamiliar concept for me!); while whenever people ask me about where I came from, the closest thing to an answer I can give is "oh, I've been all over". I've complained about this before; perhaps it's a good thing my childhood has been so spread-out, since it does result in me being pretty good at acclimatising to pretty much anywhere. And the changes that happen to me do tend to be sudden ones, too; the move from KL to Patience took a mere two weeks from random idea to fait accompli, the decision to go from Patience to KL (for A-Levels) was less than a week in the deciding, and the decision to go to NTU was just sprung on me barely two weeks before I had to go. And now? Last Thursday I was informed that the company's decided to hire me, and come this Thursday I shall be moving all my things from this place to the ancestral home.

I suspect the lives of all my siblings look quite similar. After all, we've been separated and are all in far-flung places now, and all on what looks rather like impulsive whimsy. I suspect my parents would call it "taking opportunities as they come", but to me...

Well, there's no point whining. I've been told I tend to be clingy, and I've never liked it when other people go away; much less when it's me going away. I've gone away several times now, always to "somewhere near", always with promises to return and visit lots; but time goes on and things and people change. I change; the people and place I've left behind (so to speak) change too. And sometimes I think my life would be easier if I didn't form so many attachments to people--to be the human equivalent of Teflon rather than Velcro (which is what I think I'm rather like sometimes).

But then I look at the old woman who owns the house I rent a room in, who seems to have no friendly human contact other than her two children, and I shudder at the thought of ever becoming like that.

Essentially? I'm going away. It's got massive amounts of pros and cons; the job looks promising, the company's got good prospects for growth (or at least stability), the boss is friendly, the people seem nice, it's relatively near family, it's in Malaysia; but I'm leaving behind the people I've been with for nearly two years now. Somehow that one con dwarfs all the pros, though I suppose it'll dull with time. Or it might not; I still retain keepsakes from people who went away: my wooden paper fan, the purple wristband on my left wrist, my yellow plastic wallet, my wire-rope keychain, a little wax green apple, a snowman paperweight, a handmade bamboo ring.

...but I'm getting maudlin, and this bout of self-pity is no help to me whatsoever; the past is past, the future is rushing madly towards me at the insane rate of one second per second, and the present is rushing madly away at the same dizzying rate.

A thought came to me this morning during the singing in church, spurred on particularly by the lyrics of one song--"for You are my Sun and Shield"--and it struck me as a rather strange juxtaposition. What does a sun have to do with a shield, after all? And being a rather literal-minded person, the image that popped up in my head was of a person walking in an infinite featureless plane carrying a large Roman shield and holding a sun on a string, like a balloon. Which, of course, doesn't at all sound like the picture of comfort. Being constantly in the glare of a sun would be pretty blinding, and toting a great chunk of metal around would be tiring (and doesn't metal conduct heat?), and even if you used the shield to block the sun your arms would get sore and cramped after awhile. And then the thought came to me--it's not a terribly groundbreaking thought, I admit--that that might be exactly the position we're in on this earth whether we like it or not. We're definitely in hostile Everything Trying To Kill You territory, but God protects us; we're in a world of darkness and coldness and God is our giant body of Nuclear Fusion that provides light and heat in abundance. It might only show how warped my viewpoint sometimes gets, but over the past weeks I've been looking at my situation and moaning about how uncomfortable it is. And this image reminded me basically that God makes us warrior-priests, not coddled fatlings, and that means we're going to be put through trying times for our own good; that every believer is called to be a Royal Who Actually Does Something, and that Authority Equals Asskicking. Yes. my theology tends to be expressed in tropes, and yes, my mind does tend to wander off into strange territory during worship-time.

Now I just have to plan out the next three days of hustling. I shudder.

Fastslow Pausebutton

2011-09-15T16:17:00.003+08:00

I received word about four hours ago that the company I had an interview at on Tuesday has chosen to offer me the position I interviewed for. I've already written back to say thank you very much and I look forward to starting in October, and received an email in reply to welcome me to the company "family"--inverted commas not mine--and now I'm panicking in earnest.

I know the implications of this decision, after all. It means my life in Singapore is over; no more swimming or listening to MRT jingles or convenient public transport. It also means that within two weeks I will need to be at least proficient enough at driving to get to and from the factory and wherever I live (either that or I'll need a place so near that I can just cycle instead), and given how frightening driving was to me when I first learned it, the second time 'round mightn't be any easier.

But it is a good opportunity, and I'll have a good boss and the HR seems friendly and helpful enough; and the extended family's happy enough that I'm going to be less than three hours away. And I'll still have Internet and thus be able to keep in touch with all the wonderful people I know in Spore. It's just that it's a completely new experience for me and I do think I'm completely out of my depth, the way I so often am. But we'll see what happens--I'll certainly need to change the phone number I use, and find nearby doctors and dentists and apply for (and get) a credit (or debit) card, and so forth and so on--the whole growing up and becoming an adult set of things to do. And come November I'll be learning to file my income taxes for the first time ever, oh joy! At least, I think they're filed every month. I'll need help on that.

In fact the whole experience is going to be about drawing on the help of everybody I can--my cousins for help in moving my four years' accumulation of stuff out of Spore and up to So Hour (and thence to wherever I end up staying for the next six months or so), my parents (and the housing agent) for help with dealing with the old bag, my boss-to-be (and the HR) for help in looking for accommodation, my cousins (again) for help with driving lessons... it's a lot of stuff to get done in just fourteen days, and that includes tomorrow. Suddenly time seems insanely short, when everything's moving at speeds fast enough to be frightening.

Still, survival. God promises everything we need, so if what I need is to be in Malaysia and nearby the family (but still not too far from the House of Bread), then surely there's a purpose. Perhaps it's also a good thing that I have so few obligations remaining, and the ones that are there are easily discharged or delegated. I've never been able to predict the future, and who can say what is good or bad? as the storied old man would say. As it is the steps I need to take have just become... not quite crystal-clear, but clearer. There are at least now definite things I can do, and have to do, and will do. And that little promise He made to me is now showing its fulfilment, so I shan't complain too much, except sometimes, a little bit, when I need to vent.

It's just the speed of things happening has winded me a little bit.

Fennel Funnel

2011-09-08T12:02:00.002+08:00

Let me start off by saying that Google is a magnificent company making some quite magnificent things, not least a magnificent amount of money. But there's one thing Google can't do when you type a keyword in, and that is to magically create a site that links together all the pertinent information you're looking for. When my grandfather died my father looked up "Septic shock" on Google and had to trawl through several sites (of which two or three were things like "Cure your Septic Shock today! ____ brand medicine") and now that I'm thinking of moving I'm trawling through the many, many sites advertising places to rent in Singapore, which obviously doesn't include the forums and agents and things like that.

So here's a proposal from me to whomever is a website designer in Singapore who wants to make renting better.

First off, of course, it should be free to join, post ads, etc. But ads should follow a certain format--enter address, description of facilities (this could follow a checklist of the usual amenities with an Others: ______), and obviously rental rates and contact information (or the contact information of the agent), and it should be searchable by Google or have an Arrange By ___ function on the search results page itself, plus Google Maps plugins and various other makes-life-easy things. But to be properly great, the ad would only be taken down when the ad-creator took it down by stating that the room was now occupied or otherwise no longer available for rent (the site would of course automatically email every now and then to say how many people had viewed the ad, how to make the ad more appealing, etc.). And then the information would be saved--so that, for example, should that same address become again available for rent, the new ad would contain also the information "This address was rented on DD/MM/YYYY by PREVIOUS AD PLACER", repeated as many times as the address has been available for rent--so a place where, say, people move in and get out after one month and the house-owner keeps putting the place back up for rent would have an ad about a mile long showing what the tenant turnover is like, and conversely a place where the tenants never ever left would have a shorter ad.

The other part of the site could be a reviews bit, which would follow the same format: enter the address of the place, description of amenities, and contact information--or, to preserve privacy, an option for PMing--and then people would be able to state what they thought about the place, with pictures if possible. And of course if the address being reviewed coincided with the address on an ad, then the review would come up in the ad too and therefore ensure complete and total information, especially since people are about 11 times as likely to complain as they are to commend and cameraphones are everywhere. Obviously these reviews are likely to be faked or written by ad placers or dummies, which is why the site will also need to incorporate IP-checking, a review-voting system, and prevent ad placers from writing reviews about the place being advertised (and prevent reviewers from placing ads) for a certain number of weeks.

And if it all worked and got enough people on it, then one would probably wind up with a massive site or map where all the important information on the housing/rental market in any given place was there to be Google-searched at any time and compiled and compared (that'd be nice on an ad, too, a button going Compare this Ad to Nearby Available Properties! or an addon to Google Maps that showed available properties within an area) and I think the rental market would be much nicer, especially if house-owners had just as many tabs on the competition and realised they were under scrutiny themselves.

Yes, information is indeed beautiful and I never get enough of it. (I blame being under-informed for a great deal in my life really.)

O'er the Tumultous Must

2011-09-05T21:53:00.002+08:00

It's come to my attention lately that the place I live in has a distinct sort of smell. I'm not sure exactly what the smell is due to, but I have my theories. After all the house-owner (to avoid being clubbed by ladies the world over for tarnishing their name, I shall no longer call her the landlady) has a unique way of keeping the place clean--she tosses a cloth in a pail of soapy water, wrings it out, then tosses it on the floor and steps on it and then proceeds to walk about, dragging the cloth around as she goes. It's a system that only works because nobody eats anything crumby or does anything likely to lead to messes.

But I'm becoming, as anybody with me on Facebook knows, increasingly disenchanted with the place I live in. The new roommate is already thoroughly disenchanted--two days after he arrived (that was when I met him, having just returned from my grandfather's funeral) he announced to me that he planned to move out.

But the place has a smell--it's the smell of a place where the fans are seldom turned on because the electricity is apparently expensive, but the windows are never opened (or, if opened, are carefully boarded up) because everybody outside the house is violently kleptomaniac; where the damp, newly-washed clothes are all clumped together to air-dry in the kitchen because the weather is too unpredictable, but mothballs are everywhere because putting lots of damp cloth together breeds mildew; where cooking, when it happens, tends to revolve around instant noodles or instant coffee, but washing tends to consist of very nearly soapless water applied in a miserly manner. All in all it's not at all a welcoming sort of place, not least because the house-owner has a habit of not turning on the lights until she (and I apologise to women everywhere on her behalf) starts tripping over the cat, and sometimes not even then; I often come back to find the house swathed in complete darkness and stillness, where the only sound is the hum of the TV (she watches it with the sound off) and occasionally her making odd noises.

For she makes odd noises. Very odd noises indeed, too. All day I listen to smacking lips and strange wordless crooning, occasionally interrupted when she complains incoherently or when she talks to the ten-year-old cat as if it were a rather retarded newborn (which, admittedly, is a redundancy, but bear with me here). I deal with this by putting on the headphones and some music; I'm quite glad I have easily four days' worth of music on my computer, and even if I didn't there's YouTube.

Suffice it to say that I dislike her immensely; she is an old woman, I grant, and probably older than the country she lives in is. But so was my grandfather. And so were the two old men at the swimming pool whom I overheard having a spirited discussion about Chinese medicines vs. Western treatments. My house-owner has no redeeming qualities in her. She has no friends that I can see, and if cats were as intelligent as everybody says they are then the one in the house should have found my bottle of potassium permanganate a long time ago and committed ownercide; she has no hobbies apart from feeding cats (which, apart from buying groceries in the morning, appears to be the only thing she leaves the house for) and otherwise spends her time staring at the ceiling while splayed on the couch in a most squickifying manner, or watches the TV with the sound turned off; she has no manners and no sense of privacy, and will happily invade locked doors with her master key if she so much as suspects that some electronic thing in the room hasn't been turned off--I once had her turn the lights of the toilet off while I was still in it--and yet she knows nobody's names, and indiscriminately calls everybody "Boy"--even the cat. I once had a teacher who called me by my surname and everybody else by their given name, and even then I was entertaining homicidal thoughts; as it is I've simply erected a wall of silence about me, broken only very occasionally. The only books in the house are mine, or her children's (and those are all textbooks or stuff on investment); she seems to read nothing but the newspaper. In fact she lives the kind of life that barely deserves its name.

I still think my parents are crazy for liking to wake up early and blast music at people and go for early-morning jogs and read all manner of self-help books. I think the two old men at the pool were a little bit crazy because they both looked like the kind of doddery old person you'd give your seat on the bus to, but I distinctly overheard them discussing running half-marathons and when I got out of the pool they were busily racing each other butterfly-style. I'm pretty sure my grandfather was a little crazy because he defied the doctors so much and would go off with his rifle to shoot squirrels and bats on the farms from his old motorbike, and my grandmothers like tottering around their respective houses and so forth. But I think they're on the right track. Idleness is not, I think, a good way to live. And I should know, having been under enforced idleness for the past three months.

(Not quite enforced idleness, but you get the idea.)

I still need a job, though the idea of seminary has been popping up every now and then. I suspect it'd shock a lot of people if I actually did it. Other than that? I rather like writing; maybe I should have taken up a Bach. of Arts; maybe I can be the science editor for a newspaper or magazine or something. I've been reading Bill Bryson; it's a little hard to reconcile the image of himself that he puts in his books to the fact that he's a Chancellor with multiple honorary degrees. Maybe if I finished off the NaNoWriMo project--hey, I've got the time, don't I?--and sent it to a local editor...

Meat and Memories

2011-08-31T22:53:00.002+08:00

I am writing this from my cousin’s computer in So Hour, because I didn’t bring my own laptop—I came in rather a rush and didn’t bring quite a bit of stuff that, in retrospect, I ought to have—and because I have a few spare hours with nothing terribly urgent to do. Really it’s more the case that the things that are urgent, I can’t do right now because I’m not in Spore and I haven’t got most of them. So it’s blogging for me.

If you have me on Facebook, then you probably know that for the past slightly-more-than-a-week I’ve been conspicuously absent from it, owing to the recent death of my paternal grandfather. Really he was the only one of my grandfathers I’ve ever known, since the maternal one died some years before I was born and even if he were alive I probably wouldn’t like him very much, not from what I’ve heard of him. But at any rate my paternal grandfather is dead, and the past few days have been eventful… so I wrote them all down in my notebook, and now I’m transcribing them into words.

Let me therefore begin by saying that my grandfather was a very hale old man, and his death was consequently sudden and unexpected. On the 17th of August, he was hospitalised for the second time in two months, having been found unconscious in the house where he’d fallen down; he was only hospitalised for a short time, because he soon came to and forcibly checked himself out. He was hospitalised both the next days, Thursday and Friday, for equally short periods: on Friday (everybody seems to relish saying this) he was only in the hospital for three hours and then signed himself out and got home somehow. Throughout all of this I was in Spore, not having the least idea that all that was happening, and the worst of my worries at that time were about the impending interview and diminishing finances; my father, off in China, had been calling daily and had been put off by repeated assurances that nothing was happening.

On Saturday morning I woke up unexpectedly early (I don’t quite remember the events of Friday as far as they concern me) and spent the morning online. It was a surprise to receive a phone call from So Hour; it was even more surprising that the voice on the other end was so distorted by franticness and worry as to be very nearly unrecognisable as my cousin’s. And the voice was yelling for me to ask my father to call my Fourth Aunt because my grandfather was in trouble. Some hours and phone calls later, I had found out that my grandfather had been comatose since that morning and in the early afternoon had been hospitalised. Thus I and the Gobbler set out from our respective residences, after a few phone calls to coordinate our travelling and notify affected parties (though, as it turned out, we both forgot various commitments anyway). We left Spore at around 6pm, and arrived at the bus interchange at around 8pm; on the way we were discussing the topic of the hour and the Gobbler commented that it wouldn’t affect me very much, which started something that began as a discussion and turned into an argument about emotions and Being Human and health and so on, and we dropped that topic later as we passed through the customs; I was delayed for awhile because my passport caused a database error (my Students’ Pass only having been replaced with a short-term entry pass earlier that week) and necessitated me visiting the Immigrations office to explain why my passport was

doing that to their computers. But we eventually arrived at the bus interchange, and we ate (my first McDonald’s meal in several months!) and by and by one of the cousins popped by to take us to the hospital where my grandfather was being kept alive.

It was the second hospital he was being held at, the aunts and uncles having unanimously decided that the staff of the first hospital was young, inexperienced, and incompetent; this second one was much larger, and much nicer-looking on the outside, and nearby the customs to boot. My grandfather was in a bed, with various tubes running out of him into various little machines and syringes and with electrodes attached to bits of his skin. He was unconscious, and breathing with the aid of a manual pump which a nurse (sitting beside him) was squeezing rhythmically. According to the nurses his blood pressure was also fluctuating badly, which was delaying them from moving him into the ICU. I sat there with the Fourth Aunt (according to the cousins she hadn’t eaten or left his side since the hospitalisation earlier that day) and prayed, and eventually went out of the ward to talk to the hordes of uncles and aunts and cousins massed around. Eventually discussion occurred and the horde distilled out into smaller groups, and then everybody decided that standing around out there would do nobody any good and we might as well all go back and get some rest, and then come back to the hospital later to take shifts watching our grandfather; so it was decided that some would go to houses and some would go to a nearby hotel to rest. I was in the latter group—I, two cousins, and First Uncle—and so we repaired to a hotel to get a little food, shower, and sleep. The hotel (it really almost didn’t deserve that name, being even more basic facility-wise than the university hostels) was occupied by me for about two hours, and I don’t think I actually fell asleep; but at length I returned to the hospital, arriving at around 1.30am or so.

Fourth Aunt refused to leave my grandfather, but with me around she consented to occasionally falling into a light sleep, while the cousin returned to the hotel to sleep. When I got there my grandfather was already in the ICU, and had gotten an automatic pump to help him breathe; I was only permitted to stay there for a little bit before the nurses chased me out because they had to clean the patients (until then it hadn’t occurred to me that all the people in there were naked under the sterile green blankets). So I sat around, prayed a lot, and occasionally doodled a little; Fourth Aunt sat around, prayed, sniffled, and walked around and popped into the ICU as much as the nurses would allow her to look at my grandfather. This routine was interrupted at some points during the night—at 2am there were fireworks being let off in the distance, visible to us through the window; and shortly after a very noisy old man in a wheelchair appeared, and wouldn’t go away, insisting on wheezing and coughing and hacking as if on the verge of expiring, while his wife tried to soothe him and his son slept on the chairs—and at 5am I fell asleep out of sheer tiredness and boredom, only to wake up when my father arrived and sent me home to get some real sleep while he was there. I went home, fell asleep, woke at around 11am, and arrived at the hospital at 1pm or so to find all the horde right back again.

A lot of talking ensued, and the upshot was that my grandfather seemed to be in a stable condition enough to not need constant supervision. I and the Gobbler returned to Singapore

that evening, and I spent the night rushing around to get documents and clothes and things ready for the interview the next morning.

The Monday morning interview went oddly; it started out with the interviewer asking me how I had managed to spend three months looking for work without being employed, accused my resume of being horribly unimpressive and my explanation for my poor grades of being fabricated, and it went rather downhill from there; still, he said I made a pretty good first interview. (Yesterday I found an email that said I’ve not been selected for the position, though, so maybe that was just consolatory because he didn’t want me to go off in tears or something.) At any rate it’s a learning experience.

I had lunch and then returned to Spore, making calls from the bus interchange because I wanted transport to the hospital; nobody picked up the calls, and I got increasingly irritated, until a cousin’s girlfriend answered his phone, and that was how I found out that my grandfather had died about eight hours before the interview and I should go straight back to the house rather than ask for transport to the hospital. (I think I was maybe a little too brusque over the phone, but it was rather a shock.) I spent most of the journey back asleep, waking up just long enough to get off the bus and get a taxi back (I was overcharged, of course, being obviously in a hurry). When I got back, the entire house had already assumed the mourning appearance.

Allow me to describe the mourning-dress of the house in a little detail. The living-room was stripped of the sofas and wall-mounted pictures and working-table and every reflective surface, even the mirrors, had been draped with what looked like any available towel. The floor was slightly dusty, and the entire living-room was dominated by three major features. The first, immediately visible upon entering the living-room, was the altar; it consisted of a plastic white table behind which was a framed photograph of my grandfather from earlier in the month, dressed in shirt and blazer and tie, and mounted on stacks of sacred paper on a chair. Beneath that was a pair of slacks, and at the feet of the slacks was a pair of barely-worn Crocs. On the table were a few jars; one was full of sand and burning joss-sticks; another two held joss-sticks of varying sizes, and one little platter held pieces of cloth and string in various colours for the mourners to wear to indicate what relation they were to the deceased. There were also a few plaques on the table to indicate the various posts my grandfather had held in his lifetime and consequently the groups that were mourning him. Behind that was the coffin and the body in it; he was dressed in shirt and tie and blazer, a pearl was in his mouth, and a little tape player was playing a repeating chant that I was later told was supposed to help put his spirit to rest. The coffin was a quite nice-looking one, full of little decorations that didn’t do anything except sparkle nicely in the firelight. And behind that was the fire: a small urn, in which one placed folded papers and let them burn up one by one and the whole idea seemed to be that death is a dark place and the firelight would help his spirit find its way to wherever it was going (nobody seemed to be quite sure, apart from that it was a good place). The urn was three-quarters full of ashes by the time I arrived, indicating that the burning had been ongoing for quite a while; and behind that was a giant gold-and-green cloth that announced that he was a Loh. The people were dressed in mourning: uniform plain white t-shirts and uniform long black matte pants that

were secured at the waist and ankles by elastic, with no jewellery, and with strings tied ‘round the left wrist and a cloth square pinned to the left sleeve. Mostly all I remember about that day was that a lot of crying was going on and the family seemed to be bustling around in and out; for outside a large temporary shelter had been set up with electric revolving fans and wooden-and-metal tables with plastic chairs being set up on the stones and dirt. I think I remember hired priests; and the Gobbler went back that night (he’d arrived that morning when my father told everybody of the death except me, presumably to prevent me arriving at the interview teary-eyed and morbid).

Tuesday passed unmemorably in a haze of visitors and reading the obituaries in the newspapers to make sure they hadn’t misspelled anybody’s name, then photocopying the obituaries for all the aunts and uncles and visitors who wanted one too; other than that there were new taboos (on washing hair and wearing red or yellow), burning papers and figuring out how the air currents in the house tended to go so that the people doing the burning weren’t constantly getting a faceful of smoke. I remember standing at the coffin that day, and it was the first time I realised quite how horribly effective the sales of the penitences by the old Catholic church would have been; after all a large part of the money being spent on the proceedings was revolving around trying to ensure a good afterlife, and the family certainly would have bought armloads of those from the local bishop if there were one and they thought it would help. I certainly would have, if only for the promise of the hope, even if it might turn out to be false. My main concern during those early days was to wonder if he had died a Buddhist or Christian; the proceedings and rites were definitely neither, being apparently a mishmash of Taoism and whatever the priests had dreamed up.

On Wednesday there was a fair bit of excitement when a small black butterfly appeared sometime in the late afternoon and alighted on a piece of cloth near the makeshift altar; by a process of throwing coins and guessing (something along the lines of “if X, then let the coins fall heads-up; if Y, tails-up; if Z, one each”) the family proclaimed the butterfly the reincarnation of my uncle (who died four years ago), and proceeded to sacrifice two cigarettes to it and take about forty photos of it, and then beg it to take care of my grandfather. We also spent most of the afternoon going around asking people for small change, for use in a ritual for the next day; so we counted out hundreds and thousands of coins, making sure to compensate the givers, and put away the coins. (If I remember correctly we wound up with something like 12kg of loose change by the time it was all quite done.) The rites and rituals began in earnest, at around 4pm; the priests had arrived a little earlier to set up three smaller tables and place images of bearded beings floating in clouds on them, with offerings and joss-sticks and so forth; they neglected to tell anybody who those beings were or what their significance was, unfortunately, and so I can tell you nothing further about them. There was one larger table with larger images, but it went similarly unexplained. They also set up their musical apparatus—bells and cymbals and gongs and trumpets of various sizes. They summoned the family to the ceremonies at around 5 or 6pm, just when it was beginning to dim, by clanging the bells loudly enough to be heard miles off; I, being Christian, sat by the side on the porch and watched the ceremonies with, I admit, possibly

off-puttingly avid interest. The ceremonies were conducted by four pretty nearly interchangeable priests who changed in and out of robes according to whoever was most in the mood to do some chanting, it looked like. There was a great deal of bowing to the altars and pictures, which I took to mean that the pictures were various gods or deities to do with the afterlife; and then they knelt and cried and the priests shouted. About halfway through the shouting I realised they were speaking very nearly intelligibly, and then I realised there were actually two priests shouting, and they were actually shouting out a roll-call of names, in a very singsong way (“…Third Aunt’s Eldest Son!” “Present!” “Third Aunt’s Second Son!” “Present!” &c.) and I had started listening too late to catch my family. Some of the later ceremonies included things like the ritual bathing of the spirit, or the presenting of tea to a little mobile altar (really just a wooden box with joss-sticks stuck in), and something involving a couple of ribbons. After the ceremonies people looked in the little basin of water used in the ceremony for hair (supposed to have fallen out from the spirit’s head while bathing), put out mats to sleep on, mostly arranged around the coffin, though some of them slept back in the kitchen and dining area where the sofas and lounge chairs were; and some stayed awake to keep the fire in the urn going. I stayed up a little, that night, and cried for the first time that night when nobody was looking because they were all asleep.

I should note, at this point, that I do not make a habit of crying. I read a long time ago about somebody who cried when her mother died, and then was admonished for indulging in self-pity; certainly since then I’ve always regarded being overcome by emotion in any way as a display of weakness—more something to be pitied or embarrassed about than anything really. It’s possibly also the fact that crying doesn’t make anything better, except unless something has got into the eye and needs to be washed out. Even during the ceremonies when the people cried (usually when the priests’ chanting became intelligible and they said something like “cry for your father, who is going away!”) I tended to wonder if it was a really good act or real grief, and either way whether the crying was of any comfort to them.

At any rate I found my own crying to provide me with nothing in the way of comfort, but it did make me thirsty and force me to have to wipe up my face, but it was at least gratifying to know I had functioning tear-ducts. I think I had found out sometime during the day—really there had been a few indications earlier in bits of things my parents had said, but it took awhile for the information to sink in—that my grandfather had died a Christian, and the hope of seeing him again at the resurrection was much better than that of standing around crying. So I stopped, went back to the burning, and eventually went to sleep when a cousin turned up to take over burning-paper duty.

Thursday was when the rites and rituals really got underway, though; the morning was all a hubbub of preparation, I think, and I don’t remember anything happening in the morning—perhaps the gods are late sleepers—but in the afternoon things began to happen. I should caution you, here, that I don’t necessarily remember all the following things in their proper order; they certainly happened, but I don’t really remember exactly what followed what, mostly because I couldn’t understand a lot of what was happening and so it mostly went by in a fuzzy

blur of chanting and moaning and crying with a bit of family drama every now and then. So let’s see… it started off as it had previously, with bells and cymbals to call the family to kneel and cry and listen to the priests chanting, and every half an hour or so they were allowed to go off and wander around a bit while the priests set up the props for the next bit of ceremony. I believe it was around 3pm or so when they started bringing in the really interesting things—the paper effigy houses and servants and cars, the pile of sand for carving, the wooden bridge, the tree—and so it was probably around 4 or 5 that they had the ceremony of the tree. I went through this myself when my uncle died, but this time my father decided that a stand had to be made and I sat it out; in any case it was then, and it was this time, a much too jolly sort of thing (in a macabre way) for a funeral. What happened was that the priests set up a sort of pathway that was somewhat V-shaped, and at the point of the V was a tree to which they attached pink packets with coins in; and the procession would circle around, and as they passed the tree each person would tear off a leaf or branch or flower or pink packet, then shred and cast it aside (unless it was a pink packet, in which case the person kept it), and this went on until the tree was entirely denuded. I think it was meant to be some sort of elaborate metaphor on how life strips people apart, but it certainly looked like great fun for the people in it. (I remember one of the aunts scolding us for looking too obviously happy the last time we’d done that—let’s face it, permitted destruction is rather enjoyable.)

A little after the ceremony of the tree was the lecturing of the paper servants, which consisted of the priest taking several human-shaped (though not human-sized) effigies and sticking them in front of the living-room altar and telling them things like “be broad-shouldered, wake up early, cook properly, get good bargains at the market, etc.” while I got bored and wandered off. And fortuitously I wandered off just as they were sculpting the sand into dragons—really two half-dragons, because the two sculptures were so close to each other that there was no space for legs on the insides. But they sculpted those dragons about five meters long or so, by my estimate, and then they placed four sand shrines around them, one at each cardinal direction (I forgot to check if they corresponded to the real North/South/East/West, but I assume they did), and then plugged in flickering light bulbs for the eyes and turned them on. Then they spraypainted the dragons (around this time the lecturing of the servants finished and the other cousins came around to watch) and the cousins were promptly deputised to follow the spraypainted scales of the dragons and outline them in coins. That took, I think, enough time that by the time they finished it was just about dinner-time, and so they had dinner. After that there was pantomiming, I think (there had been some earlier, but I hadn’t really paid it much attention other than to observe that it looked like one of them was pretending to be the keeper of Hell’s gates and was rambling on and on about how carefully he was going to examine my grandfather’s deeds while living, and then rather anticlimactically pronounced him perfectly innocent and suitable to enter (Hell?)), where one priest was in regular priestly wear and the other had on a long fake black beard and sideburns and was waving a fan, and then went running around while everybody chased him (obviously this was only done by the male mourners) and looked like they were also having a great deal of fun doing it. After awhile everybody seemed to be out of breath and was dismissed, and then everybody (this time

including the female mourners) was summoned, and went walking around the dragons 18 times in the semidarkness while I watched. I later asked about the significance of the number of times they circled the dragons (over stony ground, in nothing but socks!) and nobody seemed to know, or even have counted the number of times they’d walked around. Personally the only thing I know of in Chinese mythology that has the number 18 in it is hell (supposed to have 18 levels), but nobody seems willing to say that my grandfather went to hell, even temporarily.

…it looks like I’ve got the above two mixed up in chronology—I remember eating dinner while watching the running around, which means the march of 18 circles was before the men-only running around. At any rate it began raining heavily during dinner. (Later I found out that my grandfather, like me, really really liked thunderstorms, and one of the things he always used to pray for was rain.) The priests ran off to remove the bits of the dragons that were vulnerable to water damage—things like the crests and horns and fins and essentially everything that made the sculptures not look like oversized monitor lizards—and the aunts went into the living-room to pray for the rain to stop while First Uncle ambled around looking rather aimless. At some point I stepped into the house because I needed the toilet, upon which I was grabbed and taken aside by Fourth Aunt, who asked me to pray for the rain to stop. It took me aback because, as a Christian, I’d not have asked her to light a joss-stick and pray for me to get a job; but I took it as a sign that maybe she half-believed in God, or maybe a sign of desperation, and so I did. In retrospect I should have prayed out loud, rather than just standing there holding her shoulder and telling God I was sorry and I knew they were going to misattribute the rain stopping and anyway they only wanted it to do their rituals with, but if He wouldn’t mind would He please do me a favour and before I had finished praying the rain went from torrential downpour to merest trickle. Almost immediately they had the ritual going again, upon which I muttered to God that it’d be just a little bit showy of Him if the rain started up again the moment they didn’t need clear skies any more.

The next part of the ritual also revolved around the dragons, but consisted of everybody standing around the dragons watching the priests dancing around it and demolishing bits of it at a time; they’d also set up a little bowl of oil standing over a roaring fire, and every now and then they’d leap over the dragons and spit a mouthful of water into the bowl of oil, which always resulted in a giant fireball while they landed dramatically with their backs to the fire. At least, I think that was their intent—their landings were on sand that had just been rained on, though, and so were rather… ginger. But the dragons were eventually destroyed and then everybody fell on the pile of sand, scrabbling for coins while I took photos of them. It wasn’t a minute after I’d gotten bored of taking photos and headed into the house when the rain came back, just as heavily as if it hadn’t let up at all; and I made enquiries and found that while they did still have ceremonies to go through, none of those required clear skies. Which made me want to tell people about God and His sense of humour.

The heavy rains had a side-effect, though: the usual pots and pans that they store rainwater in were filled to full and overflowing, and the drains had got clogged up and overflowed too; so the next half an hour was mostly hoeing and digging new channels so that people could walk around

rather than slosh around, but it kept me grateful that my factory-reject Crocs were rejected because they hadn’t got the usual holes in them… which made them essentially perfectly waterproof in any puddles shallower than ankle-depth, which made me able to go around perfectly unimpeded other than the increased slipperiness. At length the new channels were dug and the water flowed off, and then the next bit of the ritual was conducted while the rains went on.

The ritual of the bridge is curiously similar to Greek myth—essentially there is apparently a river of memory-loss, though it only affects the memory of hurts or disappointments and suchlike; and so the people walked on a little bridge made of wood and coloured paper, wailing as they went although one would generally suppose that forgetting sadness would be a good thing, and when they had crossed and re-crossed and re-crossed again (it did look rather as if maybe the rain had diluted the river and so they needed repeated doses) the priest pronounced the memories adequately lost and they stopped. Some more chanting occurred, during which the rain stopped, and then they moved the effigy houses, boxes of things, and lectured servants out to where the dragons had been, and set them up; then they poured folded golden paper all over the lot and set it on fire, which made a very nice sight (if rather polluting). It burned for a good ten minutes, while the onlookers threw more paper money at the flames, and eventually died down and everybody went to sleep.

Friday morning I woke up to something of a ruckus. Friday morning had been set as the date for the cremation, so I suppose most of the mourners were feeling a bit emotional; still, going straight from slumber to finding people screaming at a corpse about how much they loved it is rather unsettling. And just as unsettling was finding my father roaring right back at the screaming people about how they should just shut up because it wasn’t helping anything and they ought to go off in a corner and repent and think about how they could use all that professed devotion to better the family’s future. I had breakfast while the screaming and roaring went on, and then went out in front to find the roaring still ongoing, except that the other aunts and uncles had now got over and were ineffectually trying to get my father to calm down because my grandfather needed his rest. In a way it’s fortunate that one of my cousins was foolish enough to try to approach my father and act the mature adult, because I don’t think anything else would have got my father to order everybody to get out and not interfere with grown-ups’ business. I don’t think I’ve seen my father that angry in a long time; I suspect if the aunts hadn’t dragged that cousin off he’d be in a pretty bad way. But the screaming people eventually went away, my father subsided from roaring into sobbing (along with Fourth Aunt, who was standing by), I went and got a lot of tissues, and the next hour or so consisted of praying and singing and talking about my grandfather to each other, to me, to my mother, to the cousins (actually this part was—I am completely serious here—more like my father exhorting the grandchildren to be good and studious and everything that my grandfather would want them to be), and in fact to anybody within earshot who would listen.

(Some of the things they talked about during that time made me want to title this post “Farts and All”, because let’s face it, my grandfather was entirely human and sometimes his digestion didn’t agree with him.)

At some point a hired marching band arrived and, in discordant fashion suggesting infrequent practice, played something that attempted to be a death march (I think). My father got me to get them to play Amazing Grace when the coffin was taken out, which happened when the priests arrived. There was a general atmosphere of mourning, because everybody knelt and cried silently (or not so silently, in some cases) while the priests did their thing with the joss-sticks and ritual chanting, then came in to close the coffin-lid (they had opened the glass case and resealed it, I think, the night before) and take it outside. While they were closing the coffin everybody was waiting outside, and my parents and I followed the coffin out. Then some more chanting occurred while everybody knelt on mats on the stone and dirt around the coffin—this not being too terribly ritualistic, my parents and I joined in—and after awhile the priest said something to the effect of “pass around the bier”, so everybody got up and went trooping around the coffin and through the tables and chairs (I don’t know who set the path). It so happened that the marching band had sat down around the tables, and the path passed the leader by (I think they’re called quartermasters?) and every time we passed by, my father would ask them to play a hymn—first “Amazing Grace”, which they definitely knew; then “This is My Father’s World”, and after awhile the quartermaster was evidently trying to look stoic in the face of constant questioning.

We passed around the bier about ten times (yes, I counted); the Buddhist relatives would wipe it as they passed with fistfuls of pink sacred paper, while my parents and I just rubbed the wood slightly (later on I found my finger decidedly shiny with silver glitter that had gone from paper onto the wood onto my finger) and then it was back to kneeling while the priests called out different groups to go and stand in front of the coffin and pay their last respects. For most people this meant burning joss-sticks and bowing; for my parents and me, this meant standing with head bowed. And after every possible group of people had been called, the coffin was loaded into a little van and driven out while the mourners assembled behind and around the van, as many of them pushing or touching it as they could. I was, at first, behind the van, but the jostling pushed me off to the side; so I wound up walking beside the rear left tyre, where for some reason nobody was jostling. I daresay a great deal of the relatives got a lungful of exhaust that day—small change compared to the lungfuls of joss-smoke they’d been having the past few days really—and this whole procession of van-followed-by-crying-people went on for about a kilometer or so through the streets of the village/town, until the town bus-stop. At that point a hired bus was waiting, so everybody piled into that and fell asleep while being carried off to the crematorium.

At the crematorium the Gobbler met us, and then some more chanting went on while the coffin was unloaded from the hearse, displayed to everybody, and then sent into the furnace. At that point people started passing around boxed drinks and bits of food, and then most of them got back on the bus and went off, while my father, an uncle, two aunts, a cousin, and I stayed back

to wait for the body to be reduced to ashes and bones. While waiting I went walking around the compound, but found nothing much of interest; the aunts and my father discussed various family issues, while the cousin and the uncle talked about other things that I wasn’t paying attention to. After a while my father started looking at brochures for houses and discussing the relative merits of each with me, and sometime after we’d settled on one particular estate as being suitably middle-class, the crematorium attendants came out to tell us it was done. Each of us chopsticked a few bones into the urn, then the attendant did the rest, stacking the skull-bones at the very top and sealing it; then we piled into a van and were sent off to the columbarium.

All the way to the columbarium they had to inform the urn whenever they crossed a bridge, and to keep up the chant of “crossing, crossing!” as long as the van was on the bridge, which I took to be an echo of the earlier bridge-crossing ritual, except you’d think he’d already have lost all his memories by then. Maybe they were chanting for him to forget about being burnt, which admittedly would certainly qualify as a traumatizing experience. At any rate we eventually arrived at the columbarium, located the lots we’d reserved for my grandparents, and waited. At length the priest and some other relatives arrived, some chanting was done and payment was made, and we left to go back to the house and rest.

Friday evening and Saturday morning passed restfully; the house was more or less tidied up, the shelters outside were taken down, a smaller temporary altar (still with the photo and the clothing) was set up with the joss-stick urns in the living-room, and we were allowed to wash our hair again. Saturday afternoon my family set out (my father has a serious case of being quite unable to sit around restfully) and we spent the rest of the day looking at houses, dealing with house-related paperwork, and talking to my father’s cousins who’d apparently just ended a 30-year feud with my branch of the family, which is why I’d never seen them before that day. We returned to the house at around 11.05pm, after dropping the Gobbler off at the bus interchange to return to Spore and then getting hilariously lost by missing a few turns and almost ending up in Spore ourselves.

Sunday morning I woke at 8.30am to find the living-room already mobbed with relatives for the ceremony of the first seven days, but it was relatively tame as far as the ceremonies had been going; they simply did more chanting and bowing to the makeshift altar, then stacked food around it (I’m not sure if they cooked it themselves or had it ordered in—either way somebody must have been up early getting it all done) and did more chanting. Apparently the recently-dead have huge appetites. After that they did more burning—this time of a stack of golden sacred paper that had been folded into the shapes of money and things, and after that they did a ceremonial cutting of the hair of the immediate relatives: nothing too cosmetically altering, really, just the barest snip, and I’m still not sure why they did that. Maybe it was to proclaim the no-hair-washing taboo officially over. Some more talking happened, and then all the female in-laws were told to go take a hike and come back later to signify them coming back to a new house; so we went off to the nearest neighbouring town, my parents and the wives of the

uncles, and had a bit of brunch and did some shopping before going back. And then there was lunch.

Monday nothing much happened apart from going to the bank and going through some financial things to do with the recent purchase of the house; and Tuesday we spent the late morning to early afternoon on the farm picking something that looks like the stubbly version of the rambutan but tastes about similar. And by Tuesday evening I was back in Spore, meeting the new room-mate and proving to my landlady that I hadn’t yet died and it wasn’t time to start throwing out my things and advertising for a new tenant.

Depress'd-O-Vision

2011-08-07T23:23:00.003+08:00

YE GADS. It's AUGUST GAAAAAAAA

AAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAhwow.

So, how has my life been since the 18th of July (which is apparently my last post)? Very meh, is how it's been... but I'll do the show-not-tell thing that's apparently big in creative writing, and tell you all about it in customary mind-numbing detail.

So I was in Patience, and then returned to So Hour with the parents for a day, and returned to Spore the next day--the, let's see, 20th? Yes, the 20th. So I returned to the house, having been away from it and the landlady for nearly half a month--if you remember, I had received the summons to So Hour to see my grandfather on the 7th--and so it was a little bit of familiarity as I settled back in to the place--got laundry going, went online, checked emails, that sort of thing.

And then the next day it was up and running off again, as the reason the parents (and both younger brothers) were in Spore was that there was a leadership conference going on, and they had an extra ticket that originally had been meant for the Empress, but she couldn't get leave from work and so I was going to take that ticket in her place. The conference (it was organised by a group called the Eagles, they're really good) lasted three days, most of which I spent out with the parents and their friends (my father had brought over a contingent of people from China and the contingent was forever splitting into mini-contingents and wandering off) and suffering from both information overload and people overload, and I'm afraid I wasn't in a great mood for most of the time. I think I frightened some of the contingent, since apparently my conserving-energy face looks like a murder face--at least, that's what I was told later.

So those three days passed, and then the parents left to return to Patience over the weekend while I returned to a semblance of normal unemployed life--the usual waking late and eating one meal a day and so on, interspersed by obtaining convocation gown and hat and meeting up somebody who claimed to have met me through other Crusade people...

...that meeting actually, I think, deserves to be told in further detail. I met him for lunch--he turned up late because he'd been at some kind of entrepreneurship forum, and then we proceeded to have about four hours' conversation about dreams and goals in life and all that kind of thing. Now, as anybody who's asked me about that sort of thing knows, I haven't got any. It's the main drawback of my being so easily satisfied with life--food and board and Internet and books and regular meetups with friends and I'm good to go, really--but he went on and on about the high cost of living and how difficult working life is and how wonderful it would be to have passive income, and absolutely refused to discuss anything other than monetary matters, and only those pertaining to himself (or myself) at that, and dismissed the idea of considering other people or the definitions of happiness and dreams and goals as "complicated, wisdomful [sic]" things. Which, of course, irritated me, because I think life is horrendously complicated and nothing is ever as simple as it seems. At any rate we eventually parted, since he said he had something to rush to (it was 5.30pm by then) and he said it would be nice to not waste time in future on complicated thoughts.

I had another lunch with him some time later (which I shall recount here so as to not have to bring him up again), and it started with him saying he'd got an amazing opportunity that would supply him with enough passive income to have all his dreams come true within only five years, and then inviting me to meet the friend of his who was the source of such opportunity because he wanted partners and he was offering the chance to all his friends. I unwisely agreed to it, though I couldn't very well say no--he was apparently bending over backwards (he said) to accommodate it, and the only time available for it was lunch the day before the convocation ceremony; so I went, and he was late again, and the whole thing was a failure because apparently his friend was a very busy person and had rushed off somewhere and so it was just him and me at the lunch. It was very, very irritating, especially because I'd had to do quite extensive travelling, and for all that he refused to give me any more details about this wonderful opportunity other than that it involved VOIP and IT services and healthcare (which sounded quite ridiculously diversified to me). To this day I don't even know the name of his company.

Two days ago he messaged me asking to set up another lunch, but again wouldn't tell me the name of the company or give me the address of its website, and said that I was asking a lot and asked me to detail how I'd be contributing to the expansion of the business (no longer an "opportunity"!), upon which I said that without data my opinion was that I was uninterested, and then he said thanks and promised to catch up later--which, I suspect, means that I'll never hear from him again.

So much for that.

But the day after the first lunch was my convocation ceremony. That day started horrendously, with me being woken up at 6.48am--yes, I remember being jarred awake--and the parents asking me to give them directions since they were driving in and I hadn't the foggiest where they were or how they could get there, being extremely geographically challenged and having only just woken up. Eventually I think I muttered the name of a nearby road or MRT station, went back to sleep, and woke up in time to change and rush down to school with the giant paper bag containing the gown and hat and sash, only to realise on the way that I was lacking in the safety pin department (those gowns are quite inconveniently designed, if you ask me) and dash off messages begging people to bring extra and lend me pins. I arrived, the parents arrived shortly before I did, and then there was a lot of yelling about car parks and directions to the Auditorium and eventually we found each other, and then the yelling continued about how my belt wasn't nice (I'd had to self-make holes in it because I've apparently lost a couple inches off the waist) and I was tie-less and my shirt wasn't white and my shoes weren't shined and I didn't have the safety pin, and suffice it to say that getting the gown and hat on and the sash in place was a very stressful process for everybody involved. We eventually made it in, the ceremony was very boring and several people fell asleep (or straight out didn't turn up, and everybody else wished they'd done that too), and the speeches were very much uninspiring. After the ceremony there was photographing and food (I was very hungry and the endless photographing, I admit, exasperated me beyond my limits of tolerance) and the more photographing; my parents met the other Crusade people who'd graduated on that day as well as the friends who'd come along to do congratulating, and some bickering ensued on what was to happen next and who was going where for what... and eventually I went with the parents to the bank where they did something about money that didn't involve me even though they had originally thought it would, so I eventually left them (with their permission) and joined up with the Crusade people for tea and walking around the mall, and I got a nosebleed while there--possibly from the heat of the weather, possibly from lack of fluid (I'd been thirsty the whole day), but for whatever reason there it was.

The day after the convocation was the 28th, and on that day... let me see, it was a Thursday, ah yes... I went to school again and witnessed a few friends' convocations, managed to get a good helping of food from the buffet table, and was impulse-invited to a Crusade guy's house for an afternoon of board games, at which I chiefly remember winning a game of Key Largo by the simple expedient of stealing, spamming cheap-but-safe searching, and doing a lot of selling while everybody else was still stockpiling resources. It's not a recommended strategy, obviously, but it worked out for me; I also remember playing marbles with one of the other guys there on the carpet, which is how we found out the house floor is tilted ever so slightly; and finally, the game of Betrayal at House on the Hill in which none of the heroes died. Which, if you've never played it and therefore don't know, is extremely rare and difficult to pull off, and was only accomplished by a few strokes of luck. I went to school again on the 29th, and on that day the convocation ceremony was in the evening, but food was still supplied.

On the 30th of July I had the aforementioned disappointing lunch, and on Sunday night one of the guys from the House of Bread treated me and a few other guys to dinner as encouragement for the upcoming beginning semester and (hopefully!) upcoming beginning of employment.

On the 1st of August I went to So Hour for a few days, leaving a bit of paper on the desk to inform the landlady of my departure and my expected return date (Thursday); then I went to So Hour, where the parents were, bringing along cousins who had been visiting Singapore over the weekend and the youngest brother who had been staying with the Gobbler and visiting local libraries to borrow graphic novels to read. It was a quite difficult time, mostly because the parents remain firmly fixed on the tack that if I'd been better at my studies or more pleasantly-disposed or had read a few more self-improvement books or had done any number of any other things I would already be gainfully employed, and were also firmly fixed on the idea that everything I was doing could be interrupted so I could go fetch them fruit or wash the dishes or discuss career options or something... and being already stressed out about being jobless and increasingly broke didn't help matters, so I was rather snappish myself, which didn't help matters any. It probably also doesn't help that my parents seem to think I'm misled in wanting to stay on in Spore, where the House of Bread is, and want me to go relocating off anywhere that opportunity beckons--as if I didn't already have quite enough instability in my life...

I returned to Spore on Thursday, as expected, and found the landlady in a tizzy because she hadn't found the paper I'd left; but Thursday came and went, and Friday, and now it's early Monday morning, I'm not hungry because I had a large dinner (which overtaxed my wallet really but still...!), and I'm still jobless, and can't apply for jobs until the Employment Eligibility Certificate gets mailed in--assuming the application is approved--technically I'm an illegal resident right now, I think.

Such is my life--it's ongoing, and that's the best I can say about it right now.

(Addendum: I know the Bible says a lot of stuff about me being more valuable than sparrows and how God provides and all that. I'm relying on God providing for my needs and all that, yeah. But I don't know how, or when, and at any rate I certainly am like the lily of the fields in that I toil not, neither do I spin, and am a very bedraggled lily at that.)

Skip to Late

2011-07-18T10:00:00.001+08:00

So it’s the second-last day of my time in Patience today, and I’ve only actually seen the Pig once; it’s definitely his fault, since he keeps on oversleeping and being too tired and/or late to actually go hang out before he needs to sleep for his job the next day, and it’s not like I clutter up my time… yes, I’m slightly annoyed, why do you ask? But it’s still been a pretty good time here—I spend nearly every night out with people (and a different combination every time at that), which is a bit of a strain on the wallet but apparently everybody believes I’m going to get a job soon and have a salary double or triple theirs and so they have no worries on my behalf. Personally, whenever people ask me how I am, I start off with “alive” and then add “and jobless” to allay the odd look that pops up on their face, and then if I met them at church they say it’s all in God’s timing and if I met them elsewhere they say it’s not as if the economy in Malaysia is all that much better anyway, I’ll probably get a job before they do. But the main thing is that I’d been planning to see the Pig at least three nights out of six and so far I’ve only seen him once, and only for an hour or so at that, which is hardly enough to catch up on one year’s worth of news.

So I go out, and get caught up on snippets and pieces of people’s lives, and the same happens with family where I listen and get caught up on snippets and pieces of people’s lives. Nobody really asks me about my life history, apart from the obvious questions like “how are you” and “have you graduated” and “what did you study” and “so where do you plan to work” and occasionally “what’s bioengineering really mean”, but that’s probably because I’ve never been a terribly interesting conversationalist anyway. Not in person, at least; I think I’m a relatively okay correspondent over IM and email.

[Later]

So the parents decided to go out for breakfast with friends, and took me along for the experience; at least it was interesting, even if the parents think I ought to evince more interest in other people’s lives and the only thing I could think of was “how much interest am I supposed to evince in people not talking to me, and besides they don’t even know my name?” and so that didn’t go terribly well. But the breakfast was quite enjoyable, even if it started off with the apparently long-time friends of the parents asking what my name was and whether I had siblings (!); as it turned out some other friends of a friend turned up, and they were at least complete strangers to the whole family and so were interesting. That breakfast lasted until slightly after 12.30pm, at which point it was retroactively declared a brunch.

The rest of the day has been sitting in cars and going to a succession of banks while the parents took care of various bank-related things—I never inquire too much into others’ finances, partly because I know nothing about such things and partly because it’s never been much of a conversational topic—while I played games on the phone. Apparently we all share much the same opinion of my maternal second uncle, though we all express it differently.

My maternal second uncle made it a long time ago onto the rather long list of Adults I Never Want to be Anything Like, I admit. He lived with us for a short time when we first came to Patience, and my first impression of him was that he was a small, scrunched-up little thing with a two-door four-seat car who smoked. (I should probably put that list up somewhere sometime; my list of Adults I Want to Be Like is admittedly much shorter.) The impression was never really made better, because he never seemed to do anything but smoke, and was quite vociferous whenever I said he shouldn’t—I was an extremely tactless child, and some of that tactlessness remains with me; it’s apparently hereditary—and one day I took things into my own hands and hid his lighter, which made sense to me but probably wouldn’t work on anybody who had more than one lighter. Heck, I don’t smoke and even I have at any one time three lighters stashed in various boxes just in case. But as it turned out my maternal second uncle had only the one lighter, and he never thought to check in the drawers of the desk he always left the lighter on, and so it got me a whacking when it finally came out that I’d stowed it away… at any rate some time later he ceased being a presence in the house, for what reason I don’t know, and the next I heard of him was that he was in a mental institution for something, and eventually he got out and now apparently he’s being a perfect full-time nuisance.

I don’t think I really dislike him, though. I just don’t really think of him as being quite human. My mother told me his history, as far as the family knows it—apparently there will always be a five-year gap during his pubertal years when he got a scholarship and went away to study, before the days of cheap travel, during which nobody knows quite what was running through his head—and immediately I decided that when I die, the history of my life will not require less than an hour to properly tell. My life history must be the kind of thing that takes up a whole day, maybe more, and hopefully if more than one person is telling it they should at times end up contradicting each other while both are convinced that they are telling the truth, and then it’ll take a bit of effort to put things together and figure the state of things out. But as it turns out he was highly-educated for his generation, and then put together some savings from his first couple of jobs, and then twelve years ago he started smoking—that was also, now that I think of it, around the time we came to Patience—and stopped working. Since then, to hear the family tell it, his only expenditure has been beer and cigarettes and the occasional trifle for himself; other than that he’s essentially a non-contributing member of humankind. My father, being obsessed with usefulness, thinks of him as a waste; my mother sees him as both extremely embarrassing and too lazy to improve; I thought about it in the car, not having anything else to do, and decided that I think of him as a recalcitrant pet—the kind you keep around the house because your grandmother gave it to you a long time ago, even though it’s completely useless, even in terms of decorative value, and costs way too much to upkeep, and whose value to society probably only consists of the fact that it can be boiled down and made into a couple of cakes of pretty okay soap.

Of course, one can’t be too harsh on him. There but for the grace of God go I, for one thing. And God loved the world, so one can’t be picky—at least, one can’t very well be pickier than God, at least not knowingly and with a good conscience. But I can’t help the fact that when I see him (as well as assorted other people), I think “eyes: can be gouged; nose: can be hooked; throat: can be grasped; thorax: can be crushed” and so on. Or at least, I probably could, but it’s so unsatisfying... on the other hand, at least now I know that if I should fail to get a job, I can still live off of my family, as long as I do it with good grace, and they’re highly unlikely to leave me to moulder in unemployment anyway.

On second thought I probably shouldn’t put up lists of people I look up to and people I don’t. For one thing those lists will probably get revised as life goes on, and I’m far too lazy to keep revising and re-revising things like that (which is why the list of characters has vanished); but I think I should certainly put up a list of qualities I do not want to have in my old age, and a list of qualities I do want. Those will probably change, too, but even a periodic comparison of old and current priorities has its uses. So I shall do that, instead, when I’ve got the thoughts quite properly boiled down in my head.

The Runaround

2011-07-15T00:14:00.001+08:00

It’s slightly past midnight on what I consider the second day of my time here in Patience, and so far… well, not much gallivanting has been done. I’ve mostly confined myself to the house and areas reachable by walking; I’d planned to go out on the town with the Pig for a drink, but he was indisposed. But I might as well start from the beginning, which is to say, this morning.

I woke at roughly 9.30am or so, to the entreaties of my mother to move my grandmother’s lounge chair downstairs. (It appears that old people tend to lounge chairs, or something. Maybe there’s some kind of visceral comfort to be gotten from sitting back in metal frames with broad plastic strips on them.) So I did that, and then had breakfast—simple stuff, nothing amazing, and then washed the car and my Crocs, which used to be white but were by then a sort of scuffed gray; all the morning and afternoon the Internet refused to connect, which was why I acquiesced to the chores without grumbling too much.

I also went out twice on the same errand, which was to buy extra credit for my phone; the first time I went to the nearby gas station, which turned out to be out of stock (though I suspect that they’ve never actually been in stock), and so I returned to the house and sat around for a bit. The second time I went a little farther afield, to the ‘mart where I used to work a long time ago (what was it, seven years? six?) and somewhere along the little line of shops there (I used to have tuition there too; the teacher, as I remember, was harsher than she was effective) I found a shop that sold newspapers (which I had been told to buy) and phone credit, so I bought those. And then, because it was more or less 12pm and I wasn’t too far from Loch Yuck, I went walking along and ambled past the area (it was full of schoolchildren and school-buses, the area being quite ridiculously full of schools both primary and secondary) and eventually arrived at Loch Yuck.

My first thought was to wonder if the principal was still the same one; if so the man would have been in power over the school for a little over a decade by then, at the very least, and the school would show signs of that. He is, and it did; the stalls have lost their coatings of paint and not been repainted, but there are new shelters outside the school (the newer the shelter, the farther from the school and the fresher the paint on it; the oldest shelter has scarcely any paint on it now, but all the shelters have equally uncomfortable-looking metal seats). I wondered briefly if the electric lamp-post opposite the oldest of the shelters (the one where I and my siblings used to wait for the bus or for the parents) was still vulnerable to being put out of commission by a kick to the base, but it was afternoon so I didn’t bother kicking it to find out. The school was very much the same in infrastructure, though the list of teachers has undergone enough changes that the principal’s name was the only one I recognised (when I left he only taught Moral Education; I wonder if he’s still teaching that now), and most of the buildings are still the same, except increasingly run-down and losing paint. The creaky old wooden buildings where we used to do woodwork are still there, still on their creaky old stilts and still looking like a firetrap to the properly morbid mind; and the auditorium is still a horribly-ventilated thing. The decorative ponds, to his credit (?) are still running, though; the pumps still circulate water around, and fish still live in them—I hesitate to say they thrive, and suspect that the population of fish is periodically renewed by purchasing new fish when the last batch of fish are all dead. Certainly I’ve never heard that the fish were fed, even if the ponds are all green with algae and the paint on the concrete flowers and things has long faded into grey. Behind the auditorium was the only real change I noticed—they’ve gone and built a new canteen behind it, but not added new stall vendors; and it’s a remarkably oppressive-looking place, which is probably entirely intentional. The canteen aunties and uncles are the same ones I used to order food from, though, which makes one wonder.

(I also wonder if I’m the only one of Loch Yuck’s alumni who goes back every now and then to look the old place over, and suspect that I am. It’s not the kind of place that breeds goodwill.)

At any rate I went around the place, and looked at the field and auditorium and computer room (ye gads, a course on CorelDraw? And the course load entirely written in Monotype Corsiva, at that? The teacher might know his way around photo editing (and even that is rather dubious) but his poster design skills leave something to be desired) and the labs and then I noticed that apparently Loch Yuck has got some kind of partnership with Taylor’s University going on, because all the cheesy motivational boards dangling from the walkway ceilings now have the Taylor’s U. logo in one corner of them, and there’s a great big Taylor’s U. electronic billboard in front of the administrative office with great big flashing numbers saying how many days there are to go before the next big official exam (it’s July, so the next exam apparently is the PMR).

And after I had satisfied myself that the school was still in the same old bad shape and apparently under the same old strange appropriation and use of its funding, I returned for lunch, then took a nap and woke around 5pm to find that apparently even sleeping counts as exercise in this climate—I was distinctly sweaty when I awoke.

Then I borrowed my father’s swimming trunks (I couldn’t find the goggles, so went without) and headed to the swimming pool—I may only visit about once a year at most but the routes to the usual few places are pretty much memorised—and ran into an old ex-classmate there, with whom I chatted until he had to leave, and then I started my goggles-free swimming, and managed to not bump into anybody, though there were a few close calls and at least once I had to stop moving entirely to let two people pass on either side of me without flailing my hands into both their faces at once. I swam until I judged that I had expended sufficient energy to call it exercise while still allowing me to walk back to the house, and then showered and went away. The shower area, interestingly, has had all the locks on the doors replaced—well, the few doors I looked at, at least—but not the light bulbs, which makes for a sort of gradient from the doors (where the natural light enters) to the showers (which are cast in gloom and shadow).

The night passed uneventfully for me, since I’d been expecting to go out with the Pig and maybe Herr Robson (who, it turns out, has resigned and has been spending some time here with his mom) and so had not gone with the parents to watch Transformers in 3D (my mother later said it didn’t appeal to her, but that was expected); but the Pig has a sort of temporary job that is apparently exhausting, which I don’t have many details about, and he would not be roused, so I stayed in the house reading Cracked articles and Facebook and XKCDb (which turns out to be pretty hilarious).

Credit Impulse

2011-07-13T21:45:00.000+08:00

I’m typing this from in Patience, one of the last places I expected to be at this juncture in time. How sudden changes can occur, eh? And it’s only, perhaps, typical of my life that such things should occur just as I’m expecting life to go back to usual.

So I’m here, and… well, let’s see where to start. Without the benefit of the Internet to quickly check where I left off, and yet certain that I certainly posted within the last few days, I suppose I might as well recap the events of everything since the eighth of July, and then we can slowly slice off the redundancies if there are any. But I doubt there will be any, since I don’t think I’ve posted anything since leaving Singapore. So that’s where we’ll start.

On the night of the seventh of July, I received an SMS from my father saying that my paternal grandfather (I have only the one; my maternal grandfather is long dead, and from all accounts nobody but the worst of drill sergeants would have gotten along with that man) was very badly ill, and I was wanted back at the house the next day as soon as I could make it. I asked how ill he was, and my father replied saying that he was ill enough to disrupt my father’s plans; I then asked what illness it was and got no reply. Nevertheless I left early the next day, telling the landlady I was going away and didn’t know when I’d be back (but promising to eventually show up), and arrived in the grandparents’ home roughly after lunchtime envisioning either my grandfather in his usual lounge chair or in a hearse—yes, my imagination tends to the morbid, and my common sense tends to the commonplace, and the reality is usually neither.

(At this point I have déjà vu. I’ve almost certainly typed up these events before. But I might as well tell the rest of them, since I don’t think I’ve told all of them yet.)

I found the wife of my paternal eldest uncle in the house, as well as one cousin, and that’s how I found out that my grandfather was in the hospital (as well as having been very disobedient to his doctor’s instructions post-knee surgery), the ex-wife of my (now-deceased) paternal youngest uncle had had a hysterectomy in secret and now was in hysterics about whether or not to tell people, my paternal fifth aunt was in the hospital with my grandfather (as well as my grandmother and my paternal fourth aunt) and a phone call established that my father was there too. I had a rather larger lunch than usual—my usual one-meal-a-day diet in Singapore had led to exclamations of how thin I suddenly was—and then went to sleep, because the hospital’s visiting hours were 4.30pm to 7pm daily. At 4pm I was awoken and taken to the hospital along with the wife of First Uncle, by First Uncle, and then I found out the reality of the situation for myself.

First off, my grandfather was neither perfectly fine nor nearly dead; he was quite hale and hearty, but unable to get off the bed without help, and wore sunglasses all the time because of a recent cataracts surgery that had left him extremely sensitive to light. He was surrounded by family, though, and didn’t look too unhappy about it. I greeted him and the rest of the family there, and spent the rest of my time there hovering around the bed the way everybody else was. At some point I went to the vending machine to get drinks, and established that the drinks it dispensed tended more to create thirst than quench it, due to them being terribly sweetened to the point of muting whatever they were purported to taste like. We hung around way past 7, though, because we had put in a request for him to be moved to a nicer ward earlier and the request had been approved on condition of somebody getting out of the nicer ward, and rumour had said somebody would be getting out that day.

A quick run-through of the patients in his first ward: his neighbour was an aged, aged man with no apparent brain functions; he spent his time wailing soundlessly at the ceiling, while a young maid (possibly Indonesian, possibly Philippine) sat beside him staring at him, and fed him when the nurses delivered food, at which time his inaudible wailing turned into audible coughing and hacking while the maid looked helpless and tried to coax the food down his throat. In the opposite corner was another aged man, possibly with dementia, whose bed was more like a cot with string-fastened walls; he spent his time picking at the strings, but futilely because the knots were on the outside of the cot and he never quite managed to reach over the bars. When fed, he would insist on feeding himself, but often wound up flinging bits and pieces of the meal at the nurses, and only quietened down when the male nurses came by to admonish him. One of the other patients was a young Malay man who seemed quite healthy; my father went to talk to him for a bit and I went along, and the conversation turned up that he’d managed to have eight kids in ten years, the youngest of which was (if I remember) about four months old. Two of the patients were ambulatory, and did so, wandering around and sitting down on any unoccupied bed they happened across; I remember that the hospital-issued one-size-fits-all pants were too loose for them, and they kept on having to hitch their pants up or risk accidentally flashing the whole ward. I think my Fourth Aunt talked to one of them, once.

At any rate we agreed that the ward was not conducive to resting, partly because the only ventilation was by wall-mounted electric fans and the only actual outlet through which air from the inside could go out (and vice-versa) was the door, which fortunately my grandfather was near. So we hung around and eventually the rumours were proven correct, and my grandfather was indeed moved to the new ward, which had windows as well as a door, was only occupied by one other Malay man (who snored in his sleep), and was air-conditioned all the time. We stayed long enough to say it was a nice ward and to thank the nurses and say how much better the new ward was than the old one, and then we went to Fifth Aunt’s house for dinner and showers and sleep. I slept in the same bedroom, but not the same bed, as my grandmother, and it was a fitful sleep because she had got a cough and periodically woke up hacking during the night.

The next day my grandfather was released from the ward, so we took him back to the house, and life returned to a semblance of normalcy; the cousins and the chitchat and the uncles and aunts coming and going and fussing over my grandfather (who was pretty much confined to his lounge chair unless he wanted to hobble around with his walker) and so on, and I finally turned on my laptop and got back online. The rest of the time was pretty much normal, while my grandfather rested and I sat around reading Luminosity and Radiance (which, despite being based on the Twilight ‘verse, turned out to be quite good) and sometimes talking to people—but the wireless was horribly undependable and so I wasn’t on MSN very much at all. My father took to trying to get me to go jogging or running with him, or to start reading useful things, or to start somehow being useful and all that kind of thing which proved that he’d stopped worrying about my grandfather enough to start on me.

(It’s a long-running thing, and very irritating to me, that my parents seem to constantly see me as a work in progress, and they always have input on where the progress should go. At the moment I’ve only just managed to convince them that no, I don’t want to be a professor even if I spent four years with that nickname, and so now my father is apparently convinced that I need to start reading about how to be a manager and lead people and be a great people person and stuff and then maybe I’ll be attractive enough that companies will want to hire me. It’s almost certainly the reason I broke up with the Coconut—not that my parents were bothering me at the time, but she was definitely showing signs of turning parental on me, and not in a good way.)

At one point my father asked if I wanted to go to Patience for a week, and I was noncommittal about it, which he took as assent, and so booked the tickets. And then returned to the topic of how I should be bettering myself since I had so much time, and shouldn’t be reading things like The Book Thief (which I had brought along as a book I had been meaning to read but hadn’t yet had the time to) because apparently it would make me start stealing things. I managed to distract him by going online and reading lots of local news, which at the time revolved around the government’s rather misguided way of dealing with a peaceful protest about electoral reform (it reminded me mostly of the Subnormality strip where there’s a girl on a stripper pole wearing an oversized T-shirt reading “hot for electoral reform”). If nothing else, though, the look at the ward told me what kind of old person I do not want to end up like. (My landlady is already one example of an old person I do not want to end up like.)

(The parents have a long-running thing about being useful and arranging all one’s activities towards being useful for whatever, which I partly agree with and partly want to know what I’m going to be used for and whether I quite agree with that before I start chipping away at myself. Which, with me being in my current state of not knowing anything about the immediate future, means I sort of hang around all day reading fanfics and talking to the cousins when my parents would rather I was reading stuff about how to ace interviews and outsmart office gossips and things like that, which I agree are important but not urgent.)

So here I am now, in Patience; I’ve already contacted a bunch of old classmates who are either already here or soon will be here, so I’ll definitely not be lacking for things to do or people to meet up (I hope). And there’s some Internet—one of the computers has a little dongle on it, but both parents also want to go online and so my access to that computer is limited, so there’s that at least. Job-hunting seems, like Singapore, a rather distant concept at the moment.

A quick run-through of the things I was thinking mid-flight: clouds cast shadows, which is very cool. It’s also quite difficult to describe clouds without sounding like a poet-wannabe, because all the usual adjectives have been taken already, but I settled on thinking of the ones I saw first—giant fluffy things they were—as cotton candy spun from ice crystals. Would it be possible to, with sufficient meteorological knowledge, plan a walking or hiking route so that it would be entirely under the cover of one cloud, always moving so as to be under it? It would take a bit of work, of course. And clouds would make quite interesting sculptures—what material would one use to make a cloud-sculpture, especially as unbalanced as most of them were? Most clouds look top-heavy, if they’re not ridiculously filmy or look like cauliflowers with random protrusions and all that; perhaps lots of strings holding them up. But Styrofoam might do it, if accompanied with, say, plaster for the smooth bits, and some bubbling for the apparent randomness. Helium balloons, shaped like clouds, though, would be cool, if carried on strings too thin to be seen (but not so thin that they’d cut flesh). There was a screaming baby, and I wanted to go and ask its mother if I could beat it around its head with its own limbs. The window was rattling, and I wondered if it was really airtight and then I wondered how I would test that without potentially destroying it, and without barometers or any apparatus I gave up the idea. But why do all airplane windows seem to have a little hole in the bottom of them? Maybe all airplane windows are made by the same company and they figure that if nobody complains then there’s no reason to change (and after all, all airplane windows do look alike). (It was a very long flight.) I wondered why the sea had so many tints from the air and only apparently a few from sea-level; and I wondered how big a splash would be made if the plane hit the water. And later I noticed that the sea was the same colour as forests and trees, at least to my colour-blind eyes, and for some reason people’s houses always seemed to be clustered at roads, which made me think of Geography lessons, which made me think of Loch Yuck teachers, which made me think of Accounts and Chinese and dropping them before the Slimy Purple Muck, which made me think of the Chinese teacher and then the Chemistry teacher, specifically her threatening to knock out my teeth, which made me think of the homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist… and eventually I fell asleep, and woke up to find the plane entirely blanketed in white, which it eventually emerged from, upon which I thought it was cool that different clouds existed at different heights, though it was a pity I didn’t know which was which (and wished for Wikipedia to be implanted in my brain, though that would be slightly dangerous); I wondered where we were at that moment, too, and was wondering when I’d see land (I had a window seat).

It’s not at all a quick run-through, is it? But I suppose that’s about as much as you can take (and certainly it is as much as I can remember) of the processes of my thoughts; and these are mostly scattered thoughts that I thought would be good to remember and put down later.

I’ve already exhausted my phone’s credit in SMSing and phone calls—fine, just the one phone call, to the Pig, whom I plan to meet up and hang out with tomorrow; I hope the parents haven’t got conflicting plans—I’ll need to top it up in the morning, though the parents already have plans involving washing cars and repainting walls and things like that, which is a bother. Still, I suppose if I do those they’ll be okay with me gallivanting off every night or so. Tit-for-tat and so on.

Inherited Traits

2011-07-08T21:21:00.003+08:00

I'm typing this from the grandfolks' place in So Hour, where I have been for a little less than thirty-six hours. It's been an interesting time so far, so I suppose you'll want to know absolutely everything about my life since the past update nearly two weeks ago--and, as my usual habit goes, even if you don't you're about to find out anyway!

...then again, nothing much of note has happened since my last update; I've mostly spent the time getting used to the house--there's a lot to keep on getting used to--and looking unsuccessfully for jobs, and hanging out with people, but more on that in a bit. Mostly I stay in the house and listen to the landlady's random mutterings, and I have to admit she's getting on my nerves rather. She's a sixty-something-year-old woman with the figure of a dessicated pear and the face of a gargoyle (not the real-life stone-carved ones, more like the ones from the Disney animated series) and I'm really trying to be kind here... age has not been kind to her. And I probably should have noticed earlier, but the house is clearly not the house of a person who reads much, and she said once that she used to be a retail promoter, so there really isn't very much of her mind to probe for interesting stuff either. Not that I talk to her very much, or vice-versa, apart from her asking how my family is (I suspect she just wants to know how much money we have because my continued joblessness frightens her) or her wittering on about making sure to lock the door and keep the keys secure and not use the computer so much and to not turn the lights on until it's absolutely necessary and the hot weather (when the electric fans aren't turned on) and the cold weather (when they are)... essentially she's a rather old woman and I'm still getting used to it. Mostly I put the headphones on, though that's definitely a stopgap measure and not great for long-term use, and drown her talking in good music.

At any rate I haven't been in the house for very long stretches as of late, and it looks like travelling has been foisted on me for (at least) until the 20th of July, so that's time to build up resistance to the landlady, though it also is time lost that I could be looking for jobs with, so I don't know. Still, time away from Singapore means that much longer that the money will last, so... trade-off, I guess. It's really all up in God's hands since I haven't the foggiest what's going to happen--my father thinks this mad urge to go into the industry is definitely going to end with me in some kind of management role, and if so then there's a lot more that I'm going to need to learn and brush up on. Stuff like making inspiring speeches and looking like I know a lot more than I actually do and looking down on other people as useless midgets... yes, I read Dilbert, why do you ask?

So I arrived yesterday, but I received the summons on the night of the 6th, when I was informed by my father that my grandfather was badly ill and that I should hurry up and come over to see him, upon which I asked how ill he was, and my father said he was ill enough to warrant an emergency flight from Patience (where my father was at the time), and when I asked what illness there wasn't any reply. So I left early the next day, telling the landlady only that I'd be away for an unknown period of time, and then arrived in the house just after lunchtime, thinking that I'd probably find my grandfather in his usual lounge chair in front of the TV and a little bit uneasy or something. (The other prevalent image that came to my mind was me arriving just as the coffin was being delivered, but I banished that as being a little too morbid.) To my surprise the house was nearly empty, and then I found that my grandfather was in the hospital, along with Fourth Aunt and my father, and after that was a lot of medical history--basically my grandfather had a knee surgery just before I went off to Australia, if I remember correctly, and was supposed to rest for three months; barely three days after the surgery, however, he was toddling off to run around the farm with his rifle to shoot squirrels, and on one of those excursions he managed to fall down and then the doctor was very fierce at him, and with good reason.

And then a couple days ago, he had a fever, but was lucid enough to insist on being left to rest in the house and not going to see the doctor; the next day the fever was bad enough that he apparently lost all motor control and fell out of the bed when he tried to get out of it. And that was when the panicking started and the ambulance was sent for and all the uncles and aunts and grandchildren were notified, and it was that night that I received the summons; the day I arrived he'd been on treatment, apparently for a viral attack, and today he was discharged. So it doesn't look like it was too bad in the end, but it was still very worrying. (I should add at this point that he also just had a cataracts operation and so is wearing shades all the time.) It's also a little bit amusing, because I've realised I've inherited his apparently cavalier treatment of the body--as evidenced by the episode of the infected right middle finger when I was seriously considering amputating it before going to the doctor's. (And as a result there's a slightly-rough patch of skin there, the original site of infection, where I've no sensation at all. It's rather surreal.)

But at any rate he's been discharged, and so is in the house being taken care of by my grandmother and aunts and cousins, and shouldn't be in any life-threatening situations for the foreseeable future, unless the part of his brain that says he's Wolverine kicks in again and he goes off and joins a marathon or something.

...in all this I'm sure God has His plans somewhere--if He's beyond time then He's certainly at His leisure to arrange whatever needs to be arranged, and I'll admit a bit of time in Patience does seem... desirable, for the time being. Of course, there's an old woman there, too; and the parents, and two brothers, and the Internet is going to be pretty nearly unavailable. But there's a piano, and... well! I don't know what's going to happen. Let's see what turns up.

(I suspect this impulsive ticket-booking of my father's has been inherited by me, too, except I buy books instead of plane tickets.)

Roots and Rooms

2011-06-24T20:20:00.002+08:00

So it's Friday night, and the... let's see... it's nearly four days and a half since I moved into this new place, and of those four I've only spent one full day in the house; every other day I've gone walking out to explore or get stuff done; my schedule of living hasn't changed, much, though.

I suppose I should introduce the people I'll be living with for the next year, barring giant surprises that send me off to goodness knows where and force me to forfeit the month's deposit... so first off I'll start by saying that I don't live alone. It's a small unit: two bedrooms, one living room, one kitchen-cum-dining room, one storeroom; both bedrooms are rented out, and I (and the roommate) occupy the one nearer the kitchen. It's very clean--the landlady has a thing about germs--and most of the furniture is pretty old. There's piles of stuff around the kitchen and store room, apart from the space on the ground where the landlady sleeps.

The landlady is 67 years old by her own admission--and before you ask, I didn't ask her; she revealed it to me during the first meeting, when I was viewing the room--indirectly, of course, but at any rate she is 67 years old, apparently single (I haven't quite had the gall to ask where her husband is), Buddhist, and very much an animal lover; the cat was brought in about ten years ago from off the street when she saw him eating grass, and she feeds stray cats in the nights and stray birds in the mornings. She has strong views about many things, and expresses those views without any apparent stimulus--sometimes it's about how much she prefers the taste of salt over the taste of sugar, sometimes it's about her sons' exercise routines (apparently they jog and go to the gym), and this morning it was about politics in Singapore, Malaysia, and China--I suspect I haven't yet exhausted her supply of topics to opine about. My view of her is that she's rather bound by fear--she always locks the door because she's worried that somebody might drop in unexpectedly, she prefers to cook because she's afraid of the hygiene standards outside, she always keeps at most two lights on in the house--and pretty much never any fans--because she's afraid of the constantly-rising cost of public utilities, and she wants tenants like myself because, in her own words, "Malaysian Chinese tenants are safer". She's quite proud of her family, though; I know most of their educational pedigrees by now, and their job histories to boot. But no mention of the father of the children, not even a plaque or photo of him--the walls are bare except for the electric meter and the occasional wall-mounted fan.

The housemate is 18 years old, from Jakarta; he's studying animation at the local academy of fine arts, and at the moment he's away visiting family for a month--apparently it's school holidays for him. He's quite a friendly young fellow, cheerful and very cat-friendly--splats himself on the floor to rub the cat under its chin and all that. He also reads a fair amount of manga, which I found out on the night I moved in when he asked me what I was reading and I said "fanfic" in an embarrassed tone--only to have him ask what series it was of, and then we were off to a good start and I completely spoiled the ending of Mirai Nikki for him. (He didn't believe me at first and then went to read the ending for himself, and I knew I had been vindicated when he screeched in rage.) As it turns out he speaks Hokkien and English and Chinese, in decreasing fluency... Bahasa Indonesia is not one of the things he speaks, apparently due to a private education when growing up. He can't play the organ.

The roommate... found me off EasyRoommate, which indicates a fair amount of self-drivenness, borne out by his hiring of an agent to help in the room-searching. He appears to be relatively easy-going, though somewhat private--at least, I assume such because he needs a room due to not making it past the hostel cutoff. He's relatively tall, and quite skinny, and has a definite sense of obligations, which is good... I know almost nothing else about him apart from his name, because he hasn't actually moved in yet. He moves in tomorrow, and then I'll know more about him.

The cat is at least ten years old--according to the landlady he was taken in from outside ten years ago, when she found him eating grass. To this day he maintains a habit of eating grass, which he prefers to dried sunfish (which the landlady feeds him as regular meals). He is, like all cats, relatively inscrutable; there is no scratching-post in the house, so he uses the plush sofa for that, and often interrupts TV programmes by the sound of claws-in-plush, which (given that the landlady has a penchant for soaps) is sometimes actually a good thing. He seems to like small, confined spaces--when I first met him he was between two cupboards, and now likes to stay in the corner of the sofa or the space between the TV and the window or the space between the door and the wall. I'm not exactly sure why. I don't know what he makes of me, though; he accepts backrubs and scratches under the chin, but will not leap on things I toss at him, and once hissed at me when he encountered me on the stairs (the landlady sometimes lets him roam the apartment building).

My room is small, with one window and one wall-mounted fan and one ceiling lamp; the two beds occupy almost all the floor space, and there are two floor-to-ceiling wooden wardrobes; the landlady uses one, and the other is shared between the roommate and myself. I occupy the bed nearer the door, and my stuff occupies the entirety of the space under my bed as well as part of the floor at the foot of the bed and my share of the wardrobe and my computer is put on a table outside and... yeah, I have a lot of stuff. But at least the landlady put in a router--which I'm connected to by LAN and everybody else uses wireless to connect to--and that is how I'm staying online.

...the job hunt continues its fruitless way; the parents are already busy telling me to pack up and get out and uproot myself again, and go off where the grass might be greener.

The Time Since Then

2011-06-15T19:41:00.003+08:00

...has it really been only half a month since Australia? It seems so much... longer. My sense of time has gotten warped, what with not having anything occupying my time...

Let's see if I can piece together any sort of coherent memory of the last two weeks. I'm sure I'll be able to. Not in as much detail as the Australian account, of course, but that's to be expected. Let's see what I can remember. We might have to throw coherency out along the way, though...

I suppose I might as well lay out a baseline, so you don't imagine me living the footloose and fancy free life, all bobance and bounce and fricasseed Freakazoid and come away with entirely the wrong impression and start thinking that the events I tell you about are just the tip of the iceberg and really I'm doing all sorts of really amazing things I'm just not telling you about. So here's my new "average day"...

On an average day I wake up anywhere between 10am and 12pm; the first thing I do when I wake up is groan, and then I sit up and get out of bed feet first. I always place my glasses and watch in the same place relative to the bed, so I get them and put them on. Then I go to my computer. I don't usually get lunch or breakfast--I've been eating irregularly ever since classes ended, really, it helps reduce food expenditure--and the next few hours are spent chatting on MSN, Facebooking, YouTubing, and looking at job alerts on various online job-search services; I usually apply to four or five a day--on good days I apply to as many as eight possible-looking positions, on bad days it's maybe none to two--and then I play browser-based flash games and read news for the rest of the day. This continues until about five, when I get up and do whatever tasks I have set myself for the day--usually things like "pack" or "shower" or something--and then I get back to the computer and stay there until about eight, when I go out for dinner. Dinner is nearly invariably a bowl of yong tofu--SGD2 for five items, and always the same egg-carrot-beansprouts-cabbage-tofu (sometimes the tofu is replaced with some greens) in kuayteow, with soup, and then with fried shallots and spring onions and light soy sauce and sesame oil. Dinner never takes more than half an hour. And then it's back to the room and the computer, interspersed occasionally with other tasks, and I usually fall asleep anywhere between 1am and 4am.

And that's my usual day.

What's happened since we returned? Not much, really. Or perhaps a lot? Most of it's been in my own mind, though--a quite okay place to be, since I don't exactly get out much these days. But let's recap, with the aid of Google Calendar...

We arrived back on Tuesday the 31st of May, and my first order of business was to go through my things to find my spare glasses, which I found and am now wearing; it was a great relief to have my eyesight, even if I was reminded sharply of why I had opted to buy new glasses before--not just cosmetic purposes, assuredly. And after that it was a bit of unpacking and then some laundry-doing, and then I went on Facebook and Twitter and MSN and so on, had a bit of chatter with people and then the next three days are a bit of a blur in my mind--they were probably average days, full of not doing much except sitting around staring at the room and occasionally typing up a bit of the record from the notebook... ah, yes, and looking for a place too. I had met a guy over the Internet who was also looking for accommodation, and we had agreed to live together so as to make the search go faster.

On, I believe it was Tuesday itself, he messaged me (I had messaged him first to announce my return) and told me there was a place open for viewing on Thursday night; Friday and Saturday were fully taken up by a Campus Crusade event for graduating students, and I'd been offered a place to crash for that night and Friday night, as the event was being held some distance from the campus. At any rate on Thursday evening I went out to meet the prospective roommate to see the prospective room; we agreed that it seemed nice and the landlady seemed a decent human being, if a bit garrulous and tending to ramble on about the high costs of living, and so we agreed to the place and that took awhile... it was around 8pm when I left that place, slightly unsure if I'd gotten a good deal, and went to meet the friends at the place-to-crash. It turned out to be a quite nice house, fitted with its own movie projection and surround sound system, and we watched District 9 before going to sleep.

The next day we woke and had breakfast--his father brewed up kopi luwak (!!!!) and I think we slightly disappointed him when he asked us to guess the value of each cup of coffee--I've never been good at guessing games and so guessed way too low--but it was nice coffee nonetheless. (If I had had more of a sense of drama and less of a sense of propriety I'd have gone splut at once.) It was a nice house--full of collections and random little useless-but-cool things... we didn't hang around long after breakfast, though, because we had to rush off to the event and were very nearly late. The event lasted until Saturday night, and was quite good, I think; I made a few new friends, learned quite a bit (in fact I probably should go through the notes again, I've got the time after all) and ate a fair amount too... that Sunday was the last "normal" Sunday of the House of Bread before summer schedules kicked in, too, and I quite enjoyed the time of getting back together with the rest of them and just hanging out.

The next few days I simply lived normally, experimenting with eating once every two days (it didn't turn out so well) and occasionally popping out of the room to interact with the world beyond my four walls. There was also a fair bit of packing, mostly consisting of moving stuff from place A to place B and then staring at it and then throwing most of it out after agonising about it; I'm fairly convinced by now that in my zeal to throw things out I've also jettisoned some of the only copies in existence of many of my hand-written lecture notes summaries, which means (especially given my tendency the last year or so to not download the .ppts when I could just print them out) that a fair amount of hand-written information is lost to me forever. Not that I can't Wikipedia it up--it's just the sentimental value of it, and of course my handwriting is the kind that's actually nice to look at. At any rate I managed to pack up things by fits and starts--first were the books, and then the clothes, and then some of the random debris (really, I've amassed a quite amazing amount of desktop accessories over the years--and I'm soon to be deskless) and so on...

On Thursday night there was the annual Campus Crusade thanksgiving, which I went to; it was good, with plenty of food and people and most being quite jolly about the holidays... I suppose I was jolly enough, but all the same it was one of the last parts of my student life. Still, all things end, don't they? I spent that night and the next day as usual, except for a short jaunt out on Friday night for pre-House of Bread discussion; and then on Saturday I met a man from AIA (he'd called on, I think, Wednesday or Tuesday to arrange the appointment--he'd got my information from a survey I'd done to get a goodie bag way back in April) and for whatever reason I had madly agreed to meet up and discuss my financial future--keeping in mind that at that time I had about SGD50 between my bank and wallet, too.

So we met up and it was a terribly depressing conversation overall, since it started off with him asking how much I knew about insurance and me admitting that I knew next to nothing. And then the rest of it went along the lines of "what if you're paralysed tomorrow and need a nurse to take care of you daily until you die at 80?" upon which my preferred answer would be "euthanasia" but the obviously-wanted answer was "have insurance"... and when the meeting ended because the topic finally swung 'round to my finances and he realised I had absolutely no means of paying for any plans, I went back to the room and everything seemed horribly bleak to me; it still does, to be honest. If I had a choice we'd all be One Hit Point Wonders and the moment we were put in a position where the only possible future was a Bad Ending we'd expire. As it is life is too... too bit-by-bit. We have far too much HP and a seemingly endless list of possible negative status effects, and the world is a crapsack one at worst and a crapsaccharine one at best...

...and then later I decided to heck with it, I'll never get insurance and then nobody ever will have a reason to kill me or injure me or anything like that and I'll make sure to carry a card around that says IF FOUND REQUIRING EXPENSIVE MEDICAL PROCEDURES PLEASE TOSS IN GUTTER AND LEAVE FOR DEAD. Yes, my will to live is horribly low. I'm one of those people who would never be cause for "Miraculous Recovery! Doctors Attribute it to Clinging Desperately to Life"-type headlines. I'm much more likely to be the kind of patient who, despite the surgery going perfectly and in fact better than expected because the staff team managed to overcome all their personal differences and cooperate to make it the performance of their entire careers, dies with an anticlimactic giggle and then turns out to not actually have the money to pay for the operation in the first place. Or I could just rent a car and go to some of the rural parts of Malaysia, run over a chicken, and get out of the car and wait. I hear that villagers will cheerfully beat you to death for that sort of thing and never report it to the police, which means I'll need somebody to come along and escape with the car and conveniently be a witness to my death. They'd have to be the kind who'd run away rather than perform Car Fu in an attempt to rescue me, though...

So that was Saturday. It's Wednesday today, and four days have passed more or less normally, without any distinguishing characteristics such as callbacks from companies about job applications--I don't know if I've been applying to all the wrong places or if it's just my resume or something else (a niggling voice at the back of my head says "God closing doors?") but no company ever replies my emails or calls me up for interviews or anything and my money's still running out. And I've found that in the absence of positive stimuli my default emotional state is rather... blank, with a side of irritability. I think the last time I smiled was Sunday, or maybe Monday. I don't remember... It could've been more recent than that, of course. And for some reason I've been rather prickly these past two days... I'm not sure if it's all the buildup of the worry and bother and joblessness--the parents are starting to get clamourous about it, which is more bother still--and of course there's still the matter of getting money to pay the rent with and live on until the pay starts coming in... at this point I'm starting to wonder whether it ever will. I mean, worst comes to worst, I'm off to find those hyperaggressive rural folks and kick over a chicken.

Sunburn Windchill

2011-06-02T12:43:00.004+08:00

I got back from Australia a couple days ago, and have a great deal to write; fortunately for everybody I brought a notebook along, and filled it up every day with an account of expenditure (mostly for the parents' benefit, so they know how the money went) and activities, and so you're about to be told about five days' and four nights' worth of strenuous activity! ...well, not quite strenuous. But the benefit of having a notebook to record things in is that I'm going to be able to go into a fair bit of detail, and that means you have a lovely big wall of text to look at!

But first the...

Record of Expenditure (all figures in AUD; these items not listed in chronological order)

26th May

Return ticket (Brisbane Int'l-Nerang): 57

Go card: 40

Lunch (rump steak) 9.95

Dinner (pizzas) 5.60

Observation tower ticket 21

Running total ≈114.55

27th May

Theme park and farm tour tickets 157

Breakfast ("big breaky") 7.95

Tiger/human pendant 6.90

Krispy Kreme donuts 4.50

Dinner (lamb kebab) 9.90

Bread, margarine, and plastic knives 6.45

Theme park locker (DreamWorld) 3

Running total ≈331.45

28th May

MovieWorld clapboard 10

Dinner (doner kebab) 9.90

Theme park locker (MovieWorld) 1

Bread, margarine 6.50

Running total ≈358.50

29th May

Lunch (BLT) 10

Dinner (rump steak) 10

Big Mac 4.60

Adipose stress toy 20

Maltesers (580g bucket) 10

Wax Museum entry 22

Go card top-up 5

Running total ≈440.20

30th May

Late check-out fine 4

Bread, margarine (refund) -8

Lunch (steak) 10

Dinner (Red Rooster) 12

Total expenditure AUD456 (≈ SGD600)

...And I owe, I owe... though, fortunately, I only owe it to one person; combined with the SGD900 for the return flights and SGD200 for the accommodation, I've spent a total of SGD1700 on this trip, which is very nearly double the amount I had originally thought to spend; it seems to be my fate that when I don't spend I hoard like Scrooge and then when I do, the money flows like water. Though I'd like to think that I was one of the more cautious spenders on the trip; the others probably spent a good deal more, since they actually bought souvenirs for other people. (All I have is a bunch of five-cent coins--small change from the various spendings!)

And now we proceed to our feature presentation.

The Day of Fall

I and the only other person on the trip also going from the University arrived at around 6.30pm at Terminal 3, Changi; he had made arrangements to meet up with people from his Gen12ii trip last year, and we had planned for dinner before checking in. Our flight time was around 9pm and so we were supposed to begin checking in around 7.15, so you'll see our time was really quite tightly budgeted. We met the people up--from what I heard, miscommunication had occurred and they all thought he was going on a student exchange trip--and various latenesses occurred (the last two of the travelers to arrive turned up at around 7.30pm!) and we had dinner while discussing job-hunting methods, and we eventually checked in our baggage at around 8.30pm or so, minutes before the check-in counter for our flight closed. It was quite stressful for me; I'm not very much one for sitting around and then making a mad dash to beat the deadline, so it wasn't perhaps the best start to the trip. But it was a start.

The plane trip was, as the pilot announced at the start of the flight, expected to last 6 hours and 45 minutes. I more or less spaced out during the safety announcements but perked up when they handed out the menus; apparently on swanky flights, alcohol is more or less free-flow, so I looked at all the cocktails and wines and spirits and briefly pondered the appropriateness of landing in Australia with my first-ever raging hangover; but I'm a massive coward with next to no tolerance for pain, so I drank nothing but orange juice all the way. At this point I'll note that one reason I didn't watch the safety announcement was that it was being broadcast on the little screens built into the seats, and the woman in front of me had thoughtlessly thrown her jacket over the back of the seat, and so my screen was a shower of fur and fabric; the man beside me, who was a lot less worried about disturbing other people than I, tapped her on the shoulder and got her to let my screen see the light of the cabin, and so I watched Alice in Wonderland while dinner was being served--it was an okay film, not one of Depp's greatest performances, and not at all whimsical the way I thought it might be--and then I fell asleep, stayed that way until 2.45am, and then stayed awake the rest of the way. At about 4am Singaporean time I changed my watch to Australian time--they're two hours ahead, +10GMT--and the plane touched down on Australian soil at roughly 6.17am, and from now on all times are given in Australian.

A fair bit went on during our first hour in Australia; first off we never breathed any atmospheric air, being sealed-in the whole way until we got past the immigrations, which were somewhat interrogatory--apparently hair wax shows up as suspicious on their scanners; their aggression may have been explained by the airport apparently being the set for some sort of police drama being filmed there that day, though. We eventually made it out after having been quizzed on where we came from and how we knew each other and what we were doing and so on, and it was 7-odd before we got to the part of the airport with doors and taxis waiting outside; we had another half hour before the train from the airport to the city arrived, so we spent that time running around taking photographs in the air; the sharp sting of the cold was a nice change from Singaporean mugginess, but kept reminding me of China (which is the only other place I've ever experienced winter in, so yeah). Eventually the train came and we took it from the platform--in fact we took a bit too much time on the photography and the platform was unexpectedly far from the airport, so we really only made it just in time.

Australian trains are interesting; they have plush seats, not very many hand rails at all, and the travel is extremely smooth; there's also none of the irritating "Eating and drinking are not allowed in stations and trains" announcements that you get in Singaporean trains, and plenty of graffiti was visible in the landscapes we passed--quite good too, not terribly obscene and actually quite decorative--it reminded me of the graffiti wall in KL. And there were little kids going to school, too; the uniforms there apparently include blazers, which are worn together with rather short pants, so I suppose the net effect is to keep them really sweaty in the torso and really chilly in the legs. The train ride took about an hour, and then we arrived at Nerang station.

We got the Australian equivalent of the Singaporean ezlink, called the go card, and took the bus out; we arrived at the apartment we'd rented at about 10.40am, and were very pleased with it--it was just across the road from the beach, our allotted room was 15 storeys up, and contained 2 bedrooms, a kitchen (fully stocked, it had everything except food in it), a laundry room--dryer and washing machine--and a very comfortable living room, sofas all over the place. And a wraparound balcony. Of course we couldn't check in at once; the arrangement had been that we would only get the place after 12, so we left our heavier bags with the concierge--shining example of chirpiness that woman was--and went out to explore the surroundings and get lunch. We found a place that had ten-dollar lunch specials, and I ordered steak, and promptly had an interesting new experience.

Now the thing is that steak is served with sauce in Singapore--red wine or mushroom or black pepper and so on--and it isn't, in Australia. The other thing is that it is bound to get you complaints if you serve food in Singapore and blood drips off your meat... Well, in Australia the steaks are sauceless and are bloody. I ordered medium rare steak, and it filled my mouth with a taste of copper and iron and gave me halitosis. Which is not to say I didn't like it--the taste took some getting used to, but once I got used to it--which is to say, once I found the salt and pepper and started seasoning the meat--I decided I liked this steak very much; the other trippers didn't like it quite as much, for whatever reason. After the lunch we went for a walk around--there was a large shopping district near us so we never lacked for food or opportunities to spend money--and came across lots and lots of souvenir shops with quite interesting things. One of the things about that area was also the proliferation of large seagulls everywhere; gulls and sparrows fight for food on every corner, and seem to be doing marvellously well at it from their fat sleek bodies. I kept having the urge to set up one of those box-stick-and-string traps for a gull and see if they'd taste good.

There were those packs of koala keychains, 12 keychains for a little over two dollars, which seem to be why everybody I know who's gone to Australia comes back and gives me keychains; and those rulers that have a surface of various layered images so if you tilt the ruler back and forth you get a sort of animation, which were really quite cool and if I'd had the money I'd have gotten the one with jumping kangaroos. We didn't buy anything, though; it was all window shopping until we decided that 12.30pm is quite enough time and headed back and moved into the apartment, and after a bit of setting things up and calling dibs on rooms, we all fell asleep and had a bit of a nap.

When we woke it was already dark; night falls around 6pm at this time of the year in Australia, it seems. So we went out for dinner, and got pizzas that would have cost at least SGD30 each for about AUD10; they were the really thin-crusted ones with cheese just falling off, and we only got two pizzas between the five of us--about three slices each, I think--the ones we got were a Meat Lover and a Fresh Summer, which was chosen by me because its list of ingredients included "rocket", which turned out to be slightly bitter herbs; both were absolutely delicious though. After the pizza we headed over to the Observation Deck, which is the highest point in the locality, and with a pretty fast elevator, too--ground level to 77th storey in 43 seconds--; it's high enough that you can see up to 60km out, and the deck is wraparound and completely indoors (possibly because at that height it's chilly, the wind speeds are high, and people might go up there for suicide) so you can walk around and around and stare out. We arrived at around 8.10pm, five minutes before they closed down--the attendant seemed amused when I commented on it being early--and bought our tickets and went up. It was night-time, so it was a stretch of bright lights out as far as we could see and very pretty. They closed around 10pm, at which time we went back down and then bought bread and margarine and, because we hadn't thought to check for cutlery yet, plastic knives for breakfast; we also saw another souvenir shop, and while they were browsing I got a nosebleed, possibly due to the relative dryness of the air; we got back, had supper, lounged around a bit, and eventually fell asleep.

The Day of Screams

I woke at around 6am the next day, which is shockingly early for me; the sun was already up, which was just as shocking because I hadn't yet got quite used to the different timezone. We went out for breakfast, and took it at the same place where we'd had steak the day before; apparently breakfast is called "breaky" there, and we had the large version--2 eggs with the yolks up and half-cooked and the whites intermingled; a small glass of iced orange juice; 2 large pieces of toast, unbuttered; and a small pile of bacon, fried to delicious crunchiness. It was a quite pleasing breakfast.

After that we went to a sort of Chinese tourist agency; there are lots of these little booths dotted around the Gold Coast, offering people package tours so they can get into theme parks or other local attractions more cheaply than if you bought the tickets individually for each. We found this particular place through a brochure we picked up somewhere along the line--in the airport, I think?--and then we sat there and discussed plans for awhile and our budget eventually, it turned out, only allowed for a couple of theme parks and a farm tour, so that was what we took. By the time we finished there we had just enough time to drop by the apartment for toilet breaks and to retrieve forgotten things, and then we headed out to get the bus at 11.46am from the nearest bus stop; there is a bus service that shuttles people between places and theme parks, and we took the nearest one; after about an hour of riding (during which we all dozed off--the scenery was beautiful but not particularly memorable) we arrived at DreamWorld, around 12.40pm, and in we went.

DreamWorld is a theme park of rides, so ride we did; we stowed most of the bulkier things in lockers and took enough rides to leave our heads spinning and legs wobbling, and there was even a wildlife exhibit where we got to see koalas and kangaroos and crocodiles and touch them (the kangaroos mostly, not the crocodiles, and the koalas were only touchable for a fee)--these were apparently a very small species of kanaroo, since the adult females (I presume they were adult females, because they were carrying joeys in their pouches) weren't anywhere near shoulder height; they were also very tame. And the food for the kangaroos was amazingly trustful in its provision--it was just a table of food with a little box saying "drop in a dollar, help yourself to a packet!" which would never have worked in Singapore or Malaysia; it was really good, and quite educational too with all the exhibits and performances. And the last thing we saw there was the tiger exhibit, where they had a couple tigers--one regular, one albino--and they got them to do tricks. I bought a pendant at the gift shop there; we hadn't had lunch, so we were quite famished by closing-time--around 5pm--and we bought a box of 20 Krispy Kreme doughnuts which was very nice. I quite liked the glazing on those doughtnuts, clear and flaky and most importantly very, very sweet.

And then we went back, arriving at the bus-stop around 7pm and getting kebabs for dinner. I took my first bath that day, in the hot tub--very wasteful of water but such a luxury! Though I think tubs should be larger, it was impossible to fit my entire self in and so it was really a matter of rotating body parts in and out so nothing ever got cold from exposure to ambient air. We went down to look at the apartment's heated indoor pools that night, and then it was off to bed--this was, I think, around 8pm or 9pm; it had been quite an exhausting day.

The Day of Fur

The next day was slated to be even more exhausting than the previous day, but it was a good day... but I'm getting ahead of myself here. (Ye gads, this typing is tiring; my fingers are going to scream at me all night, I just know it.)

But let's start off in the morning of the 28th of May... we woke and had breakfast--toast and margarine, during which we found out that I like my toast almost-burnt and other people like them all fair and pale but still somehow crunchy; and we left for the farms somewhere between 7am to 8am, taking the same bus as we had yesterday. The farm that we were going to tour is located slightly behind a theme park and so we had decided to kill two birds with one stone and visit both nearby locations that day, starting with the farm. So we alighted at the theme park and took the walk in, which last about 15 minutes and got us there just in time to see the ticket booth attendant turn up to work and ask us to wait a little bit until the ticket booth officially opened at 9.30am. So we waited, played Monopoly Deal while waiting--I lost horribly, as I always do--and eventually we went in.

The farm tour at first looked horribly boring to me (my thoughts when I saw the map was "they're charging us money to walk around and stare at sheep?") but as it turned out the people had cleverly arranged entertaining and educational demonstrations and shows that took up the entire morning--and would have taken up the entire afternoon too if we had decided to have an all-day visit instead of a half-day visit. So it was awesome--sheep and sheepdogs and whip-cracking and all the explanations were peppered with good jokes and threats of maiming. It all looked very spontaneous, too, which I thought was either a sign of very great skill or a sign of very careful planning--in the case of the sheep-shearing demonstration it was almost certainly the latter, in the case of the boomerangs almost certainly the former. And there was a horse-riding demonstration, too, along with damper and billy tea--I decided that I quite like damper, it's really very good given its apparent simplicity of making. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have made it into souvenir stores as an example of local traditional food, though cans of billy tea leaves are on sale at some places. I'd've liked to take some damper back. So we hung around until about 12pm when we collected the photos they took of us--they photograph practically everything you do on the tour in case you want them framed--and we'd taken some photos with the koalas earlier so we collected those--and off we went to MovieWorld, another twenty minutes' walk or so; it was a bit of a fractious walk since we couldn't really decide on the route out, but we eventually made it to MovieWorld intact.

MovieWorld is affiliated with the Warner Brothers, but unlike Disneyland the place isn't full of costumed characters strolling the streets to be photographed and shaken hands with; instead it's got rides and souvenir shops and some other shows, and so our time there was a mixture of everything--we arrived around 1pm and started off with watching stunt car driving, which was a lot more interesting than I'd thought it would be; the smell of burnt rubber I could've done without, though, since it was only interesting for the first few seconds and thereafter was just chokingly thick. After that we went on a roller coaster ride that was notable for being completely indoors; it was quite good, since they used the darkness and laser shows and sudden bursts of light to keep us disoriented and unable to see the track; given that the track consisted of lots of hairpin turns and one occasion of falling backwards, this was amazingly effective. We had had energy bars while queueing and so the lack of lunch didn't really bother us too much. After that we saw the Main Street Parade, which was the first we saw of costumed characters coming down the street in cars and things and waving to people--Bugs and Lola (LOLA?!) and Daffy and Sylvester and Tweety and the Justice League and the Joker (squee!) and Catwoman (with a whip! and gymnastics!!) and so on... all the way I kept thinking it'd be great if the Joker had his gun that shoots Bang! flags, but he didn't. After the Parade we saw a 4D show, and then split up because some of us wanted to go on one ride and some wanted another and there wasn't time for all of us to go on both, it being rather nearly closing-time; I was in the group that ended up on the Lethal Weapon ride, which consisted of us sitting in harnesses suspended from a railing, out feet dangling while the attendants instructed anybody with loose shoes to remove them. And then the rest of the ride was pretty much flying in midair and corkscrewing quite a fair bit--I know we went upside-down at least four times--and the nature of the restraints was such that the spinning action bruised the ears. And so we got off of the ride quite appropriately terrified.

We didn't get Krispy Kremes that day, but did have kebabs for dinner--I had a doner kebab with hommus sauce, which apparently is made from chickpeas (an inherently funny word, that) and was really quite tasty. We also dropped by the Wax Museum on the way back to inquire about entrance fees and found that we, being a group of five or more, qualified for cheaper rates; and when the guide found that we were visiting from Singapore, he got quite animated indeed. As it turns out he used to live in Singapore, forty-odd years ago, and fell in love with a girl and then ran away to Tehran when she started talking marriage; she tracked him down for a few years because she had a job with British Air, but then she stopped and they lost contact and he's been trying to find her again for a few years. And so we promised to drop by the next day for a tour through the museum and went back to the apartment to sleep, all agog at the strange coincidences of life.

The Day of Chafing

It was at around 7am on Sunday that we woke up (ye gads, is it already nearly a week since then?); we had planned to go to church--we had found one nearby and one of the fellow travellers had a childhood friend who had suggested a church in Brisbane's town area--but by the time we had all had breakfast we were all languorous and decided the travelling time to the town area would take far too long and we'd arrive just in time to see the parishioners thanking the pastor and leaving--so instead we sat around the apartment until about eight, then went down to the beach.

The beach was, as aforementioned, just across the road from the apartment, and so we got there quite quickly; I was quite enthusiastic about it, since I'd been wanting to go down to the beach since seeing it--having the view of it every morning and night probably contributed to that--and so I went down and immediately began splashing a little in the shallower areas, though the waves that came in were of unpredictable strengths. I started off wading at ankle-height, but the waves were such that I was soon splashed up to mid-waist--it probably didn't help that as I got splashed I went in deeper, the reasoning being that if I was already wet up to the knees then I might as well wade at knee-depth, and so on until I was wading at hip-depth and the waves were coming in almost up to my chest. The others refused to even enter the water, and were content with photographing each other on the beach; I joined them for a couple of photos, and then we all went back up to the apartment. As it was I was quite curious about the beach, as the sand on the upper parts of the beach was all fine sand, the kind I associate with ground-up stone; it was so fine and so dry that it squeaked as it was walked on; on the other hand the sand covered by the sea, which I had been walking on for the most part, was full of broken pieces of shell and coral, neither of which were in any evidence nearby (and I was told that the nearest reef was a good distance away); I still don't know why it is so. We left the beach at around 8.30am, then cleaned up a bit--I had to change and put my clothes in the dryer--and set out for the city to meet the fellow traveller's friend.

We arrived at Brisbane town at around 11.30am, and walked a short distance to a garage where we met the friend; as it turned out he was also the cousin of one of the Campus Crusade people in NTU, though the family resemblance wasn't strong. We had lunch--a rather unsatisfyingly small BLT for me, which put paid to the idea that white people eat giant portions--or at least they don't in Australia--and then we went off and started walking around town.

We started off by walking through something of a public park, where families and their kids were basking in the sun; we came across a street performance where a guy was putting his body through the seat of a toilet bowl along with much patter and juggling, which contained plenty of adult humour but managed to stay kids-friendly, though I don't know how much of his talk about piercings was true--probably all of it--and we tipped him about five bucks at the end of the performance. Why not? It was entertaining. And then the friend left us, as he had exams to be studied for, and we were left to our own devices; so we strolled some more, and we found a museum of random stuff--Aboriginal history and wildlife and Australian national history and so on--I found it massively entertaining, the others fell asleep. And then we went on, and found a whole lot of shops; I bought at the first shop a 580g tub of Maltesers and at the second (after much wringing of hands and calculation of budget) a medium-size Adipose stress doll, and after that I had no money to spend and no energy to go on shopping at any rate--I never have much enthusiasm for shopping--and so I was more or less dragging my feet after the others all the rest of the time that we were in town as they went hopping between stores and buying random things that I didn't keep track of.

We left at around 5.30pm and took a train ride back to the Gold Coast that cost around AUD7 (apparently it was peak hours) and so had to top up the amount in the go cards; then we got dinner, which was a 300g rump steak and not too bloody so it required less salt and pepper, but was still quite delicious (and I was quite famished at that point); it also had bits of fat attached to the meat by stringy fibrous bits, which took a little effort to cut; but it was delicious. By that time it was more or less eight o'clock and so we went to the Wax Museum, where we found the friendly old man from the day before and went on a tour--it is apparently the largest wax museum in the area, though that may be an overly narrow superlative, and it was full of torture devices and famous people--not the same exhibits!--and was quite interesting to look at. It's even got a wax statue of Mdm. Tussaud, made by Mdm. Tussaud herself (said the tour guide), so that's one thing special about it; we also got the old man's email, and apparently he's moving to Malaysia for a long time. I suppose it'll make his search for his childhood sweetheart that much easier.

We dropped by McDonalds' to take advantage of some buy-1-get-1-free vouchers that we'd gotten after the tour, too, and that's how I know how large the Big Macs in Australia are (the same size as in Singapore or Malaysia) and their cost (AUD4.60); we arrived at the apartment at around 10.30pm, and I bathed and then fell asleep.

The Day of Loss

It being the last day we were going to spend in Australia, we'd done most of the souvenir shopping and packing already, and I woke at around 7.15am; as before we had toast and hot water for breakfast, and finished all the bread but not all the margarine, because I was the only health-unconscious person amongst the five and so heaped the margarine on while everybody else could still see their toast under the margarine. At any rate we had to throw away the excess margarine, and we watched an episode of Mythbusters while people pottered around packing and talking about how sad it was that the time was nearly over and so on; and finally I got people to decide on going to the beach, and down we went at around 8.30am.

The weather was slightly inclement, being overcast, and so the beach was devoid of the usual bevy of people trying to get a tan or a lie-down in the warmth; the sea was also pretty cold, but I waded in nonetheless and without any of the previous day's gradualness, either--I went in full hog and got tossed around a bit by the waves before the other two joined in (the remaining two people were old women and didn't want to get wet). The sand remained graded from smooth to rough, though turned unexpectedly smooth again a little distance into the sea, so it was more like a band of shells and coral fragments through an otherwise smooth sand surface--which I still can't explain... I basically stood there, water up to waist or so, and let the waves carry me up or down or inward; every now and then a really good wave would come along and then it'd be head-over-heels and a bit of disorientation before I found the sand and my footing, though in the intervening I'd be scratched all over while being dragged along the sand by the force of the wave; that was how I lost my glasses to the sea--a wave came up from behind and before I knew it I was spinning and tumbling and when I stood up I realised I was seeing everything in blurry double--I have both myopia and astigmatism and without my glasses that makes for interesting sights, or lack of sights as it were. And so I decided there wasn't anything to lose anymore and was a lot less cautious about getting tumbled about, though I also thought that if life had any sense of drama then I would get tumbled right onto my glasses and find them in a statistics-defying turn of events. Of course, that didn't happen.

We left the sea at around 9.30am, when we went up and showered and rinsed the sand off of our clothes--the tumbling got sand into the seams and pockets and everything--and put the things into the dryer for an hour, during which we finished packing up everything (during this time I went around photographing the apartment and then found that due to some glitching, I had lost all the photos up to mid-day the day before, which was a bit of a blow to me as I had taken some photos I rather liked) and cleaned up the apartment so we could leave with a minimum of fuss; unfortunately checkout time was supposed to be 10am and we only actually arrived at the checkout counter at 11.30am and so had to pay a bit of money as a fine for lateness, though they did let us stow our largest bags with the concierge until later. After that we went around the nearby shops a bit more, and the other guys found this place that has racing car simulators and they played around for nearly half an hour despite only having paid for 15 minutes--the owner was a very nice man that way--and then we had lunch--steak--and bought more souvenirs; at around 2.30pm we went back to the concierge and retrieved our baggage, then went to Pacific Fair which apparently has lots of shops.

The next few hours mostly consisted of me sitting around while everybody else went trotting off to buy things and marvel at sales, and then we finally regrouped and sat around some more until we rushed off to catch the bus so we could catch the last train to the airport; I'd've liked to have caught the second-last bus, not being a fan of sitting around and then making a mad dash for deadlines, but the rest of the group didn't seem to mind, and so I came off looking like a worrywart. Which isn't always a bad thing, I suppose, but still...

...we arrived at the airport at around 8pm and then there was more sitting around (we had also been sitting on the bus and the train); the party split up in short order to find the toilets, dinner, and duty-free shops (more or less simultaneously) and we eventually had an unsatisfying dinner at Red Rooster--the portions were tiny and the prices high, and the food wasn't even well-prepared--and then we walked around some more looking for places to shop at, checked our bags in, and then waited until it was the last call before boarding the flight.

About six and a half hours later we landed in Singapore--I had a Singapore Sling mid-flight and found it somewhat interesting--, and after far too much walking around looking at duty-free shops (really, what is it about shopping that mazes people so?) we parted ways and I returned to the hostel.

And what came after that--I have been very very busy indeed!--is a story for another day.

Bite Me Awake

2011-05-21T12:00:00.002+08:00

So, the semester's officially ended. I know it ended more than a week ago; I do apologise for tardiness, and I know it's been 16 days since the last update. But for whatever reason, the NTU network decided to block Blogger, or at least make it so difficult to access that the browsers simply gave up on trying to load it; and today's the latest that I thought to check and then I decided to write a post. And it'll be a nice long one, too, since it's got 16 days to cover--that's the entire last two weeks plus a bit, which means the last of everything... the last lecture, the beginning of exams and the end of them, and how I am now... and of course I'll be detailing them all in obsessively overabundance of detail. After all, I've got plenty of time to type up the post.

So we begin... let's see, April the 27th was the day of the final lecture--I'm not sure how that managed to not be mentioned in the last post--but at any rate I attended it, partly because the lecturer had promised revision tips for the final exams and partly because, hey, last lecture ever, might as well show up, right? As it turned out it was a massive disappointment; the lecturer spent most of the time saying essentially "everything in the notes is important" and then concluded by "if you've skipped any of the lectures then too bad for you, you've missed out, nyah nyah nyah". I fell asleep partway through the lecture and only woke up when he started nyahing, which made my last attended lecture in the University very much like a lot of my other attended lectures, which was a bit of a pity. You'd think such events would be marked by something a little more memorable, like fireworks or sparklers or little elves falling out the ceiling with pots of gold.

Shortly after that the exam revisions began, with decidedly less fervor than for the previous 6 semesters' exams; partly because I'm used to having 5 or 6 papers to study for and so having only--"only"!--three papers to sit for seemed the height of luxury, and partly because some calculations told me that short of straight E's or fails, my graduating class wasn't going to be vastly changed, for the better or the worse, and at any rate I had other things on my mind, like job-hunting and sitting around playing board games. The way the exam schedule was, I had a bit more than a week in between the last lecture and the first exam, which gave me some breathing room to go around doing random stuff, like staying up all night with friends playing games. It was remarkably fun, and I'll miss those times--I don't think those will quite be possible once work starts, except under remarkable circumstances. At the very least I'm going to have to be able to bunk in with somebody in the hostel, or manage to get back to my place of residence while severely sleep-deprived. But the exams then came, and were dealt with as they came; quite a few days passed with four-hour sleeps and then naps to pay off the sleep debt, and some with far more sleep than really needed.

I should add that some time in between the last lecture and the first exams, I came down with a truly horrendous sore throat; in fact the first I knew of it was the day I came down with a bad fever and couldn't study at all for the cottonwool in my head where my brain usually was, and so I took that day off to sleep, assuming it was nothing more than sleep debt. That was, I think, Wednesday the 4th of May... by Friday I was incapacitated with the inability to swallow, and by Saturday I was waking up every three hours or so with a completely closed throat, where swallowing anything--even saliva--left me with a pounding pain in the throat. Googling revealed upwards of a hundred possible causes, and so instead I turned to Facebook for help. As it turned out that Saturday was the day of Singapore's General Election and all the stores were closed, so I spent the day medicating myself on warm green tea, which was the best I could do; the next day I skipped church but not the House of Bread, and was thoroughly fussed over (That was the first time Munchausen's crossed my mind as actually pretty understandable.) what with hot tea with lemon in it and various other things... on Sunday night I got loquat syrup, and by Monday I was equipped with honey and salt (and WikiHow taught me how to gargle, I kid you not) and even though I was still waking up with a closed and painful throat, I at least had ways to deal with it and get back to sleep. The most educational thing in the experience was when I talked to the aunties of the little 'mart, who conferred with each other when I asked them if I was holding ginger (for making tea with), and then yielded the judgment that ginger was entirely the wrong thing to cure a sore throat with--something about being too heaty when what I wanted was something cooling--and then I was introduced to Snake's-Tongue-Grass Tea and salted yellow watermelon slices as cures. The former was horribly bitter, which raises the question of how such things come to be sold at all, and the latter was actually quite delicious; I overdid the salt once, though, and it turned out both crunchy and horrible to the taste, though no less efficacious. At any rate the sore throat eventually gave way to a cough, though a phlegmless one; and that gave way to more-or-less health, and all this over the course of a bit more than a week.

At any rate I was well before the final exam, which raised no end of ire in myself and various other coursemates; the module in question is called Engineers and Society, has little to nothing to do with engineering or society at all, and was coincidentally also the last lecture attended. It was taught, I believe, by some outside company hired by the University, and was horrendously boring, as the lecturer tended to segue into old anecdotes that took the better of two hours to relate, and somehow managed to use the same three or four anecdotes--told in the exact same amount of detail every time--for everything. Which made the lecture notes no fun at all to read; I compressed the lot into 17 pages' of .pdf, which I usually do for every module before the exams--read the notes, rewrite them into a format I can understand (which usually does nothing more than underscore how little I actually understand), and then pore over my summary--so that's what I did again. 17 pages' of .pdf, and the man loved his lists, so it was a constant process of reading "...and the fifteen causes of amorality, 1. Lack of moral fibre, 2. Depression, 3. Incredible lack of moral fibre..." over and over until they were quite memorised. And then came the exam and I found I'd forgotten most of them, so left the examination hall rather full of rage and irritation and a sort of despondency.

That day I had pork-rib noodles and a long session of board-gaming that lasted until about 4am the next day; then I did some packing, wrote a letter to the roommate that he ought to have read by now, and then set out for the grandfolks'...

...where, four days later, I still am. I arrived entirely without warning, not even the usual five-minute-before-arrival phone call (it usually goes "hullo, I'm at the front gate now..."), and arrived coincidentally as my grandfather got back from the farm, thus had no need to wait for anybody to open the door for me. The days so far have been full of food and second helpings and sitting around and mosquitoes and talking in Mandarin. And of course there's been a lot of talking about what my plans now are; everybody, even the hairdresser, is unanimous in agreement that I oughtn't to work in Malaysia, so that's that for that. And for some reason my imminent graduation has been taken as good proof of my having become Grown Up (even if they still agree I'm just a giant baby boy when at home) and so now I get to listen in on the worries about the cousins' study habits (i.e. that they're practically nonexistent because of computer gaming, which makes it rather a pot-and-kettle situation) or about my grandfather's health and so on. It's been good times so far though, even if I keep unaccountably waking up before sunrise because of a combination of heat and mosquitoes; even with the mosquito netting up I still wake up bitten all over for whatever reason, and of course the mosquito netting means that the fan doesn't quite penetrate into my airspace very well.

In two days' time I go back to Singapore; in three days it'll be the FYP presentation; and then in four I'll be preparing to go to Australia for the graduation trip. And I'm still jobless.

*curls up in fetal position whimpering*

Rewrite, Reiterate, Repeat

2011-05-05T15:27:00.002+08:00

The semester is rapidly drawing to an end, and by now there's only a very little left of it to be gone through before I say goodbye to student days forever and then it's (as I keep telling everybody who asks what I think will happen after I graduate) homelessness and unemployment for me, I'll just sit on sidewalks and hold out a little tin cup jangling with change.

Well, really, one hopes the job market will be better than that. But I don't like living on hope; I'd like to live on certainty; but certainty is a precious scarce resource in the world we live in, and so I'll take hope as the next best available thing.

So what's been going on? This is very nearly a token update--the last two weeks haven't really contained anything of note: I wake, I do some studying, I sleep, it goes on and on; every now and then it's interspersed by events, like meetings or birthday parties or all-night board-game sessions that last nine hours or more and leave everybody heartily dry-mouthed. Board games, by the by, are a quite interesting way of gaining insight into a person's character--you don't even need the game to be particularly complex. All you need to do is let the person choose the game, and then watch how they play. It'll tell you pretty much everything about them. In my case, for example, I tend towards cooperative (or at least team v. team) games with some element of chance in them, fantasy themes, and I'm absolutely horrible at games that require fulfilling various criteria involving the eventual totting up of points--at least, such is my conclusion after the recent playing of various games and losing most of them quite badly. On the other hand lots of games are points-related--AgriCola, Railways, Citadels, Smallworld--and very few aren't--Shadow Hunters, Munchkin/ Munchkin Quest, Saboteurs--though I suppose it just shows that I'm not terribly great at strategising. Not one for the big picture, or for long-term plans, perhaps. Of course it might just be inexperience, but other people seem to have a real talent for thinking circles around everybody else, and doing it quick as a wink, too...

At any rate exams are coming, and I've started studying--erratically, but studying nonetheless! And looking at past-year-papers simply drives home the insufficiency of my studying, because there's always far too much to remember and not quite enough time to remember it all in. Personally I just find it ironic that I'm studying Optics notes and getting very little sun as a direct result, which I'm dealing with by leaving the doors and windows open--I haven't yet gone to the lengths of setting up elaborate arrangements of mirrors and lenses, even if I had any, to redirect plenty of sun into the room.

Sleeplack Grammarwrite

2011-04-22T12:22:00.004+08:00

I have just... well, not quite just... I have been awake for about 1.5 hours at this point, having gotten about five hours of sleep. You're unlikely to be able to do the math, seeing as how this post will show up at different times on either Blogspot or on Facebook (someday I think I will actually just start using one and find some way to share posts other than through Facebook Notes--just keeping the link to this blog in the profile should be more than adequate for those who actually want to read it), and so I'll tell you I slept this morning at around 6am.

It's surprising how the symmetry of life works, isn't it? I've gone through the whole cycle of see-be amused-be bored-be annoyed with that email about how babies just want to not poop in their clothes and children want to be with their families and so on and eventually old people just want to be with their families and very old people just want to not poop in their clothes; also that one about how life should go backwards... but all that is just to say that in my final semester of my university education I'm finding myself doing again all the things I used to do in my very first semester--meet new people through other people, stay up into the wee hours chatting, sleep when the birds start singing, and wake up much much later than the parents would approve of. I wonder how the Corn and the Emoticon are doing--I've got the one on Facebook, but don't talk to at all, and the other's apparently dropped off the face of the earth entirely. It makes me wonder if, in four years, I'll be saying the same thing about the people I currently know and like. I wouldn't be surprised... History repeats itself. One thing that's definitely changed, though? It's not a new realisation--I'm sure I've mentioned it before--the names of other people are few and far between in occurrence on the blog now. So much so that there no longer is a Characters Page--everybody on the page was last mentioned, what, several months, even years ago?

It may be something to do with my outlook on life and people; so many of them have come and gone and passed through my life, and so few of them make reappearances--or the reappearances are so infrequent, and so fleeting... I know there's a pithy saying about not wanting to care about individuals that goes along the lines of "not even God is that busy".

I must run; today is going to be a rushed day for me. I shall finish this post off sometime.

later

Well, I'm back, all sated and tired and full; I don't think I've eaten quite this much since the post-SPM prom night--if not in terms of absolute quantity, then at least in terms of how bloated I felt after eating: I've never quite felt like I would throw up if I swallowed another bite since then, and today... ah, today, full of so much good food that it was such a shame to let any of it become leftovers--chicken and fish and vegetables and fruits and ice-cream and brownies and chapatti and rendang and tofu and yellow rice (I think it may have been nasi briyani, but I'm not certain) and so much more, if I only had a stomach large enough to take it all.

(There are certain to be people who look at that and go he certainly doesn't need to start wishing for a bigger appetite! though. Such is my reputation. On the other hand, at least three people have commented that my face has gotten narrow or that I appear to have lost weight, despite the scales speaking to the contrary, so maybe my habit of occasionally skipping meals is turning out to have some useful side-effects.)

But today was good; the five baptisms and their testimonies--as always one finds that the most moving testimonies come from people who didn't grow up in a church environment and so they don't know the styles and formats; not that the formats are a bad thing, but having that artlessness in it makes them all the more disarming and easy to pay attention to; not to mention, of course, that they tend to have the more dramatic changes in their lives... At any rate baptisms are always pretty charged events and decidedly draining ones, too; everybody was yawning on the bus on the way back.

And of course I didn't go back--I headed over to a friend's house, one of the team I went to Cambodia with, because two of the Cambodians are in Singapore for a visit (I never did quite get around to asking what exactly for) and the team was planning to get back together for a chat and dinner and suchlike; as things turned out I arrived just in time for dinner--well, not quite: they waited for me to start dinner--but at any rate we had dinner, a sumptuous affair with the aforementioned foods, and then desserts and more desserts--the first were fruits and then, apparently to balance out the healthiness, brownies in ice-cream (Very Rocky Road and Mocha Something!) and chocolate syrup and sparklies (which nobody took any of, and I would've said something about not wanting my brownies to turn vampiric on me if I weren't busy mashing it up into a ...mash for easier eating).

So now you know my today; the past two weeks haven't been terribly eventful. Classes are ending; the final year report is winding down--I know I've said that in the last two posts, but we keep finding something to do in the lab because we find it such fun to go in and put on lab coats and gloves and mess around with pipettes and incubators and cell wells and things, and it's such a pain staring at the words and wondering how to explain the results we've gotten. But we've got pretty much ended for real, definite, certain, "confirm plus chop" in the vernacular; the report and poster are due the coming Friday, which means my coming Wednesday and Thursday are going to be spent haunting the room and staring at words.

I've also been sleeping awfully irregularly, due partly to my own indiscipline, partly to staying up late playing board games with friends and strangers--I slept at 6am this morning from playing with a bunch of people, some of whom turned out to be much more interesting than expected but weren't Facebookable because they apparently have either got very high privacy settings or don't have any account at all--and, of course, partly due to schoolwork, especially the FYP report. That thing is a 20MB file by now, 121 pages at least, and even so it remains incomplete--most of it is pictures and diagrams and so on, and I've found a little glitch in calculations that may or may not turn out to be significant--it may explain certain discrepancies in the findings, if I can get the projectmate to understand it. I think I'm almost certainly an intuitive by now, if only because the projectmate is so sensory that I find what seems to be a simple if-A-then-B argument (to me) turns into a A-is-A-not-B-and-B-is-B-not-A-and-A-governs-B-by-method-C-therefore-if-A-does-C-then-B explanation... it doesn't help matters that my English is better than the projectmate's and as a direct result I keep on having to deal with inquiries as to what words like "atypical" mean. I know I shouldn't think of linguistic skill as any sort of indicator of overall intelligence, but still.

And now? Now I prepare to sleep, of course; it's midnight, I've run the last eighteen hours on six hours' sleep; I have a debt, and I am very full of good food. I go, I go.

Win-Lose Condition

2011-04-07T11:40:00.003+08:00

I woke at 10.30am today, 2.5 hours later than usual--and in fact I only woke at 10.30am because I have an alarm setting on my phone for when the 8am alarm goes off and I want to sleep in a bit more. Left to my own devices (no pun intended) I would probably have woken up a long time after lunchtime; not that I'm particularly hungry at the moment, I did plenty of eating yesterday and the fullness has got carried forward.

I think it's the sleep debt forcibly paying itself off, though; I haven't been sleeping very early for the past few days, mostly because I and a friend have gotten hooked on playing board games and we've been spending a fair bit on new ones. Well, we've only bought two, so far, but they're pretty addictive games--the first one was Shadow Hunters, which I played twice or thrice a long time ago at the Settlers' Cafe and liked, and the second was Munchkin Quest, which we've been playing over and over because the rulebook is just that difficult to comprehend initially. They're both fun games, though. And of course the staples like Bang! and Citadel and Monopoly Deal and Saboteur are all over the place. At any rate having these games around, plus both he and I being quite blase about schoolwork--we usually get the work done in the daytime and use the night for playing about--means that he keeps on calling me up to go play a game.

I don't think I've slept any earlier than 2am since Sunday night (that was the night we obtained Munchkin Quest).

We also made takoyaki the night before last; it was surprisingly fun, and again demonstrated to me a certain... short-sightedness, perhaps. We've been planning to do some cooking, since we usually make at least one meal together every semester (kind of as practice for when we have to start living independently and cooking becomes more a necessity than a hobby) and we haven't done any this semester. So he looked up the recipe on the Internet and off we went to buy the ingredients in the afternoon after lunch. I'll just say here that I hate shopping with a vengeance; the aisles are too narrow for two shopping carts to pass each other without scraping the shelves and possibly accidentally knocking some stuff to the ground, and that's not taking into account the people wandering up and down the aisles to look for whatever it is that they want, the people squatting on the ground trying to decide between two or three items, the baby prams left sitting in the middle of the aisle because the parents can't be bothered to push the pram as they go along... if it were up to me really I'd have taken the prams and sent them careening into the nearest wall and see what happened, but I'm not chaotic enough to do it. And then actually finding the items you want is difficult in itself--the dairy products are here and the baking products are there and the vegetables are arranged in a perfectly ridiculous fashion. Very inefficient for the customer, though I suppose the supermarket does want the customers to walk all over the place and maybe they'll do some impulse buying of all the shiny stuff they have to keep walking past. At any rate we finally found the various ingredients, after nearly two hours of slowly inching our way around people and prams and other trolleys (and what is it with old aunties? They just stand there with their trolley in the middle of the aisle and if you so much as scrape them as you try to get past you get the evil eye and the death glare! Fortunately I'm quite capable of a death glare myself.) and then we got in line to pay and then we went back to the hostel.

The cooking proper only commenced around 8pm, so I napped in between the getting-back and the cooking--we'd both only fallen asleep around 3am the night before due to a round of Munchkin Quest (each round takes about 2 hours to resolve)--and at 8pm or so we started getting the stuff ready and carrying it to the pantry. Then I found out he'd invited about five other people along and so the tiny pantry was now filled with seven people learning to cook takoyaki for the first time. As it turns out that was a good thing, because we had grossly underestimated the amount of takoyaki that can be prepared from 600g of takoyaki flour (apparently it's a special blend of something and something else that creates a particular texture): every 150g turned out to produce something like 40 to 50 takoyaki, and the packet we had was 600g. Do the math and you'll see we wound up with somewhere between 160 to 200 takoyaki (my rough calculations on the night itself put the number at slightly higher, something like 216) amongst the 7 of us. But at any rate when I saw the little crowd my first thought was oh no, we're going to have to get supper too. It was fun, though, the cooking; once you get past the mixing and the chopping of the tentacle into tiny pieces, the cooking basically consists of lightly oiling a specialised metal dish with ping-pong-ball-sized indents and then pouring the mixture in, and adding a bit of chopped octopus to it; you then let it cook 'til the outside is hardened but the inside isn't, and then you take a couple of toothpicks and turn it over. Ideally the inside gooey mixture then drips out and forms the other hemisphere and when it's fully cooked, you take it out and it should look like a little light brown ball. Of course this is to massively oversimplify, there's a lot of fiddling with the gas stove involved, but you get the idea. The turning over of the half-sphere turned out to also be surprisingly fun, and so it became the most popular part of the procedure.

I have a patch of numbness on the left side of my right middle finger, stretching from just past the base of the fingernail to just after the outermost joint; it's been there for awhile, really, ever since the incident when I cut that finger and it turned giant and green--the doctor put something on to numb it and then cut it open to extract the pus, but ever since then it's been kind of stiff and numb. I thought it'd go away, but then that finger's started itching and little bumps have started occasionally appearing near the numb patch. And of course the numb patch is growing... I don't think it's anything life-threatening, but it's certainly something to contemplate. At least if I ever need to go wolf on that finger I'll know which side to do it from. At the moment it's not itching, but for whatever reason the skin's coming off of it and the layer under the skin is toughish.

There's a meeting with the professors later to go over the rough draft of the report--which means I'll have to print out 72 pages or so of report plus appendix and then we'll be looking over the stuff and hopefully they won't decide it's been horribly written and will need to be entirely redone--not that I can't do that in a few days, but it'll be a hassle. Still, we'll see! Tomorrow ought to be the last day of labwork, since it'll just be SEMing and from then on it'll be reports and discussions and rearranging the appendices to make sense and look nice and professional.

Plans and Dreams

2011-03-26T15:27:00.002+08:00

I've lived for close to a quarter-century now; if the current average life expectancy in Spore is anything to go by, I have a half-century more to go before cancer or disease or accident claims me--that is, of course, assuming I don't stray off into some sort of natural disaster or get murdered or something.
I just wonder, what would a good life goal be? I mean, what do I want a description of me, say, when I'm thirty years old to be like? How about at forty? One would think it might be an idea to describe comprehensively the kind of person one wants to be at some given future point; that way one has an idea of things to do, milestones to pass, etc.; one would also think that this description should, where possible, be specific and not tied to transient standards (e.g. "spends less than 50 hours a week on the Internet" is good; "less time online" is bad).

So, let's get to describing.

...or at least that was what I was going to type up... the day before yesterday. How a couple of days changes one's mind! But really, it's more that I've been thinking it over and then... well, let's see.

Conventional wisdom says that it's good to plan ahead, the farther ahead the better. That way, as I said, one can plan for contingencies, prepare for surprises or eventualities, take steps that will further the plan, etc. On the other hand, I put little to no faith in conventional wisdom: people are just as often wrong as they are right, and if plans were so easy to make then Batman wouldn't be half as awesome as he is. And quite frankly the whole idea of making plans means that one requires some sort of power or ability to execute those plans, or at least the means by which to acquire the means to execute plans. And then the Bible has James--"si Dominus voluerit. Et: Si vixerimus, faciemus hoc, aut illud"--and Proverbs--"multæ cogitationes in corde viri: voluntas autem Domini permanebit"... never mind the whole "can God make a stone too heavy for Him to lift" conundrum. Should I even have plans for my life?

Of course there are arguments on each side. If there weren't, this question would be rhetorical; but it isn't. So--conventional wisdom says planning is good, because everybody needs a direction in which to be headed, goals to strive for, etc; helps one deal with disaster, provides motivation for action, makes one able to prioritise and arrange; allows for cooperation should multiple people have the same goals, which then leads to all kinds of wonderful things; and so on. Religion appears to imply (to put it mildly) that planning is bad, because all is vanity, God has His own plans for one and will reveal the relevant parts at the right times, and we're much too puny in might or understanding to make good plans (let alone best-case-scenario ones), or even if we had them, to execute them. Which, of course, seems like the approach of a very lazy person: "oh, the future is so frightening and so full of unknowns, let's get God to deal with it and I'll just sit here and wait for stuff to resolve itself!" And it's certainly more comforting to be doing something than to be waiting for something...

...this seems like something I should ask somebody else about. Perhaps a good debate could be made of it.

I've had strange dreams these two days; I shall recount them here, in as much detail as I can remember; it's usually that the dreams I remember are the strange and slightly puzzling ones, but hey. Both these dreams were the ones I had just before waking--thus, both occurred on the mornings of the days in question, and both were interrupted. Given the content of the dreams, though, that might be a good thing.

The dream on Friday morning started pretty benignly; I and some of the friends of the House of Bread were sitting around the electric piano; it was a sunny afternoon, and we were singing "All Creatures of Our God and King" in quite passable four-part harmony. At some point, we noticed that the hymn had a lot more verses than we'd seen before, so we turned the page and continued. At that point the hymn's tune changed into something I've never heard before, but we went singing on--and then it changed completely into a story about this box in an attic that contained something unspeakable, and it belonged to a woman who lived in that house, who was a hired servant of some sort--governess or nurse or maid--and it was kind of this isolated country house, all wooden walls and floors and hay and straw and twine, and set on a countryside where everything else was fields and grasslands. And then along came this incurably curious young boy, who went into the attic and opened the box, which wasn't locked, and discovered the unspeakable secret--but he was caught by the woman. The next two lines of the song were "fearful young shepherd with his head full of stone/ sing tremble!/ sing tremble!" and then I woke up. I've tried to figure out where I might have heard that tune or those words before, but so far it eludes me--Googling has turned nothing up.

The second dream I had this morning. I dreamed about being at a camp or a sleepover party or something of the sort; at any rate I was on the floor, preparing to go to sleep on a sleeping-bag or a thin mattress or some similar soft surface. On either side of me were strangers, and I don't remember anything about them other than that they were male. Then the lights went out, and I dreamed of falling asleep; and when I woke, the strangers on both sides of me had woken and were whispering to each other, because I had apparently somehow turned upside down in my dream-sleep (i.e. head and foot had exchanged places) and I was using the leg of the person on my right as a bolster, but he was okay with it. And then I woke up for real.

...one of the neighbours has this thing about the ceiling light in the attached toilet where he never ever turns it off; I'm not sure why. I just keep getting up whenever he's been using the toilet to turn the light off; goodness only knows why he keeps turning it on, even in the daytime.

Oh, and the FYP appears to finally be winding down; we're out of machinable substrates, and anyway the machines we've been using are slow and/or have malfunctioning parts, so it's not like we have the time or resources to make more substrates on which to grow the cells. All of this just means that come next Friday--if all goes well--the laboratory phase of the FYP will actually be over and done with, and it'll all be about trying to figure out how to explain the results we've got--very stressful I expect that to be. Just like yesterday; yesterday was quite stressful too.
I woke yesterday morning and had plans for the day--9.30am to 12pm machining, 12pm to 3pm fiddling with cells, and 3pm to 5pm at the scanning electron microscope. All of that went poof pretty quickly, I can tell you. The thing is, the machine I was using is only available one day a week to each project team, and my projectmate--bless her generous little heart--had given our day (Friday) away to one of the other students, and had not told me. So the other student (who had the machine on Thursday) hadn't cleaned up after himself and so I spent half an hour removing the stuff he'd been working on; I also carelessly used the wrong tool in the experiment and very nearly ruined the last of the raw samples, until I realised my mistake and replaced the tool with the correct one, by which time my carelessness had also led to a scratch across the back of my thumb, which was bleeding but not profusely. At any rate the machining only actually started around 10.30 or so, by which time I had got a quite bad stomachache, most likely from the oyster omelette I'd had for supper with the roommate the night before. So the machining went on until 12.30pm--which was just a little off from the plan, which was a good thing. Then I went to the cell culturing lab, and took the results from the previous batch of cells being cultured--killing, fixing, staining--and as usual the results were (at best) mixed; that's also when I realised that the machine tool must be definitely deformed to the point of unusability, because the samples were in such a condition as to be useless for the purposes of the experiment. (Admittedly, though, it might be possible to still use them--it depends on what the professors say.) I fiddled around there until about 2.30pm, when I went to get lunch and then went to the scanning electron microscope... where I got the good news that the gold-sputtering machine, which has been down since the 25th of February, was now fixed; but the scanning electron microscope itself had a burnt-out filament, which would take two hours at least to replace--and the SEM is such a popular machine that it is only available to each student for two hours a week. It left me in such a foul mood that I had to watch two videos from the Nostalgia Critic to motivate myself to go back to the cell culturing lab, or else I'd have just gone "what's the point, the universe hates this experiment" and thrown my hands in the air and gone back to the room for chocolate. At any rate I showed back up in the cell culturing lab at 5.30pm, and was there until 7.30pm (when it was still light out!) checking on cells, passaging and splitting and seeding and photographing. All in all yesterday was... really quite bad, discouraging even. Still, the FYP is winding down--the next step? Presenting the results to the professors and going "what do Code Monkey think?"--which I expect to be just as discouraging, if not more. But that will happen when it happens.

"...Therefore, Revenge is Ice Cream"

2011-03-07T08:45:00.003+08:00

After all, it's sweet and best served cold and not terribly good for anybody's health. It's one of those quotes I Googled and couldn't find any one source for, though perhaps attempting to find the origins of a witty phrase one comes across in the comments section of a webcomic through Google is a doomed enterprise in itself.

It's Monday! Monday mourning. I mean morning. Either way of spelling it seems to work...

It's also been about 12 days since my last post, and for the life of me it doesn't seem like the past 12 days were terribly eventful, though I'm sure they were; I've been tired and sleepy and twice last week I slept before 11pm, which is a rare occurrence in itself. But then lately I find myself getting tired earlier than I used to, and waking before the alarm, which should be taken as more alarming than a seismic rumble in Christchurch. (That's probably an ill-chosen simile.)

And, of course, there's little more than a month remaining until the final report of the final year project (I can never decide if that phrase needs capitalisation or a hyphen, and even if it did I'd never figure out where to put either) and it's... ongoing, is the term I always use to describe it to people who ask, because that's the best way to say it; I wouldn't say we're making leaps in progress, but we're not exactly stagnant--right now we're in the repetitive motion phase of the project where we just keep doing the same things over and over and take records and see what turns up. And then we'll write down whatever we have in the report.

Which just reminded me that I should look at a few journals, or bring them to school, to doublecheck a few things. So perhaps blogging does have its uses--i.e. in the process of documenting things, one is reminded of things that need remembering... which I just did, of course, only to find that the journals don't seem to have mentioned at all the kind of thing I was hoping to find, which means more Googling sometime in the afternoon. Perhaps I should do this kind of self-reminding more often.

It's been an interesting two weeks, in that regard, I suppose; one learns new things all the time. As a lecturer in KTAR said--and this is one of the few things I remember from his lectures, because he repeated it practically every lecture--"Every day you learn something new!" Which is true, if one keeps one's eyes and ears open. "Remember why the good Lord made your eyes/ So don't shade your eyes", go the (very out-of-context!) lines from a Tom Lehrer song. And of course sometimes the learning can't be avoided, like when one is in school or in church or whatnot--well, admittedly one can still avoid learning in those cases, with a little effort.

In that regard I suppose the final year project has been about as educational as any module--not that the knowledge of the project will be useful beyond this semester or so except in rare circumstances, oh no; but the methodologies, the skills, the pursuit of knowledge! I was ranting a little bit yesterday, I think, about that; this probably stems from my childhood, in which I was never very good at separating fact from fiction and actually believed in mutants and magic and all that kind of thing--I treated X-Men with the kind of seriousness that most people reserve for documentaries, and I think my current baseline cynicism is from finding out that the world is really a lot more ho-hum than that, and yet at the same time is massively interesting if you look at it properly.

Fire in the Year of Metal

2011-02-23T09:05:00.002+08:00

So I'm twenty-four, at least as of three days ago; it says something about the kind of schedule I've been subjecting myself to that I intended to post this a few days ago, and only now have time to--and even this time is punctuated by the blinking yellow-and-blue of an MSN conversation window. Not that being twenty-four is particularly amazing; most of the people around me have been twenty-four for at least a year, and as for me I woke up on the day before my birthday thinking I was going to turn twenty-five and was planning all sorts of puns revolving around being a quarter of a century old.

I suppose this means I should rewrite my Introduction to Myself post; certainly I think I would like to fill it with links to tropes that I think are present in my life, and I think I've changed plenty since its last edit; I might as well also trash the Characters page, because people seem to come and go in my life the way the little drifting things go past your field of vision when you're looking at a plain surface; and I'm far too lazy to keep updating the thing whenever I meet new people. And of course, it's depressing to read over it and realise just how many people I've lost touch with... a fact that was recently highlighted by the birthday wishes on Facebook, of which there were about 80 or so, and of which at least 40 to 50 came from people I haven't seen or heard from since Loch Yuck or TARC. People come, people go, and unfortunately I'm people too.

I think I like the Complaints Choir so much because they do something I'd like to do more often, which is to complain long, loud, and in public, and have people stop and agree and complain right alongside instead of going "grow up!". After all, I complain more to this blog than to any human, possibly for that reason. Not that it's a good place to complain; the way the Internet is going, all my prospective employers will just slog through my entire 7-year history and come away with the impression that I am thoroughly unemployable. Or something; I'm an optimistic pessimist, which is to say I assume everything turns out horribly so that I'll be happily surprised if it doesn't. But then yesterday's career fair seems to have proven that my course isn't the most employable one, so... nothing much to lose, eh?

So. Hm. An awkward silence--literally, because my tapping produces noise, and therefore the cessation of one produces the lack of the other--while I try to remember what I started this post for... ah, yes. Schedule. I've been insanely tired these past few days; I'm not sure why, but I have been. Well, I actually know, sort of. Lack of sleep, irregular eating, lots of travelling and human contact... it all adds up. I don't think I've had very much solitude since... oh, since last Wednesday? Yes, since last Wednesday. Or even before that; my Google Calendar has been extremely colourful since the 13th of February, and if I remember correctly I was busy on the 10th and 11th as well. It's always a worry to me when the calendar starts filling up; it usually means I wake up in the morning and go "Good Lord, it's morning"... I don't like mornings. But my schedule has been colourful, which means it's been crazy--flitting here and there between groups of people and places, each of which might be enjoyable in itself, but cumulatively the stress adds up and right now I don't want to go anywhere at all, just sit here in front of the computer vegetating all by myself... well, not all by myself. But physically alone, just me and the computer and my books...

I need to begin planning my finances for the rest of the semester; I don't think I've more than a couple thousand to tide me over 'til graduation, and if I'm going to buy the tickets to Japan then I'm going to want to live on a thousand 'til then--over the next four months... that's a little more than a couple hundred a month, which seems like a lot until one remembers the hostel fees (about half that amount), tithing (a tenth), travelling (maybe forty to fifty)... which doesn't really leave a lot to eat. I shall have to work out the details this evening; it looks like I shall have free time to run up tables and calculations and graphs. I definitely have emails to send, too, which I'm procrastinating on but really shouldn't be, because it's a very short email... which I shall send in the afternoon, after classes, because classes begin in half an hour, travelling time is about ten minutes, and I also want to shower before heading out because I still have bed head.

So. I'm twenty-four, about to graduate, and my employment opportunities look dim; the trip to Japan... well, my father says the decision's up to me but the family can only spare SGD1k--I'll have to borrow the rest and pay it back eventually--and even after that I'll need to live on savings from somewhere until my first paycheck, whenever that will be. Still, what's the worst that could happen? I suppose if the worst comes to the worst, I'll go to Patience and find some kind of simple job that does nothing more than pay the bills and enables me to put up some kind of savings to repay the graduation trip debt... at least there I'll have a house, and I can commute by bicycle, and I'll more or less live at Starbucks for their free wifi; I'll be mostly alone and lonely, of course, since nobody I know well lives there, and the Pig is likely to get assigned somewhere outside Patience. But then it's the worst-case scenario, it's not going to be enjoyable. (Of course, the worst worst-case scenario is prolonged unemployment and bankruptcy while sponging off of everybody I can latch onto and thus evoking the scorn and pity of everybody around me. But that's too depressing to contemplate right now.)

Plaything of the Body

2011-02-06T23:31:00.002+08:00

I returned to Spore about... twelve hours ago? No, it's closer to fourteen hours now. Technically I and the family crossed the national boundary at around 9am or so... but I am getting ahead of myself. These few days have been full of things going on, but rather weirdly... I live very much in a world of my own, which makes me both easily entertained (because I pretty much never bore myself) and slightly off-kilter (because I'm also almost never quite paying full attention to the world around me). And of course, like the past few days, it makes for a sort of fugue state.

The past few days, of course, have been the Chinese New Year--my second completed cycle, since it's now the Metal Rabbit and I'm a Fire Rabbit. And since this year it so happens that the two days of public holidays given for the Chinese New Year fell on a Thursday and Friday, travel plans naturally began accounting for the previous day or two--in the case of myself and the Gobbler, we decided to head out on Wednesday morning to the grandfolks', and he decided that it'd be a good time to bring along his girlfriend, so she came along too.

The parents had arrived at the grandfolks' some days beforehand, too, and so when we arrived (a scant three hours after leaving the station, or about four hours after leaving my hostel), thye came along, picked us up, and off we went for fishball noodles--according to my father and the shopkeeper, harvested fresh from the fishing boats anchored a few kilometers away from the fishball noodle shop. After that we went back to the house, where we met the grandfolks.

At this point, I suppose I should interject. I and a few of the people from Crusade have been planning to go for a short trip--ten days or so?--to Japan, some time after graduation/convocation and some time before beginning work, because none of us think it'll be likely that we'll all be able to take that much leave to travel off anywhere together once we begin working; but it's a little costly--at least SGD3k, apparently--and while I'd already broached the subject with the family, the parents were already saying things like "it'd be more meaningful to climb a mountain" or "why not somewhere cheaper, like Malaysia?" so I wasn't terribly hopeful. And that probably led to a slightly chilly reception for my parents from me; it's not the first time that plans I've made have been kiboshed by them for reasons ranging from budget to not knowing my companions to approaching deadlines. At any rate I didn't greet the parents quite as warmly as I greeted the grandfolks.

But we arrived at the grandfolks' house, and greeted everybody, and then the usual rituals of comparing heights and exclaiming over how tall or fat or skinny people had gotten since the last sighting, and in my case there was also a great deal of exclaiming about my hair (it hasn't been trimmed since last, hmmm, October? September?) which apparently was much too thick to look real. And of course there were the usual choruses about whether we'd studied well, when I was going to graduate, had I been eating properly--this question only asked in jest, because my reputation is such that nobody worries about me letting myself starve--and so on. And of course, this time the Gobbler had brought his girlfriend along, and so I was asked when I'd bring one back too--to which my standard answer was "I shall grow old and die bitter and alone".

We had the reunion dinner that night--meat and seafood and things--most satisfying. But then I'm generally a happy person when well-fed, and I'm generally well-fed whenever in the grandfolks'; the only oddity about the menu was the inclusion of cheese sausages, thus showing that the goodness of cheese permeates even to the remote villages of Malaysia.

That night there were fireworks, and we enjoyed the show as usual; the neighbours are relatively well-off, or they are relatively free with their money, and they often put on a quite decent show of fireworks--the calculated cost is maybe RM10k or so for the entire display, and there are always, at any given time during the night, at least four families letting off fireworks. My family... lets off no fireworks, though we did buy a noisemaker this year and half-deafened all the family's dogs and certainly frightened the chickens. This year we noticed a few 孔明灯 as well--literally translated, probably bright-eye lights--they're massively illegal, but so are fireworks--both are likely to cause injury and fire if mishandled. But they were certainly pretty.

The next day was Thursday, and we set off for church; that particular church was full of old people, but the sermon was quite well-delivered, I thought; it did go on a bit long, but it was humourous and the points were well-put--full of stuff about being always thankful and so on. The church also happens to be located in the compound of a school--presumably a church school?--and so we went wandering around it after the service and laughing at the facilities and things they had up, like the educational corners where they had put up manila cards of idioms and "common phrases" that really aren't at all commonly used, or the art corner where they showcased the work of students who are convinced that the natural colour of a rabbit's fur is bright, shiny, sunny yellow.

After church we dropped by the house of my Fifth Aunt, and then returned to the grandfolks' house for a short time; and then we returned to the house of Fifth Aunt for a steamboat dinner, during which I found that it is quite difficult to tell fish from squid when both are in a thick opaque broth; that cabbages are nice when boiled to textureless softness; and that crabsticks are always a delight to the palate. After the dinner we watched the second part of Red Cliff--the first part had been aired the night before--and I Googled, Wikipedia'd, and TVTropes'd it with the handy laptop in Fifth Aunt's living room during commercial breaks. (As a side note, it was quite jarring to have the tense moments in the film, especially during the final battle scene, interspersed with little fluffy bunnies telling us to drink such-and-such brand of milk tea or whatnot. Very jarring indeed.)

The next day was the Second Day of the Chinese New Year, when it is customary for everybody to gather at the grandfolks' for a massive lunch that continues on 'til reasonably late; so we obtained food--it's catered by nearby Malay families, because if you get five women to cook for 40 stomachs then arguments break out--and people fell to eating and drinking and talking and gambling. It's surprising how growing up separates people; I found I had hardly anything in common with my cousins apart from blood ties, and so spent most of the time drifting around eavesdropping on conversations or abusing the younger cousins; one of my female cousins is also a Rabbit, but twelve years younger than I, and she spent a good deal of time sneaking up on me from behind to attack; while I, of course, had a good deal of fun catching her in the act and then taking retribution. I now have a pretty scarred right hand, while I suspect she has bruises on the insides of both her wrists and the knuckles--my retribution was always simply to grasp the wrist or knuckles and squeeze, while her tactics revolved around her surprisingly sharp fingernails.

Later that evening, we went swimming; we found a dilapidated little pool, about an hour's drive from the grandfolks' house, and swam; we soon found that the place was cheap to swim in, and closed very early, for the same reason--to save money, the health club (or such it styles itself) doesn't turn any of its lights on; and as a result we only swam for about 45 minutes before the murkiness of the water and the darkness of the surroundings forced us out of the pool. I doubt that pool will still be there in a year's time--or if it is it'll be full of dead leaves and drowned moths. We came back from the swimming in time for a trip out to get lamb soup with grandpa and a couple of his friends--which was, I'll say, very nice. But then swimming had made me hungry; but the last time we ate it it was nice too.

The next day--Saturday--we spent partly out of the house; the morning was spent travelling to visit one of my father's old classmates and his children, and then we travelled back; I spent most of the rest of that day napping, because we'd been sleeping very little (midnight 'til about 8.30am or so!) and spending that much time around other people is always draining on me--a primary reason I usually bring the laptop along, apart from obsessively detailed and frequent Facebook updates, is for a bit of "me" time, or I get very tired very quickly (and then I start eating like mad, or madder). It was during the drive to my father's classmate's that the subject of the graduation trip came up again, and eventually my parents decided that a budget of SGD3k was way too much and SGD1k was going to be the upper limit.

At which I went into... a weird sort of mindset, I think. As aforementioned, I'm used to my parents butting in on my plans and kiboshing them. Then again, I did rather want to go on the trip; but there were (and are) cogent reasons to not go, i.e. budget, time, and so on; so essentially? It's a decision between enjoyment and rationality, really. Rationality says that the money would be better spent keeping myself alive while looking for a job, that surely (as long as life is) there will arise other opportunities, that I'll want that money to eat and pay rent and so on; enjoyment says that one only graduates once, and once one joins the rat race it's awfully hard to opt out, even for only ten days, and it's incredibly unlikely that all the people should get leave at the same time and have that much money left over from whatever other responsibilities we will surely accumulate, and that I've spent most of my life being the mostly-responsible, dutiful son, the one who pinches pennies and scrounges for ways to make ends meet while the other brothers spend money like water on strange things--my wallets, for example, are about to fall apart while the Gobbler paid SGD25 on a paper wallet (!) and it's about time I went on a splurge and was a little bit irresponsible for once.

Of course, the two pigeonholes full of books above me bear testament to my weaknesses in spending, too, but still.

But I've been mulling it over--together with the whole looming issue of job prospects and things--and the thought came to me earlier that it was odd how, when one asks for things and one gets them, one doesn't want them any more. In my case it was that I've been wanting a clear direction on what to do after graduation; and the parental kibosh on the graduation trip would seem to be that. But I don't like it, mostly because I don't quite trust the parents on their ideas of work and leisure and what constitutes fun. And that then ties in to how I see God... the thing is, there are a lot of verses in the Bible about Him supplying all we need. And there are a lot of people out there who are Christians who are leading incredibly uncomfortable lives. My way of harmonising these two facts is that... well, quite frankly, "all we need" isn't very much at all. All we need for survival? Food and drink and shelter and companionship. Perhaps then the promise extends to the resources we need to do what He calls on us to do--which, also, isn't very much. In fact my view of the "all we need" set of promises is something like the Perry Bible Fellowship strip where a man asks God for a billiards table in heaven, then admits he doesn't really need a billiards table, and so doesn't get it. And so I've come to have the idea that what God supplies is the absolute bare basics necessary to sustain physical life for as long as required, and anything more, well, better be grateful for that, eh?

Which is, admittedly, a rather cynical view of things, especially in light of other verses about having abundant life and so on.

So it's... back to prayer, frankly. I don't know what I want, and even if I knew I wouldn't know how to get it. Or at least, I know what I don't want. That's a start, right?

Incidentally, I found out today that I become extremely irritable when hungry, and I don't even know when I'm hungry because I so seldom am. The lesson? Eat within four hours or so of waking up, or I get very prickly and irritable (and irritating).

Giggledy Giggledy

2011-01-30T22:43:00.002+08:00

Nineteen days since the last update! How very remiss of me. I shall do my best to make up for it--but then, of course, nothing terribly earthshaking has occurred in the past three weeks or so... well, nothing apart from the last two weeks of holidays (ha!) and the first week of school; what an odd sensation to be on the second week of school already. One keeps on getting reminders that one is graduating soon--between all the career fairs and DONATE TO THE UNIVERSITY NOW! reminders that one keeps getting in the inbox, it's slightly eyebrow-raising how much attention is suddenly being paid to one by the University. But then of course it looks good for the University if one donates, and if one finds a job soon after graduation (the nature of the job doesn't seem to be a concern, only that there is a job). Which is really why I'm running through one of the University's job-searching aids at the moment, or I would be running through it if I could access it; apparently high traffic volume has brought it down because that particular aid ceases functionality in a little less than half an hour's time. Which shows both the last-minute tendencies of students at large, the poor technical/ server support for the aid, and the incredible... lack of consideration? lack of something, certainly... that causes the University to want people to have decided on the career they intend to enter by January when graduation is in June. Surely a choice of career is momentous enough that one is expected to take a little longer to decide on it? (And of course, the lack of technical support has forced them to extend the deadline by a couple days. You'd think they'd expect this sort of thing by now--unless they did, and that is why the extension was so promptly performed.)

I've said before that it's silly how people are expected to take so little time to decide or learn important things--driving, I think, for example, and now apparently job searching. And frankly I don't know what kind of job I want, only what kind I don't--which is to say, I'd rather not do anything involving the persuasion of other people to get something they don't need or want, I'd like something where the outcomes are tangible and easily measured, and... that's about it. Really.

So... the last two weeks of holidays? Weren't holidays at all, at least not in any sense other than name; I woke at 8am daily and headed to the lab, started processes running by 8.45am, and thereafter reappeared at the lab every one-and-a-half hours to check on things and keep them running; and this went on 'til 5.30pm, Monday to Friday; interspersed with all that were meetings with the supervisor and the projectmate, during which we generally established how little we knew and how extremely poor our grasp of the technical knowledge required and all that kind of thing; and every now and then were Campus Crusade activities, notably the conference that took up a whole two days and left me drained--really, the stuff we went through in that was pretty intense... Somewhere in those days I also picked up three books from the library--possibly the first three books I've ever borrowed from the library, which says something about the workload of the previous semesters and/or my usage of my free time (or both, of course). And two weeks on, and their return due date is the 8th of February, I've only almost finished one of the three.

(Unsurprisingly, I had a nightmare involving discovering that half the books in my room were borrowed from the library and having to cart the lot off to the library to return.)

I have a cold; it's probably due to the weather, which has been unremittingly rainy for the past few days; my laundry is constantly soaked, and I've resorted to simply taking in the items I plan to wear the next day and wind-drying them in the room overnight. At the moment I'm wearing two shirts--one thick and short-sleeved, one thinner and long-sleeved--and the ceiling fan is at position 2 and the standing fan has been turned off. The room is unprecedentedly warm, but at least I'm not sniffling and sneezing every two or three minutes. And I'm now sweating, either, which says something.

I wonder what it is with standing up in churches. It's quite common these days that when the sermon is over and everybody is supposed to be praying or meditating or something, the pastor or preacher starts asking people to stand up if they've made a decision to _____ (and the blank is of course filled with something appropriate to the sermon), and everybody is told to not look around to see if anybody else is standing but to just stand themselves. I always find that sort of situation extremely disturbing. What's the objective of it, after all? It might show the preacher that their sermon has had an immediate impact, perhaps; but the same could be accomplished by going up to them after the service and saying how nice the sermon was. Perhaps it's supposed to show one's own certainty of the thing to be done; but then if one is certain already, how does standing cement that certainty? And who is one trying to show the certainty to? Maybe, in the cases of decisions with obvious outward actions, the standing is to enable follow-up--maybe their cell group leader can then talk to them about it and encourage them to go on. But then it means that cell group leaders would be obliged to look around so they knew who'd stood up and then they'd need to put in the effort to actually follow up; not to mention that I'm relatively certain that the injunction to stand up is only obeyed by a very specific kind of personality, and that people who obey the injunction will continue standing up for future injunctions. So in the end the whole stand-up-if-you've-decided-to-_____ thing is massively... illogical. And irrational. But still practiced, for whatever reason.

After a great deal of talking with the roommate, I'm rather firmly convinced that his girlfriend is of a very similar temperament to mine, which is slightly unnerving.

I Wish I'd Said

2011-01-11T11:43:00.002+08:00

Every now and then it happens that a course requires me to get up before the class and make something of a speech--during the past semester it happened no less than five times. And most of them went horribly wrong, because I have a habit of speaking too fast that gets exacerbated when I'm under pressure; and the combined gaze of thirty-plus pairs of eyes counts as pressure for me. Heck, more than five pairs of eyes on me and I get prickles running down my neck.

But one of the speeches I gave that I think could have certainly been done better was the one on Professional Communication--the group had been assigned to present on job searching and I had been tasked with the section on resumes. (The other speeches were very technical and so had much less potential for entertaining either myself or the audience.) In fact the idea for this post came to me on the way back from lunch just now--a stray thought set it off and I ruminated on it for the rest of the walk, and now I present:

A (Roughly) Four-Minute Talk on Resumes in Job Searching

*gets up*

"Thank you, [previous speaker], for your illuminating presentation on [topic]. Now, then, class, I will be occupying your attention for the next four minutes with the topic of resumes, which [our module instructor] has already said a great deal about; hence this will be a highly-condensed version of what we all already know.

"My presentation today has one overarching point, out of which I will draw some practical principles by which we may all abide and, hopefully, use to write very good resumes that will massively enhance what employability we have left in this... economic situation. So without further ado, I say."

*points at screen and clicks pointer*

*screen is entirely white, words appearing on screen in sync with the spoken words*

"We. Are. Robots.

"Allow me to repeat: we are robots. Not from our own perspectives, of course; I'm sure we're all well-developed human beings with wonderful backgrounds and hobbies and political interests. But nobody wants to hire human beings nowadays. What your interviewer thinks when they look at you is not what a nice young graduate this is, I wonder how I can get to know them better and help them? but well, they look promising. I wonder how much profit I can get out of them? Doesn't sound very flattering, does it--in fact it's the exact same thing I thought whenever I buy, say, a pencil.

"Which now brings me to the resume-writing proper. To even get to the interview, you have to have at least have sent in a resume or some document that somehow convinces them that you're worth the trouble of interviewing. Now, we have established that as far as the company is concerned, you're a machine--input money, output more money. What kind of resume does a robot write?

"Point one: A good robot gives their owner no trouble. Thus your resume should be pleasing to the eye, and make it easy for them to see the advantages of hiring you above all the other robots. Such advantages are things like modifications--have you, for example, been programmed to do a certain activity useful for the position?--or place of manufacture--we all, how lucky for us, have been processed in NTU, which is one of the more reputable places of manufacture--or other things like that. Equally, make it obvious that after hiring, you will continue to give no trouble--do you interface well with other robots? Do you often have errors? Do you clearly communicate when required, and in the appropriate languages? Will you be easily caused to follow relevant regulations?

"Furthermore, there are certain things that are expected of all robots. Spell-checking, for example, or neatness; exhibiting these qualities in the resume will convince the employer that you may be a useful asset to the company.

"Point two: Robots must be useful, and must continue to be useful. This is, again, reflected in the resume. We are all robots, programmed with a certain amount of certain kinds of knowledge. You must show that the programming is relevant to the position you wish to fill. You must also be prepared to continually update your programming and show that preparedness in the resume, or risk becoming obsolete within a few years, upon which you will be replaced with a new robot who can do better.

"In this, then, you may reflect a certain amount of customisation: while all of us have gone through processing here, we have all had slight alterations in the processing. Also, we have been differently preprogrammed even before coming here, and the various other modifications may give you some advantage in this, as they show how easily you may be reprogrammed, or they will show that certain programs already exist in you and so the company will only need to update instead of installing from scratch. Be sure to portray relevant advantages, or portray all advantages as relevant.

"Finally, robots must not act human. We do not expect our watches to develop a longing for other watches, or our calculators to decide that they want us to press them a little more gently. Equally, your prospective employer has no interest in your opinions, likes or dislikes, or any part of the rest of you that complicates the return-on-investment calculations--all they want to know is whether you will be able to correctly, completely, and reliably perform your task. That said, some amount of likes and dislikes should be mentioned, but only because your employer knows that a happy robot is a productive robot.

"I hope that this will help all of us write resumes that show how much better we are than all the other robots and thus manage to gain us employment in the company to which we apply to be owned by. Thank you."

*sits back down*

------

Not that my sentiments are strictly along that line; I do know that companies usually have a lot more than ROI on the mind when looking for employees. It's just that the whole idea of looking for employment seems to consist so much of "I'm better, hire me!" which makes it like a race more than anything else. Our parents and teachers all lied when they said education would get us good jobs; it's more that education makes us able to apply for a better kind of job.

One thing about robots, too--one can easily replace another, and they are mass-produced. Much like graduates these days.

(One suspects, of course, that leaving this floating around the Internet could seriously hurt one's chances of being employed by any company that checks one's Facebook or blog, or Googles one's name, as a routine part of the employment check. After all, cynicism isn't usually high on the list of Desired Attributes.)

Zydrate Comes in a Little Glass Vial

2011-01-10T08:39:00.003+08:00

I'm awake, and having paid off my sleep debt by sleeping for 9 hours, I'm rather alert as well, which is a new and unusual thing for me--at least, the combination of being alert in the morning is... Not that I would have normally had a sleep debt, as it's the holidays, but I'd only gotten about five hours of sleep between Saturday and Sunday and Sunday is usually a quite busy day for me.

It's only been a week since the last post, but it's still been a pretty packed time--not very, not at all, but things have happened and so I shall be my usual loquacious self about them; though, of course, my memory is hardly the most trustworthy source of information around, it's still the only source of information about those things. Heh.

Last week I and the FYP-mate met up to attempt to make some progress on the FYP; it wasn't too long before we both found the machines that we wanted to use occupied (apparently the holidays are a very popular time for people to catch up on their FYPs) and found that some of the information we wanted unavailable and both the professors weren't to be found in their offices. So we decided to do the literature review--with two people working on it we managed to get the rough draft finished in 1.5 days, and the next portion will be the polishing--and in the meantime one of the professors has been ascertained to be away on holiday, while the other did reply our email. So we're meeting again in about half an hour to discuss revised parameters: at our original plans we'd have had to make a good 900 pits, each of which requires anywhere from one to two hours to make; I'm thinking of maybe revising it to 64 pits (approximately 1/16 the original!) which is still up to 128 hours' working, which is still a challenge--the lab's only open 5 days a week and of those it only works for 8 hours; which essentially still means 1.5 weeks per sample, and we do want at least three samples to work with. So that's one of the things we'll have to figure out as we go.

But my main reason for writing this post was that I had two rather odd--decidedly unsettling!--dreams last night. Or technically this morning, since I'm relatively sure they occurred after midnight. But they were still unsettling; I don't know what caused them, and I've no idea if they say something about my inner self or something. But I shall record them, and all you Freudians or Jungians can dissect them as you please.

Dream #1 was set in the grandfolks' in So Hour; I and the Gobbler were there, and I was eating instant noodles from out of a polystyrene bowl. We were both in the dining area, though the Gobbler wasn't eating anything. Suddenly two women walked in, both in professional dress; both the women looked like grown up, grown out versions of the Brats, and they seemed to know the Gobbler. Being curious even in my own dreams, I eavesdropped (though they were all talking loudly and frankly everybody could have heard them) and it soon transpired that the Gobbler had rendered them some kind of service at great cost to himself, and they had promised reimbursement, and this visit was to tell him that the reimbursement was not forthcoming. Upon which it got louder, as he was irate and they were defensive, and I was irate as well and went up and poured the Maggi over the head of the one who looked like the oldest Brat, upon which the other Brat-like took out a camera, smiled in an oily fashion, and snapped a picture. The rest of the dream was a rather bloodthirsty sequence of events, in which I was roundly abusing the Brat-likes--curiously, nobody intervened--while they threatened exposure, expulsion, etc. And then I woke up and lay there for awhile, and then fell asleep again.

Dream #2 was also set in the grandfolks' at So Hour, but this time I was there with the Empress; Youngest Uncle was there, too, and behaving oddly--very misogynistic, very sharp of tongue (admittedly he'd always been, but not to family--not very much anyway), that sort of thing--and oddly, again, nobody seemed to notice. And all the time I was getting more and more agitated about it, and finally on the night before I and the Empress were due to travel away from the house (though I've no idea where we were going to travel to), I finally burst out: "Wasn't he supposed to be, you know, dead?" For Youngest Uncle has been dead for over a year--the funeral is documented in the blog for that time--and I was there to see the cremated remains, the urn, etc.--and the Empress didn't seem to notice the question the first time. I asked again, and she shrugged. "Cannot come back meh?" She took the intervening silence, during which my jaw was busy picking itself up off the floor, to wonder whether the next day was a public holiday.

After that I woke again and lay in bed until the alarm went off--maybe ten minutes or so...

This morning when I woke up I found several SMSes reminding me of things I'd totally forgotten about, which goes to show how bad my memory is and how loose my grasp of time has become. Neither of which is a good thing, of course, not when school's due to begin in less than fifteen days.

Yarrow Yarrow Qwerty Fellow!!!11.11!1/1/11

2011-01-01T11:11:00.003+08:00

So, it's the New Year. 2011, one year closer to 2012 and then we'll all see if the Mayans were right when they predicted general doom and catastrophe--or, at least, we think that's what they predicted--as far as I know all there is to it is that their calendar ends on our equivalent of December 2012, or something like...

At any rate exams are over. It's a little hard to believe they were only--what, two weeks ago? My final paper was the 23rd December, and it's now the 1st--a little over a week, then, about nine days. And in 9 days I've gone through so much relaxation I wouldn't mind if the next semester started the coming Monday, because I can already feel the fluff building up between the ears. But there's still 3 weeks to go, most of which I'm projecting will be spent in Singapore. I keep telling people I'm here for the FYP, but honestly there aren't any projections on that yet; I'll start work on the literature review portion of the thing on Monday, I think, and there's something I want to try out on the little metal square we've textured so far, and of course we can always email the professors to see what to do next in the absence of input from the postgrad student helpers.

So, what's gone on since the day before the final paper? ...a great deal. Obviously. The past 9 days encompassed the final paper; the post-exam celebrations, which segued into Christmas Eve celebrations; Christmas proper; Boxing Day; a few days back in So Hour; New Year's Eve, and then today--New Year's Day proper. And I shall document all of these, in as exhaustive detail as I can, simply because I can, and I don't want to forget.

The final exam began at 9am, and was probably the hardest exam to study for. Not because it was so vague and all-encompassing and so full of strange terms (really the business world is a strange and weirdly complex one), but simply because it was after everybody else's exams and the hostel had been steadily emptying out all week. The second of the two neighbours in fact left the night before, around nine or ten, to stay overnight in the airport and catch his flight (the next day at 8, I believe it was); and we chitchatted--I was bored, left the door open for fresh air, and was pacing the way I do when reading. It's a new habit, and only surfaces when I'm reading my notes. Very odd, but I suppose I have to burn the calories somehow--not that I was getting much in the way of calories, since during the exams I kept a steady diet of one meal a day on average, and not even an extra-large meal to make up the difference. At any rate I paced, eventually paced my way into the corridor, and found the neighbour periodically going in and out of the room to throw away stuff; from which I correctly surmised his imminent departure. (That and the fact that the earlier-departing neighbour had said so too.) So we made desultory small talk, over the course of which he expressed surprise at me being shirtless; I suppose being from northern climes leads to one always being clothed, while I find myself most comfortable with a nice cool breeze going on--in fact it's raining outside right now and I remain obstinately shirtless in the room, with both fans going at full speed, so yeah. We chitchatted and he left, and shortly thereafter the roommate appeared--he had his final paper at around the same time as I.

The final paper itself was more difficult than envisioned, being rather different from the style in which most of the past years' papers had been set, and was depressing; but after it I had my last helping of pork-rib noodles for the year from the aunty at the NIE canteen, and then I returned to my room. Some time after that--I think it was around 2pm or so--I was called out to begin the post-exam celebrations with a few other Crusaders; those celebrations consisted of a giant lunch at Yuki no Yaki, which essentially was a buffet, during which I learned to not overcook meat--my favourite meat was the dory, mostly because it's soft and fatty and has a nice texture to it if cooked very carefully and frequently turned over so it doesn't get overdone. And there were also sashimi and various other meats (the lamb chop I took came out pretty good too); of course I had eaten the pork-rib noodles earlier, and so was already partially full and so didn't eat quite as much as I normally might have; but I flatter myself I still outdid most of the other people at the table. On the other hand--I'm not sure, but what is it about people that makes them so bad at estimating a suitable portion size? We certainly took much more food than we could finish--well, I didn't; I took and ate and took again--but some of the other people there didn't seem to have any sort of sane estimate of their appetites. It's a mercy the restaurant didn't enforce the SGD5 per 100g wasted food rule, or we'd easily have shot into SGD50 or so penalties.

After the meat and vegetables (yes, we had vegetables too) there was an ice-cream thing that was immensely fascinating; they had little cups full of the ice-cream mix, warm liquids all; you poured those on a metal plate, and the liquids hardened. In essence it was the reverse of a hot plate; so you simply poured the mix on the plate, used a spatula to spread it around, and then scraped up the stuff to eat (plus toppings); three people went through, if I remember correctly, 13 or 14 cups of mix.

And after the entire bout of eating, we staggered out of the restaurant talking about how very very full we all were; and then somebody suggested pool and somebody else wanted to play DotA or StarCraft 2, but not everybody wanted either of those, so we settled for going shopping; it's a good thing we did, too, because I found a quite... interesting thing to buy for the Christmas Day gift exchange--so I bought it, and shortly after I also had one of my rare wins at Monopoly Deal, which was nice.

The next day was the 24th; I don't think I did anything for most of the day, but the evening was spent with the people of the House of Bread in a Christmas Eve celebration, during which we had dinner and a few rounds of Pictionary and Pictionary Telephone; one thing I very much like about the house rules is that the words are user-made instead of the standard set, which creates a great deal more flexibility--that night we had things like "liquid nitrogen", "eigenvalue", and "the understatement", which just goes to show that when you're playing Pictionary with words that come from university students and graduates, you've got to have a certain amount of background knowledge. Yesterday, for example, somebody came up with "Pyrrhic victory", of all things. Really, I ask you.

And on Christmas Day--well! Christmas Day was all fun and games from 12pm onwards, also at the House of Bread (I've been spending a great deal of time there over the past number of days, you might as well get used to hearing about it); the gift exchange was when my bought item came out and was assembled--it was an AirZooka, basically an SGD39 item that was SGD9.90 due to a sale; the thing basically consists of a plastic cone with a flexible membrane at one end, so when you pull and release, it propels a volume of air forwards at sufficient force to knock over small objects, flutter papers, give people a ringing in the ears, etc.Very worth it; I got a stack of memo pads, still unopened, out of the whole thing. Other than that there was food and drink and laughter and giggling, and I think we actually only ended it quite late--6pm? 7pm? Later? I'm relatively certain it was dark out by the time I left.

Boxing Day was Sunday, with all the things that entails: church (extra early, since I was playing that morning), the House of Bread regular meeting, and more hanging around 'til late.

The next day, the 27th, I met the Gobbler and we set out for So Hour around 2pm; we arrived at around 5pm, and that set off a series of discoveries on my part of things left behind--notably, my toothbrush and my laptop charger--which necessitated buying (toothbrush) and going without (laptop). But the time there was enjoyable: lots of good, cheap food; chats with the grandfolks--grandpa had a trip to China recently and was full of stories to tell about it--during which I also realised my command of Mandarin has massively regressed and at the moment it barely deserves to be called command, but still--and going around mussing up the cousins' hair, messing with their MMORPGing, and staring at the very fat hamsters. How the hamsters get so fat on a diet of neglect and ignorance, I will never know. We stayed there until Thursday afternoon, during which we had lots and lots of food, and even now a bunch of bananas sits on the table before me and biscuits sit on the bed beside me--all taken from So Hour because my grandfather is convinced that without such things I will starve and wither away to nothing. (It in fact seems that I have gotten thinner since the last visit--either that or some misperceptions have been going on.) Or of course perhaps he's simply being his usual generous (to me!) self; though it also seems he's gained a keen sense of his own mortality and kept on ending his speeches with "if I'm still around by then".

And then we came back on the 30th of December 2010, having left at 2pm because I had to do course registration (on the Gobbler's Mac, which I kept on having to figure out the hotkeys for--admittedly it's quite user-friendly once you figure out the shortcuts and things, but those take such a time to figure out!) and then we did our packing an dgot our food and went off; we arrived in Singapore around 6pm. I don't think I did anything productive the rest of that day, or for most of the 31st either, apart from resting and eating; and the evening-to-night of the 31st was entirely taken up in a celebration in the House of Bread where more Pictionary, more food, and a viewing of Despicable Me (we watched it without subtitles because the subtitles menu kept giving trouble) during which some people--I was looking around!--got suspiciously teary-eyed; and then singing and watching the live telecast of the fireworks at the bay.

(Ah, yes, now I remember. I spent the morning of the 31st cleaning the room--I had had sandwiches for dinner on the 30th, and managed to drop an egg-and-lettuce sandwich on the floor--they're sold for SGD1 each after 6pm at bread shops and I had bought two. At any rate the sandwich was dropped, the floor became oily, and so the next day I went and got a broom and dustpan and mop and cleaned the floor thoroughly. It turns out there was a LOT of dust and dirt and plastic wrappers, along with a behind-the-door backlog of flyers and things, which I got rid of; the mopping had to be done thrice because quite a bit of the dirt was stubborn and wouldn't be got rid of by sweeping, but the soap water did the job. So I did have some level of productivity that day!)

And then it was over, and we all departed around 1am--the trains were running late; I and a couple of friends walked back to the room from the nearest MRT station. It's a good thing the night was clear, but starless.

...this, I think, brings us to the present, and now my narrative has caught up.

Xenon Bright Bright Grabspace

2010-12-22T18:50:00.002+08:00

My final exam is tomorrow. I spent some time this afternoon studying--and last night, of course--and some time ago; my 25-page summary didn't type itself, you know. And this afternoon I and a couple friends went flipping through the past-year papers and I think we can all agree that as long as we can sufficiently memorise most of the contents of the lists--and there are many lists, believe me!--we ought to not come off too shabbily.

...but I can't quite make myself study. I don't know why. Well, actually, I do know--kind of--but that, at best, is only a partial explanation; it happens every semester and yet this is the first semester I can remember where I've been so attentive to the gradual emptying of the hostel as people finish their exams and pack their bags and disappear. The neighbours, for example: one of them left on Monday morning and the other leaves tonight (or early morning tomorrow--I'm not terribly certain); and several of my better friends here leave directly after the exams; and of course there was that departure last Tuesday, which I still haven't gotten over because the idiot hasn't replied MSN offline messages (and I'm rather impatient when it comes to instant messaging). And I'm a little bummed about not being able to go back to Patience this time... of course, it's not a question of ability. I can easily obtain plane tickets, arrange accommodation and entertainment, etc; but I'd be a massive drain on the Pig and the entertainment in Patience is limited at best--and of course the FYP is pressing and needs doing or it'll never get completed.

So I've been rather... lonely, I think, is the best way to describe it, for awhile; my only contact with humans outside my room is the occasional glimpse with the neighbours when they step into the toilet for relief or showering, or with the coursemates just before and immediately after exams, or when I talk to the canteen aunties while ordering food. In fact I think one of the people I'll miss most when I graduate will be the Noodle Stall Aunty in the NIE canteen, who by now recognises me on sight and constantly threatens me with inflation, but she's a nice person for all the blustering and she does make good pork rib noodles! (And always gives me lots and lots of fried onions which really is how she recognises me--my daily requests for extra fried onions made me stand out amongst all the other loyal customers, I expect. I think in her head she calls me "Onion Boy" or something like that, the way I think of her as "Noodle Stall Aunty"--of course, I just call her "Aunty" and she doesn't call me anything.) But yeah--and of course my room's a fair distance away from that canteen, and in fact I've been skipping meals out of sheer laziness ever since classes ended. Not the ideal kind of diet plan, though mints do stave off the hunger, and of course I've plenty of reserves.

Well. In 16 hours--a little less than 16 hours--I shall have leisure, and I'll go out gallivanting with friends and more or less have a good time of it. If I'm not too tired and depressed, that is. Heh. It's an odd sort of time to figure out that I'm much more social than I thought I am.

...you know, life is beginning to seem like a Sims game. Or maybe The Sims 3 is just a lot more realistic than expected in some ways--my Social meter's probably dipped into the red by now and I keep getting Wishes like Talk to Somebody or Talk to Self--at least the Hunger, Hygiene, Bladder, and Energy meters are easily taken care of. Entertainment... well, it's fair, I suppose, but talking about movies on Facebook doesn't quite compare to watching 'em in a cinema with friends and commentating on 'em throughout. (There isn't a cinema in The Sims 3, is there? There's a stadium and an opera house but not a cinema. How lacking.)

WRYYYYYYYY

2010-12-16T09:39:00.002+08:00

...it's a ridiculous 25 days since I last posted. How extremely remiss of me; and unfortunately I can't remember everything--I could check my Google Calendar, of course, but I'm far too lazy to do that--that's happened over that time period. (In passing, I wonder how long Google will store those Calendar entries. Would it be possible to, at some unknown future time, riffle through one's own archives and go "oh, wow, ten years ago on this day I had my very first exam in NTU ever!"?)

Twenty-five days; sometime in this period, a lot of people from the House of Bread have gone off back to behind the Great Firewall. Most of them I didn't mind because it was explicitly a temporary absence--most of them are students--all bar one, actually--so they're sure to be back by the time the school term starts up again. On the other hand, the one who went back on Tuesday has just graduated, and has got a job that'll apparently eventually send him off to Wollongong, which I don't like, because I don't like the idea of partings. I'm not sure why; in anybody else I'd call it pathological clinginess. I never do like the idea of anybody going away with no possibility of returning, and when I do it--well, I never do it. At least not explicitly; one of my stock phrases when people ask about my long-term plans is "well, life is long, who knows?" because in my ideal world, there would always be the possibility of reunion. (One of the reasons I like the last episode of The Law of Ueki so much.) And of course there's heaven, but it's so difficult to imagine it.

At any rate, the more pressing issue is exams, which are upon me--in fact they're more than halfway behind me now. Though I must say, it's oddly... jarring. These days I seem to be giving much less a whit about exams than I used to; I've watched the entirety (all three seasons!) of Avatar: The Last Airbender between the first exam and last night, while alt-tabbing between the Media Player Classic window and the TVTropes page--and we all know what a time sink TVTropes can be--while also playing The Sims 3, which is in itself a very accomplished time sink because I'm ridiculously kindhearted and keep on helping the Sims accomplish goals and things. The one instance I had of a family actually running itself into the ground, I aborted the game and started over. So yeah, I'm not as much of an amoral gleeful maniac as I sometimes think I am. That's probably a good thing.

But I digress, as I often do... the exams aren't frightening in themselves. It's what comes after--the whole issue of finding a place to live, a job to do--it'll all be completely new to me and I know I'm borrowing trouble by worrying about it, but everybody else is worrying too! And even before that there'll be the rest of the final-year project to complete and nobody seems to ever have breezed through that--they have tips on how to get through it more easily, but not on how to get through it easily: a subtle but terribly important distinction there. I still don't know what I want to do after graduation--work, yes, settle down somewhere, yes. I just don't know the details, and that's what niggles: where, what, when, how, why? and the why of it is the most unanswerable. There's that old story, isn't there, where some rich magnate happens across some bum lazing in the sun and tells him to work hard and be an entrepreneur and establish his own business empire and all so he'll have the leisure time to laze in the sun, and then the bum shrugs and goes "that's what I'm already doing"? It's the "be all you can be" argument rushing headlong against the "do just enough" argument, and both have their merits. And of course--my parents would be aghast--my inclination is to the "do just enough". One of my friends has landed a position that'll earn him easily 10k a month in a little less than two years after graduation; my inclination is to some medium-income, medium-rank position where I'll make just enough to be comfortable. And after all I am easily made comfortable, I think; but then simply settling for comfortable goes against the entire Protestant work ethic plus the entire history of Chinese rice farmers (I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and ye gads, how much stranger life is than what I thought).

My method of doing the exams is also, perhaps, questionable. It's probably habit, but... maybe I ought to slow down? It's one of those things I notice about myself every time I do a paper, but forget about later on and do again. Hopefully finally getting it down will have some effect on it--unless I've previously already written about it and forgotten it, which is probably entirely possible. I don't read my own blogs that often, after all. But my method of doing papers is to write everything I can down, as quickly as possible, and to get as complete an answer down for every question as possible on the first runthrough--which, for engineering papers, takes maybe an hour, one and a half at most. The rest of the time is spent second-guessing my answers to worry about whether I wrote correctly or the handwriting is legible and not too squiggly (my handwriting is squiggly whether in cursive, exam-writing, or note-writing--someday I shall photograph my writing and put it up) or the calculations are correct. And then I look around and everybody is industriously covering pages and pages with their answers and then I have a little moment of panic because obviously I have underestimated the question somehow--my answer must be off-topic, or I haven't answered fully, or there was some implication or inference that I've missed. It's always an attack of the nerves and it's always absolutely exhausting.

Which may be why, after the paper yesterday, I slept at 7pm--and subsequently woke at 11pm and couldn't get back to sleep 'til 3.30am. And woke today at 8am. Bleh.

Vindicate Vaguary

2010-11-22T14:01:00.002+08:00

...I'm typing this from my library, during a bit of a break in between classes. I've done a bit of work--not much, but some, and then I fell to reading my old blog posts. It strikes me that I've really not changed much at all since my A-Levels days; I still worry about the future, I still don't like not knowing the full impacts of my possible decisions before doing them, I still have a relatively bad temper even if it manifests a lot less these days, and I certainly still don't get good grades, although I've been reading Gladwell's Outliers and it seems that I needn't worry about being smarter than everybody else as long as I'm smart enough, however much enough might be. Then again, being a February baby explains how I've been more or less coasting along academic life, or at least I was during primary and secondary school--of course genetics comes into it somewhat, along with me being the firstborn, but then there's the early-birthday advantage.

I also found out this morning that I can still fit into a pair of cargo pants that I bought back in my A-Levels days; it was rather gratifying, because I haven't been exercising at all lately (I haven't swum at all this semester, and running... let's just give that up as a lost cause, shall we?) and I keep discovering new stretch marks all over the place. Though how I'm managing to still be getting... more... faster than my skin can keep up defies my understanding; my diet's not that large. I think. I certainly ought to exercise, and I would, if I could find anybody similar in (un!)fitness level to myself who would want to exercise together; there's something to be said for deriving motivation or inspiration from fitter people, but generally all I get is depression and a desire to whop them in the stomach.

The NaNovel's actually close to completion--by which I mean it's close to 50k words--as far as the storyline goes it's only still in the second of ten chapters--which is a gratifying thing; I'm averaging 2,000 words a day, and the storyline's nowhere even NEAR a quarter of what I thought I'd do; I spend so much time establishing character traits that there isn't much time to make them walk the path I was planning. And even then I find that all my characters somehow manage to be... me-like: not bad, not good, just neutral with maybe one or two interesting but not particularly jarring traits. Not a single jerk amongst them, nobody lazy or alcoholic or given to promiscuity or anything of the sort--well, there's a Bottle Fairy Conspiracy Nut, but... maybe I'll do a Character Tropes page on them. That should certainly be good for some more word count! And if I do some character derailing on the way, so much the better, I'll just throw a Reality Warper into the mix and Hand Wave it that way--put the Deus in Deus Ex Machina, you could say.

I also recently obtained and installed The Sims 3, which I only convinced my computer to run after some tinkering with drivers (I kept getting an error message about the ialmrnt5 driver failing, which Google showed was a terribly common failure, so I had to uninstall and restart and download an updated driver and restart and then play); at the moment I have just the one Sim, whom I called Always Right, and he's an up-and-coming politician. I haven't yet installed the expansion packs that I also obtained, though, and I haven't yet succumbed to Videogame Cruelty Potential--so far it's more Heartwarming Potential than anything since his Lifetime Goal involves making lots and lots of friends.

I met Fourth Aunt and the Gobbler last Wednesday--it was the Muslim equivalent of the New Year--and we went out for food. Apparently I appear considerably thinner to her than the last time she saw me; either that or she formed an impression since our last meeting of me as a giant roll of fat. But it was something of a compliment.

Urge Under Over

2010-11-17T16:03:00.002+08:00

I don't think I've slept for more than six hours any day in the past two weeks or so; it's becoming increasingly common for me to sleep at four and wake at eight, and then keep dozing off whenever I can find an opportunity to do so--yesterday I did it while in classes and then at a Campus Crusade meeting after classes--and of course the recurring problem is that whenever I'm tired I become more taciturn than usual, and then people start thinking I'm depressed or pondering something or preoccupied, or else all the scum in me rises to the top because I've no energy to think twice or suppress the urges... even if today is a public holiday it doesn't mean I'm going to get more rest than usual. At least, if I manage to stick to the schedule I might, but my mind feels like a packet of cotton wool at the moment.

I went out for something of a jog last night with a friend, and at the end of it we decided it was a bad idea. But then it's never seemed to turn out well for me to jog with anybody, ever. I suspect--nay, I know--the problem is that my level of fitness is so low, and theirs is so much higher, relatively speaking, that in any situation requiring physical force I will almost certainly be outmatched. The only advantages my physical form has over others, in general, seems to be that I can ignore a lot of physical stimuli--whackings and ticklings and squashings and so on--and my thumbs are longer (proportionally to the rest of my fingers) than those of other people. But the gap in fitness between myself and pretty much everybody else is large enough that I haven't a snowflake's chance in Singapore of keeping up, and then you get a situation where one is constantly panting and gasping and getting stitches in one's side, and everybody else is jogging on the spot waiting for one to catch up, and by the time you all finish the route the one is completely wiped out and the others haven't even exhausted their first wind. And of course I'm much too lazy and undisciplined to force myself to go running alone. I'm starting to think it's a good thing I never did buy jogging shoes because they'd be such a wasted investment if I had; at least the post-jog conversations do tend to be more enjoyable than the jogs; but it's starting to look more and more as if if I ever want to have anything like a normal BMI it's going to mostly be a solo effort--and how struggling in solitude does depress--I'm never convinced I'm doing it the right way unless I have somebody who knows what they're doing is coaching, and even then I have to make sure what I'm doing is what the masses are doing. I'm susceptible to public opinion that way.

It's raining. That's nice. My laundry is still in the washing machine and if it finishes on time I shall be hanging my laundry in the rain--it's either that or leaving the laundry to moulder away in dampness and dark. That's not quite so nice.

It's hard to believe there's only three weeks left until the exams begin; and then the exams will last for a little over a week, and then it's Christmas... And, of course, my studying is woefully inadequate. But then you wouldn't expect anything less of me.

I've been wondering for awhile how we think of omnipotence (and, by extension, God's actions in the world)... what spurred this train of thought was Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, in which there is a scene where Moist von Lipwig, a conman extraordinaire, digs up a great deal of money--really the results of many years of conning people--but attributes it to a sudden flash of inspiration from several gods and goddesses. Then there is a response from Gilt, who is admittedly the villain of the book and who dies by suicide, but his response is oddly... resonant, perhaps: "The gods are not generally known for no-frills gifts, are they? Especially not ones that you can bite. No, these days they restrict themselves to things like grace, patience, fortitude, and inner strength. Things you can't see. Things that have no value..." Or perhaps it only resonates with me... The Bible is full of quite amazing stories that happened to perfectly ordinary people--I don't refer to the various ordinary housewives who rose up and drove tent pegs through kings' heads or tossed millstones down on besiegers--in just as many cases people were released from prison by a convenient earthquake, or the sun stood still for a long time, or manna was found at the doorstep every morning. And in modern times--we don't see these things happen any more, do we? We don't see floods rising up to drown evil armies, or fires falling down on people, or anything; increasingly it seems as if religion is a private thing, not only because the world demands that it should be so, but because it doesn't seem to be connected to physical reality. The demands of the masses are that one's beliefs may be different from others' but you'd better not start a fight about that even if the two beliefs are diametric opposites--in essence the prevailing belief is that peace must be preserved at all costs, and peace is defined as "the docility of the people". But that is a topic for another time. I suppose what I want to say is that I wish, maybe just a little bit, sometimes, that something a little more--empirical, perhaps--would happen. But then the Bible is also a document showing the insufficiency of large-scale demonstrations of power in maintaining belief, or the Israelites would be the most devout people on earth in all history. Essentially I don't know what I want, but I'd certainly like things be more the way I'd like them to be, whatever that might be.

And of course there are many good arguments why God would not want to simply do some dramatic thing that would immediately and conclusively prove His existence: the preservation of free will and His mercy come immediately to mind, and there might be other ramifications--sending ravens to feed hungry people would just lead to ravens' brains being dissected and studied, I suspect. But then that doesn't explain why He did those in the past, if (as it seems in some of my grimmer moments) the result of knowing Him is... intangible benefits. Of course those are valuable: peace and fortitude and inner strength and whatnot; and they can't be bought for love or money; but how... pale and thin they seem when compared to... well, to things like health and prosperity and so on. It's no wonder that a common argument against religion of any sort is that it's a crutch or a motivating force for people to develop desirable traits that other, better, more self-sufficient people can develop on their own with no need for help.

Not that I'm thinking of abandoning Christianity; but these days, when we talk so much about God being able to do anything, we have a very limited definition of anything, don't we? Or at least I do. Maybe the prosperity movement has caused a massive backlash, and now instead of thinking God will provide riches and wealth I've come to think that all He provides is inner virtue and as far as the physical realm goes I'll stay alive as long as He needs me around but I'd better not expect to live in the lap of comfort, which is a pity because I absolutely delight in soft cushions and warm fuzzy blankets and fluffy bathrobes and things. Or of course maybe I don't trust Him quite as much as I should, or I value comfort a lot more than I value obedience to Him.

I don't think I've managed to help myself articulate anything with all this verbiage. It's mostly cathartic, though. And it does remind me I'm only human--as if I needed reminding of that...

Taking Time Off

2010-11-03T22:09:00.002+08:00

I'm horrendously tired at the moment.

They say opposites attract. I find this is rather, oddly, true of most of the people I hang out with; somehow they're all the boisterous kind, full of bobance and bounce, whose life is fricasseed eels and I'm channeling Puddleglum today, it seems. But 'tis true; it was driven home today, when I spent a strange couple of hours doing what was meant to be "chillaxing" (the etymology eludes me); I was there, with Announce-chan and two other friends, whom I think I've not yet named, or if I've named them before I've forgotten it.

I should go into further detail so as to provide an adequate context for my narrative.

Since the 27th (the date of the last post!), there has hardly been a day that I didn't have a meeting of some sort, or people to discuss things with or homework to catch up to or a project that needed rushing. My Google Calendar, the main way I keep track of all the things I need to do, assures me that if a busy life is a happy life then I'm absolutely hilarious.

And oh boy, hilarity is tiring. Lack of sleep is the norm rather than the exception, the bags under my eyes will soon have to pay rent given the length of time they've been staying, and such contact as I have with other people is... suffering. The contact, I mean. Not I, and hopefully not the other people.

Today, for example. Wednesdays are the day on which I schedule meetings, because on this day I have no classes at all, thanks to a deft bit of scheduling. I'd spent a hefty amount of time on Tuesday (9.30am 'til 4pm, to be exact, I think) with the final-year-project-mate, rushing about to buy steel and learn about grinding, polishing, milling, etc., wandering the school looking for workshops and (for a short, surreal period of time) acting as messenger pigeons through which our supervisor and a lab technician discussed the viability of buying lots and lots of sandpaper; but we thought we'd sorted everything out and so today we weren't really planning to spend more than maybe five hours working--we'd planned to cut, mount, and characterise the samples--and then the professor threw a series of schedule-destroying wrenches at our plans.

Now, you have to understand that I'm rather attached to my plans. It doesn't matter so much if I'm the one revising them on the go, because I always have contingencies. But when it's somebody else causing the disruption...!

And so it didn't help me that between last night and this morning, there was a flurry of messages relayed to me by the project-mate from the professor that went, roughly, don't cut, meet vendor, discuss parameters, etc; and then as the day progressed it became clearer that for all our plans we wouldn't be making any real progress on the project; we got a bit of scanning done, yes, but that was all; we didn't even meet the vendor in the end because at the time when we'd been told to meet the professor and the vendor, neither were anywhere to be found, wouldn't answer phone calls or SMSes, weren't at the offices or usual meeting-rooms, and so we hung around the place where he'd said the meeting would be until we both gave up and left.

So it was rather a waste of a day.

And then the chillaxing... we were planning to have dinner together, which was all well and good. I'm always up for a good dinner. We were planning to have it at the nearest mall, which I didn't mind too badly either, because the mall has a wider choice than the school does and it has air-conditioning too. But as it turned out we had dinner (I ordered something that came with a free flow of white rice and ended up eating three bowls) and then started wandering around, shopping. At which point my fatigue kicked in, possibly due to the strain of digesting and walking and thinking, all simultaneously, and I became quite badly uncommunicative for the rest of the time I was with them... on the bus ride back (I take a different bus from them, because I live in a different part of the school) two of them sent me SMSes saying I could unburden myself to them, whatever the pressing issue was. But there wasn't any issue more pressing than "I need sleep badly".

Which brings me to my point, I suppose. My idea of chillaxing would be their idea of deathly boredom, since when I think of relaxation I think of sitting around in silence, maybe a bit of soft music playing in the background, dimmed lights--just enough to read by but not enough to hinder sleeping--everybody sitting around on futons or pillows or floor or mattresses with books or computers or giant fluffy pillows in hand, and just chatting or sleeping. I suspect if I were to arrange such a thing, they'd take one look at it and invite me out to the mall for window-shopping or a movie or a night on the town or Monopoly Deal or something.

Being as introverted as I am has its down points, it seems. People think you're sad and depressed when you're really just tired and hankering for a place to sit down and lean on something. And goodness knows I want to lean on things right now.

I think I'll not write for the NaNo tonight, and wake up earlier tomorrow to do double work.

Somebody, Somebody Smell That Air

2010-10-27T15:00:00.002+08:00

Well, recess is over; it's the Wednesday of the next week, and that planned timetable? Didn't work out. Would have run if I weren't so tired; would have swam if it hadn't rained and I hadn't been so busy. I don't think I got more than six hours of sleep at any time during the week, and by Saturday I was sporting noticeable bags under the eyes--I'd slept only four hours that day--4am to 8am; though that was entirely my own fault. My procrastination combined with my sense of always being crept-up-on by deadlines meant that I'd frittered the day away on Kongregate and movies (Monty Python, no less!) and so was rushing to look at notes and things in the wee hours.

On the other hand I do have a sense of accomplishment, having managed to get some things going during it--not as much as I'd have liked, of course, but real progress was made; and one of those things was to do with the FYP and the upshot is that I have slightly less than 2ft x 3ft x 1mm of PMMA between my wall and my bed, and a long piece of PMMA grid hanging on a clothes-hook behind my door. It's perfectly transparent and does nothing at all; the larger piece makes a whomp-whomp noise, like rain echoing off a tin roof, if you shake it carefully.

It's about an hour to the next FYP meeting, at which I will be discussing cells and PMMA and how difficult it is to get suppliers and tool bits--this is what happens when you try to do new things, apparently. Everybody else seems to have taken the easy way out and used lasers or chemical modification, both of which are very highly precise and easy to use; my project wants to use fly-cutting, which apparently is a little-known technique and has never been used for anything less than a couple hundred microns. And I'm told that the machine has an error margin of up to 1 millimeter--which is a thousand microns--so we might accidentally carve right through our chip if we're not careful. And of course the tool bits may need customising. Which requires money.

I'm told that I seem oddly relaxed and carefree in comparison to everybody else. I don't know how or why--well, to be honest, I probably do: I'm never seen working, I post very regularly on Facebook (and not so much on Twitter), and I'm very good at lounging around. And of course, I type long rambling blog posts like this. But then so much of what I need to do relies on others for timeliness... at this moment I'm waiting on at least four documents to come into my possession for arranging and editing and compiling, which means sleepless nights and mumbling angrily at the laptop screen. I had one of those a couple days ago, and it was all for naught: I didn't attach the edited document to the email I sent, and by the time I found out it was too late, and so the grammatical version now lives only in my laptop. The ungrammatical version, in which there is an amusingly misspelled "Intellectuallly Disabled", lives in a printed-and-bound copy in the professor's possession.

The odd thing is that my grammar fluctuates depending on what I've been reading or who I've been talking to, too. At the moment I'm reading Bill Bryson, who has a much more colloquial and familiar style; previously it was Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore (gads, but that man can proselytise)...

November starts in a bit; I wonder if I want to try NaNoWriMo. I've been wanting to for-- well, for since I found out about it in Year One, I think. I've just never been able to since exams all fall within that time period, generally; but this year the exams don't start 'til the 11th December and so November will be the rush-projects-and-assignments time, which also implies I'll have quite a bit of time. And of course if I adhere strictly to the no-rewriting rule I might actually be able to churn out the requisite 16,666-words-a-day average. Might not have anything resembling a coherent plot, but then if I write it'll likely be a slice-of-life sort of thing. Except with magic and mutants and things, because I'm a reader of fiction and hey, why not? I might actually give it a try. Or I might write a 50,000-word fanfic. Crossover between One Piece and Naruto and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, just because it'd be stupidly funny and gamebreaking. Or something like Erfworld--throw people into a game system and watch silliness ensue.

I had a haircut yesterday, my... fifth, I think, in the past four years, in Singapore. The hairstylist took a lot of time pointing out how ridiculous it is for a person to expect one haircut to be enough from August to October, and then shortened and thinned out my fringe considerably, to the point where it no longer covers the left of my face from forehead to upper lip. And then she added that I'd be a ladykiller if I had my teeth bleached and re-straightened (somehow the effect of the 1.5 years of braces has worn off, despite my biological maturity), to which I merely smiled (giving her another opportunity to stare at my teeth) and paid and left. Personally I expect this haircut to last me 'til December, maybe even next January.

It was also yesterday that the roommate found out that I never shave and never have shaved. He thinks it's a blessing and I think it's an aberration; but then my head shape wouldn't go well with stubble anyway. Personally I think it would have been obvious from the fact that I haven't a shaver or shaving cream. (The first time I saw an electric shaver I was quite fascinated and wanted to try it out on its owner, but was deterred.)

This post took me half an hour, less the time it took to have water and pee and alt-tab to Facebook and Twitter and email. I'm definitely getting used to my new keyboard--it definitely saves time not having to hit keys to unstick them or re-hit because they weren't detected the first time.

Recess. Riiiiiiiiiiight.

2010-10-19T12:13:00.003+08:00

It's Tuesday.

How did it get to be Tuesday already? And half of Tuesday is already over. It seems like it was just yesterday that it was Friday, the beginning of the weekend. And now it's Tuesday--where did the weekend go?

Ah. Yes. It went wherever the past always goes.

And so it's Tuesday already, of my recess week; it promises to be a busy week. I've already looked at my time and made a little schedule that looks something like this:

...the blank bits are my buffer times, during which I'll likely be playing Bunny Flags or Epic Battle Fantasy 3 or digging through some of the many books I have that I haven't finished reading. I don't have very many of those. And of course some of the things I plan to do will take more, or less, time than I've allocated. Hence the buffer time.

And, obviously, one big omission from the thing is the GO HOME bit that usually appears in my calendar whenever there's a holiday; normally by now I'd be at the grandfolks' in So Hour, being fed and being told to get a haircut or playing with the cousins or something. Obviously this time I've been unable to; partly because there's a lot of stuff to be done that can only be done in school, and partly because that 10-hour block of travelling time could be so much better used. If you look, there's at least three projects to be hurried along in the next few days...

The toiletmates are in, of course; and the roommate, equally naturally, is away. I doubt I shall have very much human contact this week, apart from MSN or Facebook or the occasional meeting (tomorrow, for example, promises to be entirely too full of seeing people except at night. Not that I'm misanthropic, but being alone has its allure; for one thing there's little to no talking to anybody else, and for another it's comfortable and I get to lounge around in nothing but shorts, occasionally singing the Llama Song or Still Alive or whatever tune comes to mind. On the other hand it also means running will occur all by my lonesome and I'll not push myself the way other people would; I'm generally much too easygoing on myself. It explains my current tubby shape.

...the library has a scanner. It occurred to me some time ago that if I were to want a new header for the blog, I could easily sketch it out and scan it, then get somebody to PhotoShop it into more-or-less good quality. After all, it's the recess week, isn't it? People should be quite unlikely to be urgently needing the scanner, and besides I can always pretend to be doing it for an Arts course. Of course scanning means it'll be entirely black-and-white, with shades of gray at best. I suppose I could get the PhotoShopper to add colours, but I'd probably save time if I downloaded and cracked PhotoShop on my own.

...So yeah. It looks like I shan't be getting a terrible lot of rest this week.

Quickly, Quickly, Quail, Quiver, Query

2010-10-01T23:29:00.002+08:00

Is it really only two days since my last post? It's the first of October and somehow it's unbelievable that I should have posted only three days ago--it's Friday night, after all, and so much seems to have happened; yet looking at the post, so little seems to have been recorded.

This blog serves the function of recording things, in the end, and it doesn't seem to be serving that function very well...

At any rate I shall therefore record; after all this week many things happened other than me having weird dreams. But then I suppose those would have slipped my mind; it's not difficult, what with my mind having the frictional constant of wet soap. At any rate the record is accurate as far as it goes, so far...

Personality types have been on my mind for awhile. At any rate I've always had an interest in people's inner workings. I'm what I've learned (in Fundamentals of Management, no less!) is called a low-context person, which means I'm a lot more literal than most and care almost nothing for facial expression or body language or stuff like that; which is odd, actually, because I stare at people a lot. Body language fascinates me too: not that it's terribly accurate or reliable, but the idea that people are subconsciously broadcasting stuff is an interesting one (as well as the implication that you can therefore read them and send out false and confusing signals).

But all that is simply so that I can use a sort of shorthand, as it were, to describe the people I come into contact with. Of course, my other way of classifying people--a rather intuitive method, of course--I'm most likely an I_TJ (I can never decide if I'm N or S)--is that I classify people according to whom they remind me of. It's something in the appearance, but when I point it out nobody seems to have noticed it before (and sometimes they don't see it even after it's been pointed out), which indicates that it's not necessarily something evident to the senses. And I used to think it was a failing in myself, but... it's oddly accurate. People who remind me of each other do tend to behave like each other. And of course there's also the D&D alignments...

On Monday I met the other person in my Fundamentals of Management project group (it's to be done in pairs); a Lawful person if ever there was one--wouldn't even reply SMSes in class, but would read them. And she's in the Crusade, too... and then the people I've been running around with are ID/Performer or CD or Teacher (which if nothing else shows the need for some sort of standardised system). And so on and so forth; I'd be hard put to name a person I haven't also attached a bunch of psychobabble-labels to.

On Tuesday night there was a steamboat in the room of Announce-chan; I helped choose the ingredients, which in the end were: frankfurters, fish balls, crab sticks, cabbage, broccoli, corn, chicken wingsticks, carrots, chicken stock, and eggs; the total spent on that was about SGD40. Six people were fed and, as it turned out, I still retain my ability to prepare raw food well enough to not cause diarrhoea--lots of washing and rinsing were involved in that--and the soup came out pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. After that we played poker, but instead of poker chips we bartered with sobriety--there was vodka and Coke in the room, so we mixed them and bet on hands; however random chance has never favoured me, and I went all-in twice and lost both those times. I did not however get drunk enough to suffer memory loss, so I do know I was gibbering deliriously at one point; spilling vodka on the floor at another while trying to refill somebody else's glass; at least I did not at any point break out into song.

The rest of the week has been consumed in group projects and meetings of such and rushing those; admittedly, though, I do tend to spend a lot of time laying plans and preparations and then when the time comes to do the thing, I'm over-prepared for contingencies that never happen, and at the same time woefully unprepared for some terribly obvious thing that I somehow managed to completely overlook. Today's an example, though it might have just been due to lack of sleep: I spent most of the last week or so reading review papers for the Biomaterials project and making little scribbled notes on sheets of note paper, then Wednesday to Thursday morning keying the notes into a Word document while they were still legible and remembered, then Thursday night turning it into about 14 slides' worth of PowerPoint slides, after which there was a Skype call with a couple friends that lasted 'til 4am (in my defense the PowerPoint was only completed around 3am or so). And then this morning I remembered that the group discussion meeting (with the professor in charge, too) would clash with a tutorial I had forgotten about because it's a fortnightly class. So I shot off an apologetic email, but forgot to attach the slides... and only remembered that when the class had already started and it was too late to go back and resend the email. Of course I did eventually resend it, but much too late.

Lots of other things are still awhirl, too; lots of stuff I should have got settled ages ago are still in the air, though they're settling; this weekend promises to be full of lack of sleep; tomorrow I am going to a place to which I've never gone before, which means I must make travelling plans, and on Monday I have another group meeting; on Tuesday I must present the PowerPoint which I have no feedback about; and on Wednesday I have two Crusade-related meetings (though those require a definitely different sort of planning) and one other, I think... and the Sunday after next is the 1st birthday celebration of the administrative assistant of the company where I interned, and I haven't decided whether to go yet...

Argh. Time passes, flying off and never coming back, and I am so full of things I ought to or have to do that I cannot do what I want. But maybe that's a good thing. I don't trust myself to want the correct things.

Pop the Bubblewhap

2010-09-28T10:23:00.003+08:00

I've been having... odd dreams these days. Not all on consecutive nights, of course, and they're not all similarly weird; but for me to remember any dream at all is odd. (As an aside, I notice that the dreams I remember tend to involve me in some sort of uncomfortable situation. Possibly that is what kicks in the remembering.) I had two earlier, which I already wrote about on Facebook; and I just woke from the third. I never quite see these dreams through to the end, though; I always wake up and that's how the dream ends.

The earliest of my last remembered dreams was set in Cambodia; it was afternoon, I remember, and we were walking down a generically Cambodian street--hot, dry, a sparse crowd of people, traffic running the wrong way--and somehow I was walking behind the staff leader and Sir Bob, listening to them talk; and then the discussion turned and became a discussion of the likelihood of us returning to Cambodia for a second visit. Eventually the two of them turned to me and asked what I thought of it; and I replied that I was unlikely to organise such a thing, but if it were organised by somebody else and I were able to, I would follow along. Upon which either the staff leader or Sir Bob--I can't remember which--had an expression somewhere between a smirk and a sneer and muttered, "Yeah, always a follower, never a leader".

The second dream was--I think it was last night--it almost certainly was. I dreamt I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. But I should provide background context... The layout of rooms in my part of the hostels is that two neighbouring rooms are connected by one common toilet/shower area (each room has a door into the area); each of the neighbouring rooms is, as a consequence, a mirror image of the other's layout. The bed I sleep in is the one closest to the door; entering the room, my bed is on the right-side and I sleep with my feet to the door. In my dream I woke, still with my head to the wall and my feet to the door, but reversed: the bed was on the left of the door, if you were entering. I got out of bed and the toilet/shower doors were open. By looking through I found that I was in my neighbours' room. And then instead of returning to my room, I went looking through drawers; and inside the drawers I found relics of my childhood: blankets and towels, horrendously ugly, that someone a long time ago thought fit as a gift for young children; toys that I'd forgotten I'd owned--one of them was a monkey-doll with velcro on its palms and feet that I and the siblings always called Long-Man because it had long limbs and we had no imagination--ah, so much. Every drawer was a different thing, and I woke.

Last night I dreamt again; I and the Gobbler were going for a shower after swimming, and we found a pair of shower cubicles, ridiculously large and with very high walls, blue and shiny and for some reason it looked very very swank. And so we went in and showered. And in my cubicle the water didn't drain out, for some reason, and the cubicle became a little swimming-pool from all the water--I eventually was paddling around and was able to look over the cubicle's walls to the outside. And then I woke; but that's not the full dream, because it contained elements I don't want to remember. It was a very... disturbing dream. Disturbing because during the dream I saw nothing wrong with what was going on, but on waking and remembering--

--so yeah.

School's been very odd; for some reason all the lecturers have hit on some sort of coordinated and unspoken (to us anyway) agreement that the usual midterms and quizzes aren't quite cutting it as far as assessment goes, and so what we have instead are group projects; I've got a group for every module, it seems, and my final-year project is a group project too, which brings me to a total of 6 groups of varying sizes and deadlines and projects. I seem to find myself doing nothing but catching up to all my duties; and I haven't even begun the discipleship group that I should have started two weeks ago because of various schedule snarl-ups. Life is time and time just keeps going and going, and one never seems to get anywhere...

Last night I went for a run with three friends; maybe it was a mistake to go with the friend who's been a track-and-field trainer. I haven't been pushed in the back to keep me running since many years ago, almost a decade, when it was my father doing it; except of course he used prodding fingers instead of the whole palm and it was painful then. But either way it was still pushing; half the time I think I was trying to stagger away from the pushing hand instead of just going on. But my will-power is very limited, and my physical strength even more so; I was pushed for at least 300m of jogging-staggering-running, and when we finally finished I thought I was going to throw up because I didn't just have a stitch in my right, where the stitch usually is; the stitch felt like it had decided to spread to the left, too, and then inwards to my innards. But I really did think I would throw up, though I didn't... And of course we then played Monopoly Deal--that trainer friend is very hard to say no to--and the upshot was that I walked back to the room at 2am, having left it at around 11.30pm or so; I always walk back barefoot after jogging with them; I'm just too tired by then to put the socks and shoes on and tie the laces.

The strange thing is that this morning I woke up... painless in the legs. At least, there wasn't the sore stiffness that I usually have, that makes me absolutely detest staircases for the next few days. Not that I'd agree to going for a run again tonight, but I don't think stairs will be a problem today. It's very odd; perhaps it was the stretches, perhaps it was the unusual exertion--too tired to stiffen, how about that?--and perhaps it was just me being so sure of pain that God decided to have a bit of a giggle and took that away. After all it's when I'm the most sure of a pronouncement I predict that the universe seems to conspire and prove me immediately and utterly wrong.

Oobleck Oobleck Fruit

2010-09-17T10:00:00.002+08:00

It has been long, long indeed since my last post; but you needn't worry, this post won't really be all that long either--well, maybe it'll be. My tendency when writing blog posts seems to be to try to start out clear and precise and concise, and then I veer off into descriptions and explanations and justifications, and that's a slippery slope at the end of which is a wall of text. At least I'm a lot less censorious now than when I was younger; though, of course, whether that's a good thing remains to be seen. One is always reminded that while one should try to be tolerant, simply letting everything be is sheer laziness.

And I have been awfully lazy this week, I think. When a Sanguine/Choleric starts wondering why you're so incredibly free, you know you've been very incredibly free indeed. The various responsibilities I've taken upon myself have begun piling up, and time is precious coin that I spend prodigally on fritters and toys. I should be more disciplined, I tel myself; every morning I wake up and have a stern talk to myself saying Well, look, the week's nearly over. Isn't it about time to buckle down and do something about _____? where the blank could be filled in with anything from the various group projects at school (I have 6 projects this semester that require group work, including the Final Year Project), church (I serve there, as well as in a sort-of-independent Bible Study group that I have no idea how to describe except that it's "sort of parallel to church"), the Crusade (my responsibilities there are vastly less than they were last year, but no less challenging!), the Animal Lovers' Society (the name of which is a continual embarrassment and which seems to constantly lack for manpower), and, obviously, homework. Guess which have been rather badly neglected? That's right, everything academia- and church-related. Cue the crushing guilt attack.

Take the past, say, three weeks--I haven't posted for three weeks, anyway, so I'm not telling you anything you don't already know--the past three weeks have been the first three weeks of school. And what a three weeks they have been. I include this week in the past three weeks because it's Friday and the week is as good as over. The recruitment by all the ECAs of the incoming freshmen occurred over the past three weeks; the first week was mostly Campus Crusade doing surveys, which wouldn't have been too bad except it was also the first week of classes and I was still adjusting to all the new lecturers--seriously, not a single lecturer this year was lecturing us last year. But it wasn't too bad. The second week was... oh, the second week was. The Campus Crusade decided that this year I should be leading a small group of freshmen, so they gave me a list of phone numbers and names and such to call up or otherwise contact (though calling was heavily preferred) to ask and see if they'd be interested in joining. Yeah, the Crusade is a bit pushy that way. It works, though. But I live in petrified fear of approaching strangers, even by phone, so I was procrastinating and feeling guilty all the while.

(I seem to live in a perpetual cloud of guilt for not having done stuff. Or for having done stuff I shouldn't. Of course there're verses about forgiveness and so on. On the other hand there're verses about sluggards consulting ants and about faithful servants, etc. At least the Ten Commandments doesn't say anything about Thou Shalt Not Procrastinate.)

But the calling comes later; the first three weekdays of the second week were the ECA Fair days, when every club in school opens a booth to invite new members in. Of course the Crusade had a booth; the problem is, so did the Animal Lovers' Society. Wanting to help out at both but being incapable of mitosis, I decided to just go to the booth that needed me more. As it turned out I spent a lot more time at the Animal Lovers' Society booth, being thoroughly embarrassed about being there, and smiling in what I hope was a nonthreatening manner while handing out flyers. I was at the Crusade booth for very short periods and even then wasn't really able to help much; I think the most help they got out of me was helping to pack up. It was a very tiring week, because there were also classes; I and the ALS President (friendship makes me do the strangest things) kept hurrying between the booth and classes, mostly because we were the main manpower there apart from the incoming President and the occasional helper. The rest of last year's main committee? Vanished into thin air by the looks of it.

Thursday was a pretty okay day, really; the fair had wound down, I'd started actually calling people (and gotten rejections or "this number is not available" followed by bounced email reports), and the classes that day were pretty light; and of course there was the Crusade Freshmen Vision Tea that night so I got to unwind a bit. Not to mention I'd bought one of those umbrellas whose handles look like katanas'--I've been wanting one for awhile; that day students had been allowed to set up little booths to sell things and that was one of the things they were selling. Apart from the nice handle it's also a bit larger than the average umbrella--resting on the floor it comes up to my waist, whereas most others barely get past the hip.

Thank God for small miracles, I suppose? It reminds me of RBS when one Sunday I was looking at a kitten and the thought came to my mind that really, the cuteness of small/young animals is not exactly necessary, either to us or to them. That they have that quality shows that God is something of an entertainer in addition to everything else He already is. It makes one feel better about laughing at stand-up comedy.

This week... classes. Group projects. All the things of academia, suddenly rising up like dark pillars; and I had the initial meetings with the two interested contacts (but two is a good number too, easily managed!); as it turns out I'd run into one of them at the Freshmen Vision Tea but hadn't recognised his name. Yes, I have lousy memory for names. But mostly classes. And the last two days (Wednesday and Thursday) it's been Main Committee Recruitment for the ALS, so I've had to prepare questionnaires for the hopefuls and interview them while catching up on my FYP reading material (hunting down material is hard enough, it took me two hours yesterday to figure out how to navigate the library system and even so I only got four papers that look relevant). And then I've been visiting Announce-chan in his new room, which he shares with two other Crusaders; and on two of those nights--consecutive nights, too!--I slept over in a sleeping bag on the floor. It's what led to his roommate (the aforementioned Sanguine/Choleric) telling me I was much too free. It's also what led to me drinking more vodka than I'm used to one of the nights and turning incredibly scarlet and becoming unable to walk straight (when I tried, I wound up catwalking). But I've been tired since Monday; that night there was a meeting of the discussion leaders of the House of Bread, and I kept dozing off. I was definitely not a contributing member that night. (Which is more guilt for me, whee. If I were a superhero whose powers depended on guilt I'd never ever run out of juice.)

And of course now I've gone and taken much longer than intended to type this blog post and certain other things to do have to be relegated to night-time; at least tomorrow's Saturday, but there's practice at church and FYP reports to type up (all the readings in the world don't help if your prof doesn't know they've been read!) and the accountability group in the evening, so that's that for the time of rest.

I should schedule some kind of get-away-from-everything time into my regular timetable or I shall go screamingly mad.

Nuts to You Too

2010-09-01T01:08:00.002+08:00

I am in a decidedly unhealthy state; my nose runs and I keep sneezing violently and at a high frequency, too. I've decided it is due to the state of the room, which until a few hours ago was horribly dusty--at least the other side of it was...

...I should start off chronologically, for ease of recounting and remembrance. Therefore I will begin my recounting about four days ago, on Saturday (technically, as it is after 12 now, it was five days ago).

It is a long time since the events in my last blog post, but rest assured that nothing of great moment occurred in the intervening period; the time was spent running around for meetings and outings and sometimes spending lots of time sitting at the computer (which only occurred one day out of five last week, now that I think of it). I got quite footsore and my free dryfit vest got a lot of use.

On the Thursday of last week I went down to the Hall Office (they had sent me a letter some time back offering me accommodation, which I naturally and happily accepted) to ask to move in early; due to the Youth Olympic Games, which the University is hosting, the schedule for this academic year has got quite messed up--I have exams 'til the 23rd of December!--and all the hostels had sent out letters saying to move in only on the Sunday before school began. Not wanting to skip church and wanting to avoid the mad rush, I asked to move in early, and they said I could do so on Saturday morning.

On Saturday morning I woke at 7 and was out of Announce-chan's room by 8, with one of my larger bags and most of my electronics in my backpack; I arrived at the new Hall presently, all sweaty, and received my key. And then I went to my new room, along with a friend who was planning to squat with me (he hadn't got an offer for accommodation), and then... well.

The room was filled with boxes and bags, there was rubbish all over the place, and there were two people sleeping, one on each bed. I knocked about 15 times (during which the friend kept urging me to ask to be reassigned to a different room) before one of them woke. The Hall Office had said that the previous occupant had yet to check out and was due to check out the next day, so I chose to tolerate it; I merely woke the occupant up and told them I was going to move in.

The moving went on until about 12pm, and occurred by taxi and walking; during this time, the person we'd woken up had made himself scarce and I've never seen him since, and the other person remained asleep throughout. Therefore the only course of action available was to stack everything on the bed that I was going to occupy, as no other surface was in a usable state. Having done that, I changed clothes and went out, having already made plans for the rest of the day. (I also stopped by the toilets and was shocked into speechlessness; I took photos of it later, and everybody who's seen the photos has also been shocked into speechlessness, which should say something. In fact just having me be shocked by dirt should say something about it.)

When I returned that night, the other person was awake and about, but disappeared shortly after introducing himself--he was Indian, a fourth-year EEE student, and I've forgotten his name and face--and I went to sleep on the floor, having cleared out a bit of space to put my pillow down amongst the bags and plastic random items; even so, my head rested on the pillow, my back was on the floor, and my legs were on a large hard-shelled bag, and I was woken around 4am when the roommate stumbled back in and accidentally kicked the bag on his way to his bed.

The next day was Sunday; I woke and left for church, hoping to return to a half-empty room--the Indian had said that he and his friends (there were apparently five people's belongings in the room!) had chartered a lorry and would be done that day. I left, therefore; after church there was a dedication of a daughter by one of the church members and I was invited along to play the keyboard and attend and have refreshments after; and then I rushed back to the hostel to help Announce-chan in his moving.

I stopped by the room to change clothes, and found it just as overflowing as before; the Indian was awake and on the phone, and claimed to be calling his friends (who were all apparently asleep) for help. I left, and helped Announce-chan, and then my friend (who had decided that he would rather squat somewhere else upon seeing the state of my room) to move; then I and Announce-chan dropped by my room and found it being emptied, which was a hopeful sign.

Suffice it to say that today is Tuesday and not only did they not finish moving on Sunday, but I haven't seen hide nor hair of them since then; I think they've given up on the belongings they left behind, so I have put them on the sidewalk and written an email to the legal occupant to inform him so. I also did a bit of mopping and cleaning of the toilet on Sunday night, and now it's practically livable.

...the only thing that bugs me about all of this is that last Saturday I and the Gobbler joined in a Bible study, and one of the action points was to put others' needs ahead of one's own, at least three times this week. And while I might think I've done that, it's also possible that I'm just being mean to people who didn't manage to do all their moving earlier and have been too busy over these two days of school to get it done; and of course their slovenly way of life shouldn't be an indictment against their entire character. But then I'm sneezing madly and it really was disgustingly dirty--they not only have dust bunnies, they have pieces of dessicated cockroach mixed in with the bunnies... well, they had. I've removed both bunnies and cockroach pieces. But yeah; I wonder if I've been, well, unChristian by tossing all their remaining belongings (gleefully, I might add) onto the sidewalk (but in an arrangement whereby the pedestrians are unimpeded)? And of course I did the usual looting; I did not toss out their LAN cables or a particularly nice new black leather belt or a little plastic case full of coins or their thumbtacks. So yeah--it's more gray v. grey than white v. black (or yellow v. brown as the case may be).

And I must sleep; we shall talk of classes some other time. Good night!

Livin'! Livin'!

2010-08-18T12:18:00.001+08:00

I must apologise for the long period in which I haven't posted; in return, therefore, here is a post that details my life over the last month and a half!

July 26, Monday 3am

I have just returned from an outing with the Pig and Kelvin--well, Kelvin had to leave early because something he ate during dinner disagreed with him, so I spent about two hours with both of them and about three hours with the Pig alone. We had drinks at Coffee Bean--White Chocolate Dream for me and Pure Vanilla for the Pig and hot water for Kelvin (who wasn't feeling well by then)... perhaps I should get things chronologically arranged first, though. And there's a lot to tell...

I have a lot of reminiscing to do: the eighteen eventful days in Cambodia over the mission trip; the four days of orientation that immediately followed those; the day I spent in Singapore; and then my time here in Patience so far. It's a lot of typing to do, and it's already 2.30am or so--we caught a late screening. Perhaps I shall limit myself to the sojourn in Patience so far, and the time in Cambodia and the orientation days can be recorded in a later post.

So I will therefore begin my record on the 24th of July 2010, Saturday. I woke that day around 8, in a bed where I had fallen asleep due to tiredness from the events of that day--mainly lazing around and sitting in the room gorging myself on Facebook time. I woke because the roommate of the person I was/am/will be squatting with has a very loud and very persistent alarm ringtone, which both the roommate and the person (let us call him Announce-chan) have evidently become accustomed to; every morning I am the first to wake, which I assure you is a definite first for me. In any case the alarm is commonly set for 8am, and so I woke, then attempted to return to sleep but failed; the buzzing of the alarm persisted and was impossible for me to ignore. Presently everybody else began waking up, and by 11am or so the roommate had gotten up and shut off the alarm and showered and departed with requests to help him take in his laundry (Announce-chan is something of a Literal Genie as far as requests go); and then I began packing for the flight.

The flight had been booked some time earlier, on the first night of the orientation camp in fact (which is to say, on the night after the day I returned); it was booked for Saturday, at 5.35pm, with up to 15kg check-in and an in-flight meal. Therefore I had planned to spend Friday packing, but procrastinated, and actually only packed on Saturday itself; I began around 11am and made a list and did my packing within about 2 hours, because I was done and ready by 12.30pm or so.

I and Announce-chan left the room at around 1pm (after he had showered, changed, and been struck by a sudden whimsy to book a last-minute ticket to Patience and accompany me), and had a quite small and unsatisfying lunch nearby; then we took the MRT to the airport, where I checked in my luggage; then we had drinks and then he left at around 4pm for his church. I then went through the gates and so forth, bought a book at the Times bookshop (SuperFreakonomics), attempted to use the airport wireless but failed (there were some permanent terminals which I didn't notice until far too late), and eventually made my way onto the plane.

The flight was uneventful; I finished SuperFreakonomics over the course of the flight. The other main memorable thing is that I stepped (I was wearing hiking shoes with thick and heavy rubber soles) on the exposed toes of a sandals-wearing young lady who was behind me; I have a habit of stepping backwards to assess situations, and at that point I had just placed my backpack in the overhead compartment and was wondering if I should push it in farther--so I stepped back and there was a brief, soft yowl of distress.

I arrived without incident; having checked in early, my luggage came out late on the conveyor. I remember wondering if there might be a way to design the system such that luggage checked in early comes out early, as a sort of incentive to check in early. I found the Gobbler waiting for me with an airport van (the fee was RM35) and thus we made our way home; the parents were out at the time at a wedding dinner of another distant relative (in this case, my maternal grandmother's elder brother's grandson).

The next day, which was today, we had church in the morning (and then, to drive home the point that Patience is a small place, I ran into my old high-school Physics teacher at the church); then we had a vague sort of lunch--mostly bananas and biscuits and buns; I spent the evening on my Cambodia mission trip report--my task is to do writeups of some of the events that were organised; and then we went out for a dinner that consisted mostly of seafood. I rather regret not bringing my camera along to photograph the food, as it was definitely of the sort not usually found in Singapore, or at least not cheaply; 7 people ate and were filled for about RM171. After dinner we returned to the house, from which I departed with Kelvin and the Pig at about 9pm.

We headed to a cinema and bought tickets for Inception (by the by, it is a pretty good movie--no apparent special effects failures, a relatively believable plot, and quite good acting); we bought 11.35pm tickets because the 9pm screening had already been going on for 27 minutes when we arrived. As it turned out that was a good thing; Kelvin was ill and had to leave around 11, which would have caused us to miss the ending of the film if we had watched the 9pm screening. During the intervning 2 hours or so we gossipped about old schoolmates' graduations, illnesses, etc., and sat around sipping drinks and eating a slice of Chicago Cheesecake (whether Chicago has a unique sort of cheesecake is not for me to tell).

And then I got back to the house around 2.30am or so, and have been typing this since.

July 26, Monday 11.10pm

Well then... the family just got back to the house from a quite long dinner at my uncle's wife's place--the uncle himself is away, which is a good thing because he's a politician and so his conversation tends to... shall we say it never quite reaches beyond banality. The dinner was good, though; lots of talking and reminiscing and so on; I don't think I've met the uncle's wife or their kids in at least five years, and there was quite a lot to be talked about.

...my computer's annoying me. I just had to restart the computer because the explorer.exe chose to go haywire--it does that every now and then... I never like to shut down and start up the laptop because of the long time it takes, and the number of programs that also start on start-up is rather large, and most of them are useful enough that I wouldn't normally remove them from the start-up menu; it's just that they become entirely useless in the absence of an Internet connection. I should start hunting places where I can regularly and cheaply use wifi; there was a little restaurant near the church here but things turned sour when they found that offering free wifi does get your customers to hang around longer but doesn't get them to order expensive and many foods. It, in fact, is starting to look like Starbucks (or a different coffee chain) is going to be a regular haunt.

I think I shall begin my recordings of my memories, such as they are; my memory deteriorates quite quickly, unfortunately, so all you'll get is impressions of things; sometimes I have very detailed impressions, and sometimes not, and very often the impressions are of things nearly or completely unrelated to what was actually going on. So what you'll get from me is something of a slide show of images and events and people and things... and of course the slide show might not even finish being told in one post--eighteen days, more or less, of thoughts and musings? It'd be a killer of a post to type and even worse to read. So I might separate it into periods--the simplest way seems to be to treat it in terms of weeks--half-week, week, week--or periods of events--preparation, events, illness, meetings, departures--perhaps the second is better. More separations means a smaller window per separation, which then means more ease of typing and reading. So the second method it is, then.

Come to think of it, I actually have about six main sections of the trip to describe; they're not all equally long, obviously, but they're convenient to use.

The first period, I think, would be the time of travelling and settling in; that began slightly before the 1st of July. In fact it occurred about a week before the 1st of July, as that was when I did my packing and set aside the things I expected to need in Cambodia; they filled a wheelbag, a backpack, and a small cloth bag--mostly food in that cloth bag, really; a friend had recently returned from his mission trip to Macau and had given me a bunch of Macanese foods. I packed, and then that bag went with me to Announce-chan's room where I stayed for the rest of the day (I had returned the hostel keys that morning and so was temporarily homeless) until night-time. I left Announce-chan's room with my bags and with Announce-chan, and we had dinner together--burgers, as I recall; I also changed some money into US dollars (about a hundred). We ran into the overachieving coursemate (he was apparently returning to his house from army training or something similar) while on the way to the MRT, and then I left Announce-chan to board the MRT.

On the MRT I found that my Zen had stopped working entirely; I had charged it in Announce-chan's room to full capacity, but it wasn't working then. I should add in here that I had previously planned to sleep over in the airport, as the flight was at 6am and I didn't wish to take a 4am taxi, but the only other male on the team (let us call him Sir Marker) had offered to get his parents to let me ride in their car too; so I was heading to his house. His parents were genial, and his house was a chaos of bags and clothes and things being packed. In fact my general impression of Sir Marker is that he is a sort of clone of me, except grown up in quite different circumstances--and of course, he's a lot more driven than I am. But then most people are a lot more driven than I am. In any case he was still packing, and in the process of handmaking a little blue notebook that he brought to Cambodia and never once wrote or drew in, which was a pity because it did look like a quite impressive handmade notebook. In any case I found, at his house, that the Zen would not only not turn on, but that it had also somehow become completely undetectable by any computer in that house; essentially my headphones had instantly become dead weight.

We hung out while he rushed about making final preparations; we watched a couple episodes of Doctor Who; and then I slept while he continued packing. We woke around 3am and had hot chocolate before heading out to the airport in his parents' car, and we arrived at the airport around 4am; the team had previously decided to meet at that time so that we could check in our luggage and get all the little random things done on time. So we did; some arrived later than others due to various things, and Sir Marker and I weren't even the earliest at the airport. We took photographs at the terminal with the people who had turned up to send us off, had some prayers, and then we checked in the luggage and went through the various security screenings and things that the airport does to people all the time. I add here that one of the people from my Bible study group was also on that plane, travelling to Siem Reap; we met her and her friends at the check-in counter, but lost track of them all immediately after.

We also had breakfast--toast and coffee--in the terminal, and then we headed for the waiting area. We boarded and had our seats and took more photographs and took off without incident. While on the plane I fell asleep, only waking occasionally to fill in the arrival/departure white cards and so on; but of course, the plane stopped over at Siem Reap where the Bible study friend and her friends left the plane. We had to get off too, and so had about half an hour to stroll around the Siem Reap terminal; so we had toilet breaks, photo sessions (you'll notice by now that photo sessions were a constant motif of our team), and then we re-boarded the plane and had the second leg of the flight with a whole new set of co-passengers before we arrived at Phnom Penh International Airport (at least, that is what I presume the building is called. We got our luggage without much incident, as we had put bright yellow ribbons on everything for ease of identification, and then we headed out; we were met by two of the local Campus Crusade (hereafter abbreviated to CCCC) staff and a couple of vans sent from the airport, into one of which went all the luggage. The people went in the other, and we rode back in the van while the staff introduced themselves and we introduced ourselves and we stared at the scenery. To be honest, though, Phnom Penh reminded me more of Patience or of some of the villages in So Hour than anything else. It's just got that giant small-town feel about it--a "small provincial town" as Belle might have put it.

At the hotel we got our bags and were assigned to rooms (there being only two males on the team, we were de facto roommates). The CCCC staff offered us chewing-gum, which goes to show how (in?)famous the laws of Singapore are outside Singapore. We also discovered that the luggage van had knowingly or unknowingly forgotten to unload a couple items of luggage, and so we spent some time making phone calls to track down the van and the luggage, which eventually were returned to their rightful owners. One of the owners, I might add, was quite incredibly calm about it--she sort of ambled along telling people, with a perfectly cheerful face, that her luggage was nowhere to be found; it's not terribly surprising therefore that we all thought at first that it was a bit of a joke, although one with an odd sort of punchline. We had lunch at a nearby restaurant, and found that Cambodian food is quite similar to Malaysian/Singaporean food, except that it has much stronger tastes--contains lots more salt and pepper, less greens, and revolves quite a bit around soups and eggs; apparently of the meats, beef and pork are cheapest, and chicken and fish (and seafood) are the costliest.

July 27, Tuesday 12.15pm

I have just woken up due to the efforts of several people; the Gobbler has departed and by now is either in So Hour or in Spore; either way he will be back in Spore by the time I return there, I think. And then there was a parade of people into the room to open the windows and let the sun in, tell me to wake up because it was past 1pm, and so on. I've fallen for that "it's very very late!" gambit so many times that it never fails to irritate me; causing a panic attack may be effective, but it does absolutely nothing for the mood of the person who panicked. In my case I simply head for the nearest timepiece, verify the claims, and if I've been fed false information I glare at the feeder and return to sleep.

At any rate there's probably lunch downstairs; the parents are as usual trying to convince me to sleep and wake early, but I've never been a wake-with-the-dawn sort of person. I tried that over the internship and very quickly decided I'd rather suffer lack of sleep than try to sleep early. And of course my view of the holidays is that they are the perfect time to toss all biological clock balances out the window because there's plenty of time and opportunity to fix them up again later.

I now continue my account of Cambodia... where? Ah, yes. The afternoon of the 1st of July, lunch... well, after lunch we had a bit of a meeting and then we headed out to the CCCCHQ in a couple of tuktuks (6 people to each tuktuk). A tuktuk is a sort of little carriage on two wheels (one on each side), and is pulled by a motorcycle affixed to the front. There are two sofa-style seats, one facing forwards and one facing backwards. The sides are open to allow the passengers to climb in and out, but there are rolls of tarpaulin hanging from the ceiling, three on each side. When the weather is inclement, the tuktuk drivers (they are recognisable by their jockey caps, which appear to be a sort of informal uniform) stop the tuktuk at the nearest convenient place and unroll the tarpaulins to keep the passengers dry. The tarpaulins also have a little window of transparent plastic in them to allow the passengers to continue gawking at the streets while staying dry.

July 27, Tuesday 6.45pm

It's evening; I have just spent a relatively boring and uncomfortable afternoon outside... there was lunch, and then we went out for what was initially described as a joyride but then turned into visits to people only known to the parents; so I and my two siblings were obliged to just stand around (seated positions are few in little shops) while the adults talked and talked, with little or no need for any input from anybody younger than 30. We then went shopping for picnic provisions, as we are apparently planning to go to an island tomorrow--of course I'll bring the camera. As it is I already wish I brought the backpack out more often; the shops this afternoon were uncomfortably hot due to a power outage and a fan would have come in very handy.

In any case I again return to my own remembrances: it's odd how long it takes to document just half of one day... some time soon I shall put this into MS Word (it is currently a .rtf in WordPad) and do a word count. But at any rate we went to the CCCCHQ in tuktuks--we found out a bit later that the CCCC has those two tuktuk drivers on call, and so we were driven around a lot in them. At the CCCCHQ we met the National Director, the remainder of the campus staff, some of the Christian students (and some Christian non-students, of course), etc, and some speeches were given and then we were split into little groups to talk and so on. I think we were supposed to stay in those groups for the entire trip: two or three students to one staff, to allow for easy translating and follow-up and tracking and so on--administrative stuff mostly. Then we had fruits and dinner at a little nearby restaurant, which I remember because it served refillable dishes--the owner kept asking if we wouldn't rather order 10 different dishes, but we insisted on ordering 2 each of 5 dishes; it was only later, when we started noticing the owner taking away empty dishes and replacing them with filled dishes, that we figured it out and started eating lots. I think this was the time when the girls of the team decided that Cambodian servings of rice are too large, and so they started putting all the rice they didn't want on my plate; with there being 10 girls on the team and 1 of me, I often wound up with about 7 times as much rice as the average girl. After dinner we went back, showered and so on, and had a team meeting in the room of the staff-in-charge before going back to our rooms to sleep. (I should put in here that I wound up with the only queen-size bed in any room; every other person had a single bed or mattresses on the floor--it was that sort of hotel.)

Thus ended the first day in Cambodia; we woke up the next day, had our free breakfasts and our first encounter with the incredible sweetness of Cambodian drinks: order any drink that they make on the spot, and the bottom of the glass is at least one inch of condensed milk; the rest will be the drink you ordered plus ice and so on; stirring would turn black coffee into very light brown, and it would be nearly undrinkably sweet; I got used to it after awhile, though--my sweet tooth kicking in again, no doubt. After breakfast we met the CCCC staff in the room of the staff-in-charge (it became our default meeting-room for these things) and then headed over to the campus, where we were ushered into a room. I should add that we were all dressed quite formally--long-sleeved button-shirts on the guys and blouses plus floor-length bottoms (either pants, jeans, or skirts) on the girls; as it turns out that's what all of Phnom Penh seems to wear, because T-shirts continued to be a rare sight throughout our time there. At any rate we went and sweated, and remained in the room while the university's Student Association filtered in and took seats and introduced themselves to us and so on; we had formal introductions when they'd all arrived (they were, for Southeast Asians, remarkably punctual).

July 27, Tuesday 10.15pm

The family has just returned from the Monday prayer meeting at the church, where there were only three members of the congregation; as the number of the family currently in Patience is five, it means we were roughly 62.5% of the total number of people praying just now. It was okay, I suppose; singing and praying and so on; but I wasn't really that enthusiastic about it. I'm not generally enthusiastic about things I get volunteered for, or things the family does that I'm automatically expected to participate in; generally those things are things the parents want to do, and they don't usually ask the kids if they want to go along. There isn't even usually a choice about staying back... of course, this kind of thing probably works on younger children; but I wonder sometimes if the parents haven't just got used to making all the decisions and haven't quite got used to the idea of a bit of democracy. Then again, sometimes their decisions work out okay, like their plans to go to an island tomorrow (this definitely means the hat and fan and camera!); it's just that very often their idea of enjoyable times are sharply at odds with their children's.

But I return now to Cambodia.

We met the people of the Student Association in their office, talked a bit, and then they asked me to play a song on their electric piano (donated by some French company or other, I think) so I played Amazing Grace because whenever I'm asked to play anything on the piano, my brain freezes and I can't think of anything to play that would be relevant to the people asking me to play anything. A case in point would be that at the Student Association office, I could think of nothing but Jonathan Coulton and some hymns. But it seemed to go over well, and some time later we set out on a tour of the school grounds; I found out quite quickly that the campus, despite being one of the older and more prestigious universities in Cambodia, is about the size of the average Malaysian high school; certainly small enough that no map was needed.

We walked around the school with the staff and the Student Association members--mostly the main committee members, though some of them were subcommittee members too--learning about the system and the lifestyle there, and various other trivia: for example, the tuition fees are about USD380 per annum and the school day is generally about 3 hours long; most students study one course in one university and another in another; grades are printed out and posted on a noticeboard where everybody can see; and so on. We walked around a lot, in the course of which I lost track of my original assigned guide and so roped in the nearest student as my new guide, and then roped in a third when I lost the second. In fact I think I lost the entire rest of the group at one point when they headed to the library and my guide headed for the computer labs. In the end, though, we got to the canteen, where we found that in that canteen (and another food court, at least), cash isn't used; rather, one changes cash into coupons and uses those instead. The reason we were given was that cash might be dirty and this helps keep people's hands clean; I'm not terribly sure of its efficacy, but it was an interesting system. And of course, one can later change unused coupons (the stallkeepers also give change in coupons, so no worries about having to try and get small bills for exact change) back into cash; the coupons are only valid for the day they are issued.

We had lunch--I had omelette with bread, which became something of an instant favourite amongst the team. Cambodian omelette is awesome--somehow they manage to have it be very very moist, and it's generously salted and peppered and there's frequently onions and meat and suchlike in it--and the bread was French loaf--probably a relic of the French occupation. One thing about Cambodian food is also that it's very heavy on the eggs--omelettes and soups and so on. But given how nice the omelette is, that's no surprise.

We had lunch, talked awhile; and then--my memory deserts me at this point.

...you know, this trip to Patience is turning out better, at least so far, than I'd hoped; but then I hadn't hoped for very much... the last trip was okay until the parents arrived, at which point most of the enjoyable parts of life were curtailed severely; the day or so before this trip I kept worrying that the parents would spend lots of time complaining at me and telling me that I needed to be a lot better, wake early and study lots and generally set a good example for the younger siblings and suchlike. So far there's been a surprising lack of that, apart from the almost-traditional mutterings about wanting the car washed and us up early and painting the grilles.

Perhaps I just have very low expectations of people in general; but I don't think so, else I wouldn't be disappointed in people ever, unless it's that I set low expectations that people fail even to meet, which is a rather depressing sort of idea. But then depressing ideas are everywhere; Inception, for example--the idea that dreams are nearly indistinguishable from reality to the dreamer, and the only way out is death--there are at least two ways that idea could go horribly wrong. One is, obviously, the possibility of people committing suicide to get back to the "real" world; the other is that (if you're only a projection of somebody else's subconsciousness, or if everybody else is only the projection of your own subconscious) then there obviously isn't anything morally wrong with running amok and murdering people left, right, and centre, is there?

...the next few days of Cambodia are a blur to my mind of going to school in the morning and walking around, talking to people; I'm not good with people, and was highly difficult to persuade that people would be friendly and perfectly fine with being talked to by a complete stranger. However, it turns out Cambodians are very sociable and very friendly, and perfectly okay with talking to a foreigner who knows little to nothing of the local lingua franca--in this case, either Khmer or French--it was quite an agreeable surprise. One of the encounters that stands out in my memories is the boy whom I approached; he was scribbling on paper (and may I say, the Khmer script is very pretty) but stopped when I sat down and started talking; some time later, perhaps around 11am, I asked when his essay was due. He replied, perfectly equably, that it was due at 12pm, and yet seemed perfectly willing to have me and my companions hang around a little more to talk; I was probably more discomfited than he, and he didn't seem the type to not give a whit about homework while I most certainly am. I've forgotten his name and course and year, but the behaviour still strikes me as quite definitely unlike anything in Singapore--or Malaysia, for that matter.

At one point we and the Student Association went on a tour to Tuol Sleng, a high-school-turned-prison where 20,000 people were at one point or another held prisoner and tortured; there were only 7 survivors. It was quite sad and a great reminder of the things that human ingenuity will come up with, even (or especially) for the pain and suffering of other humans. And it was also a reminder of the human drive for profit, because there was a little souvenirs shop right beside it that sold not only books and DVDs documenting the Khmer Rouge, but also sold scarves, silver cigarette cases, and pirated DVDs of such things as the Simpsons, Family Guy, etc. It was quite jarring. From Tuol Sleng we proceeded to various places along the riverside--a market where we bought nothing and only took photos; the area outside the Royal Palace (we actually entered it only on another day) where we took more photos and had coconuts from a roadside vendor and found another vendor selling fried crickets; we bought 50 cents' worth of fried crickets and filmed ourselves eating them. They were small, very oily and crunchy, and slightly salty; the larger ones had an additional aftertaste of grass. It rather scared some of the girls, but some of them also ate the crickets.

July 29, Thursday 12.52am

Well, a lot has happened over the past... well, now. It's a couple of days since I last posted, isn't it? But I've reason; yesterday was busy, and today... well, today's been differently busy. I shall recap the more recent events first, and leave Cambodia to later; I haven't showered and I ought to...

Yesterday was predominantly taken up with revisiting Sappy Island; we woke in the morning to prepare picnic items--mostly packing baskets, preparing the cooler, boiling and smashing eggs, etc. I think we actually left the house around 9am or so, and arrived at the jetty around 10am; we got a boat and left and after a rather boring boat ride (during which we ran into some China Chinese tourists whom the parents talked to) we arrived at the island. Our activities from that point were a hodgepodge of swimming and sitting around and eating and walking around to gawk at the other people at the beach (one of the other people was busy for a couple hours in sculpting a giant sand turtle which other people eventually came along to gawk at too). Sappy Island is in a rather bad state, though; apparently there's a lot of illegal immigrants on Style Island (which is very nearby) who are permitted to go on living there because the government finds them a useful source of ghost votes, which keeps the government in power, at least in the state of Patience. Unfortunately all these people generate lots of rubbish that they don't dispose of properly, and so it floats on the seas and is driven by the currents to Sappy Island from Style Island; and the corals and fish of Sappy Island are definitely not what they used to be. The corals are bleaching, the fish are less in number and less energetic than before (and they seem to subsist entirely on bread from tourists), and I saw nearly no live seaweed in the sea, which explains why the drifting bits of it were so attractive to the fish--fish normally completely ignore floating clumps of seaweed.

At any rate we left Sappy Island at around 4pm, when there was a bit of a drizzle; during the boat ride it whipped up into a lovely storm and stung the faces of everybody on the boat, including the China Chinese tourists; they nearly lost a couple of hats in the wind. The rain was very painful, very cold, and very wet (when we finally alighted we could all wring water out of our shirts) and very, very fun indeed. The entire trip was worth it for that ride in the rain...

And yesterday night I went out with Kelvin and the Pig, for a round of drinks; we would have gone for a movie but there weren't any that we wanted to see being shown at the time, so we didn't.

This morning I was on the Internet for most of the time, commenting on Facebook and talking to people and so on; the Pig and Kelvin and I had originally planned to see a movie at around 12pm but it got postponed to just now because of the Pig's school work (which Kelvin and I agree is an euphemism for "girlfriend"). All in all today has been uneventful; I woke up, was online, did some chores, had dinner with the family, and then went out just now for a movie with the two of them (we've been seeing lots and lots of each other these few days) and then came back.

Now I go to shower, and then I shall sleep.

July 30, Friday 11.06am

The family is all annoyed, to various degrees; it's what, the fifth day since I came here? and already tensions are showing. Of course the tensions were always there, as I've said earlier; but I think the main reason behind all the pother is that the children have very different desires from those of the parents, and neither side has really learned to compromise yet; we tolerate instead of cooperate, I think. Which is why we grumble when the parents burst into rooms at the crack of dawn and announce that it's 10 when it's really 8, but we get up and go along with the programme anyway; and the parents grumble when I go out at night but they shrug and let me go as long as I remember to take the keys and lock up behind me when I get back.

And of course the parents came here as adults, and so their contacts were all adults who'd pretty much settled down in Patience already; and now, six years later, their contacts are all still around for calling on and talking to and reminscing and so on; in the meantime, all the people that we the children knew have grown up and changed and gone on with their lives. It's why my circle of contacts outside the family and church (none of which I'm all that close to anyway; the ones I'm close to have also grown and gone) has shrunk to Kelvin and the Pig--and of course, the last time I was here it was just the Pig. And now the parents want to go gallivanting around to talk to their friends, and then they drag the children along... and we the children get very, very bored listening to reminisces and discussions about things of no interest to us (seriously, how much am I supposed to care that housing prices have changed throughout Patience when I have no intention of settling down anywhere near it?). It's not surprising therefore that when the parents barge in and announce that we're going out to eat with X (the names change every meal but are almost never recognisable), the children respond with a resounding "meh". After all, there's nothing to excite us. Of course we go along, dutifully, and eat, and so on; but the conversation doesn't involve us and wouldn't interest us even if it did involve us, and anyway we wouldn't have anything to contribute.

I've noted before that my father, in particular, is particularly forceful in character. It's no surprise that honest opinion (amongst the children) flees in his presence like bacteria from penicillin.

In any case this morning was like that; the parents wanted to go out at 8.30am to meet a certain friend for breakfast, while the children were mainly interested in getting breakfast. Naturally breakfast occurred, after a bit of yelling from the parents about the virtues of waking early and how waking late is just the first step off a slippery slope at the end of which is complete moral ruination and financial bankruptcy. After breakfast the children excused ourselves as the conversation became increasingly irrelevant and boring, and we drifted from hardware store to pet shop where the kid sister melted into puddles at the animals in it... naturally this meant that we kept the car waiting for a bit before we noticed the adults at the entrance waving for our attention (they got a lot less attention than the puppies).

My father also happens to be a very impatient sort of person who hates waiting; multiple times in the past he's preferred to drive off and then come back to the house to pick us up rather than sit there and wait in an idle car. I'm not sure if it comes with having been a manager for so many years or if it's just some sort of integral part of his personality.

At any rate when we arrived at the house he immediately grabbed the laptop and attached dongle which is our only method (we haven't got any any wifi spots so far) of accessing the Internet and disappeared for awhile; then he came down, started the car, and drove off. I haven't been able to find any trace of the laptop or dongle which is why I'm typing this, really; not that I'd be able to use it for long even if I had found it, since it's the only Internet-accessing laptop amongst four people (not counting the father) in the house, and the connection is unpredictable, sometimes good and sometimes... not. Though, of course, that may simply be due to my techbane capabilities.

I must return to my documentation of the time in Cambodia, or I fear I'll never quite finish it, and that would be a pity.

Well, then. Tuol Sleng and the Royal Palace all occurred within the first few days or so of Cambodia, interspersed with going around on the campus to talk to people; I exchanged emails with quite a large number of people over the course of those few days, and I hope none of them have tried emailing me or they'll be greatly disappointed with the tardiness of my replies. In fact I should probably initiate the emailing, but I think I'll leave that 'til I get back to somewhere with a more reliable Internet connection... that's at least 12 days away. It's odd how tedium so rapidly makes one look forward to being busy again. Today in fact promises to be full of lots of typing, because I've little else to do anyway.

July 31, Saturday 11.54am

Last night was pretty okay, against all my expectations; or perhaps because of them... It was cell group, and of course the parents took the children along willed we or nilled we. Commonly my reaction to this sort of thing--the church is, unfortunately or not, primarily composed of rather aged people--the younger people aren't particularly committed and are particularly wishy-washy, at least to me--and thus, again, the problem of them talking and being incredibly boring--but my reaction is to sit and endure it and go daydreaming off. I'm very good at daydreaming; it's not a particularly productive skill, but the amount of entertainment it provides for me more than makes up for that. But last night I prayed and was more of a "well, this isn't the best of circumstances, but since I'm already here I hope it'll be interesting and be of some good to me"... and what do you know, it was. Well, it still wasn't the best of circumstances, and there were definite parts (like the unscheduled Korean-style praying in tongues that went on and on and only stopped after an uncomfortably long time) that I could've done without; but on the whole it didn't put me to sleep the way it did the last time I went for one of these.

On the other hand, the fellowship after the cell group wasn't particularly scintillating; people talked to me, and I talked to them, but either my responses were boring or they were acting out of politeness and nothing more, and the conversations died away quite quickly. In particular one... for lack of a better word, dialogue... stands out: the other person had been on a mission trip recently, to Nepal, and had also been with me for the OM camp last July, the one I still remember with a little sourness for having been dragged away before it even ended. Well, not a little; bitterness is a particular problem of mine and I still resent not having been able to complete the thing properly.

At any rate he talked to me, and it soon became clear that he has a certain definition of "missions" and going around campus talking to students doesn't fit into it; he kept going "so you go around making friends? That is all?" and I kept telling him that yes, that was what we did, and we had events (which I will record shortly). And then he asked how many had come to Christ in the time we were there, and when I answered a single-digit number, the conversation died away quite quickly... Perhaps it is merely the arrogance of youth, but I can't help wanting to know his definition of "missions" and what he did in Nepal. But I'll find out tomorrow when he shares in church, he and the other uncle who went with him.

I'm expected to share, too, though; five minutes of me talking about the mission trip to Phnom Penh... I'll probably take about three minutes just to give the background information--Campus Crusade isn't terribly well-known in Malaysia, so I'll need to explain all about it and then all about the background of the university and why we went there and so on, and by the time I get to explaining what we did and why, I'll probably have been speaking for upwards of three minutes, if I'm speaking intelligibly; the main danger with me speaking in public is invariably that I get nervous and wordspam and then nobody understands a word I say. The next danger is that I'll have no idea of the level of detail they want and then I'll go way too deep and they'll lose interest... still, I'll just have to trust that as long as I go up there and speak, it'll be of edification to them, somehow.

But back to the records of Cambodia.

So, we went around the campus talking to people. I should mention at this point that we were officially forbidden to be obviously Christian on campus; that particular university, apparently, has a history of being the starting-point of major uprisings and student protests, and so is under rather strict government watch--spies and police apparently patrol the place watching for seditious activities. In addition, we were there under the Student Association as some kind of cultural exchange activity; so we went around saying that we were there to learn from the students about Cambodian culture and stuff, and we were also having events to teach English (like China, they are moderately good at reading/writing English, but not so good at the speaking/listening bit) and to tell them about Singaporean culture, particularly the education system there (this was suggested by the CCCC staff--apparently the brightest and best of Cambodia want to go abroad).

Our events were all held within one week, on alternate days--Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, and English Class and Cultural Night and Friendship Club respectively; it was very tiring, but not for me, as that week was also the week I fell badly ill. It stems from the fact that we had visited a particular mall to obtain supplies for the events, and thus had also had a meal at the food court there. I was feeling particularly adventurous at the time and so ordered something called "7-colours fried rice"; each colour turned out to be a different item of food--white was a bit of squid, yellow was the rice, and so on.

July 31, Saturday 5.50pm

...as it turns out, the GameHouse Universal Patcher doesn't work on games downloaded from PopCap, which is a pity, because Plants vs Zombies is a ridiculously fun (and cute) little game.

But back to Cambodia!

...well, we ate at the food court on, let me see, I believe it was Wednesday--it can't have been Sunday because we would have been at church and then at the sports fellowship. By the by, the sports was a little better than I'd thought it would be; generally the mention of sports conjures up visions in my mind of pain and grime and lots of injuries, and those did happen, just not to me. I spent my time in badminton and playing something that, for lack of any other name, I will call Boules--that, after all, is the word printed on the side of the cloth bags they use to hold the game's implements. It's really a simple game, and requires a dirt patch, a bottlecap (or some other such small, easily-seen, durable/replaceable thing), and twelve iron balls, of which six are perfectly smooth and six have lines scored into their surfaces. You play by stamping the bottlecap into the dirt so that there is a little white dot amongst the brown; then you use a foot to draw a line in the dirt. Then the players separate themselves into two teams (there is no requirement for both teams to be of equal size, but it is done as a formality), and each team is either smooth or lined. Then a representative from either team steps up and throws the iron ball once, after which the turn passes to the other team. It remains that team's turn until their ball either lands closer to the bottlecap than the other team's, or until they knock the other team's ball away so that they have a ball nearer the bottlecap than the other team. (It is a distinct disadvantage to throw a ball directly upon the bottlecap too early in the game.)

We were tired and dirty after the games (which had lasted from 3pm to nearly 7pm) and after dinner, my roommate convinced me to attempt 20 pushups and 20 situps; I managed the pushups by doing quite pathetic ones, but only managed 18 situps and even then I think I pulled my abdominal muscles.

At any rate the next day I was sore in the stomach; I don't really remember that week's Monday or Tuesday, except that some of the other teammates complained of bad stomachaches every now and then. Ah, yes. Tuesday was the English Class, and it went incredibly well; we got loads and loads of attendees, and I was told to introduce them to some online resources for the improvement of their English, so I told them about things like Dictionary.com and so on, and then threw in TVTropes just for the heck of it. I hope I haven't singlehandedly destroyed all their free time for the next few decades by that.

By Thursday morning I was running for the toilets every hour or so, which was very bad; I couldn't hold any conversations because I might have to run at any moment, and so I tagged along with my roommate and was mostly silent and strained-looking. I became quite well-acquainted with the toilets around the canteen, and later with the ones near the Student Association room. I would in fact have wanted to return to the hotel, but we had the Cultural Event that afternoon, and I was required to be around for (at the very least) a mass dance performance.

However the strain must have been quite apparent--either that or the roommate got concerned enough to say something to the rest of the team (not that I'm complaining about that!)--possibly I was pale; after all I hadn't eaten at all for the entire day. It's a bit difficult to get solid food down when you essentially have been pooping lumpy brown fluid all day (and I'd thrown up quite a bit too), and I had zero appetite anyway. (Those who know me well will know that this generally means quite extreme sickness.)

That was the beginning of the three days of sickness, and that was the first day, when I was still able to put a grim face on it and go around the school; by that night I was too physically weak to leave the room, and they had porridge sent to the room for me. The next day I was forbidden to leave the room, though I couldn't have anyway; again I had porridge, and in the afternoon the roommate came back to the room to check my temperature and so on. The rest of the team had also produced various diarrhoea medications and suchlike, and I had brought some charcoal cubes (which hurt quite badly to swallow--sharp edges do not go down the throat well), so I was on quite a bit of medication. It was during this time that I got decidedly depressed about being stuck in the hotel room and not being useful, but I got into some rather convoluted thoughts that sort of make sense without actually doing so. I'll have to set them out later to avoid disrupting the flow of the narrative, though. The third day, Saturday, was the day of the last event of the week, Friendship Club (despite the name it wasn't at all exclusive), and I wasn't there; that afternoon I'd been taken out to a local polyclinic for an injection and some medications. As it turns out medications aren't at all regulated in Cambodia; we arrived, didn't even need to show our passports, and were immediately ushered into a little room where a nurse gave me a blood pressure check and then an injection, both on my right hand; I think she thought I was left-handed because I wear my watch on my right wrist.

At any rate the doctor wrote a prescription and I was supplied with more medications for the next five days. It seems it was quite a potent injection, or else I was already healing by then, because I was well enough to go to church the next day and I even managed to participate in the sports fellowship, though I limited myself to Boules--as it is, it's a very challenging game because there is no perfectly even dirt patch, and one needs to figure out how to use the hillocks and depressions to one's advantage, and of course if one throws the iron ball hard enough, one makes one's own depressions in the dirt--and a few mass group games that were quite fun. We also played Jacob's Ladder, which involves people scrambling over other people's legs, and I stumbled because I was trying to overtake the person in front of me and he was trying to block me; so I tripped over a bag strap and plowed right into a guy's side. I expect it was rather painful; I'm not light by any means and he didn't have a cushion of fat.

Monday we spent at the Royal Palace, and I took upwards of a hundred photos there. It was quite fun, although my stomach remained queasy throughout (and after the jumpshots it was even more so). I didn't sleep terribly well that night, being afflicted (though I didn't know it then) by hives which were very itchy. At the time I just felt bumps on the skin and scratched accordingly.

Tuesday morning the hives were still there, and rather extensively covering both my legs up to the knee; they alarmed the staff-in-charge and the CCCC staff, and by mid-afternoon I had antihistamines to take in addition to my other medication (although the roommate, having been a medic when in the army and being a Life Sciences student at the moment, insisted that I should stop the medications in case they were having worse and harder-to-detect effects than the hives).

I should note that at this point, we weren't doing random campus ministry as much as before; we'd made quite a number of contacts and friends over the past week through randomly talking and through the events, and many of them wanted to meet up for fun and profit (the profit in this case being a chance to practise their spoken English); and of course they would specify the teammate they wanted to meet with. I'd been sick for three days and even when healthy I'd been distinctly less sociable than everybody else, and so had no contacts: a quite depressing sort of thing, especially when some of the more outgoing teammates had more contacts than the hours of the day and were constantly moaning about being tired out from meeting people. It's not a nice way to put it, perhaps, but it did seem like it at the time... still, all things work out for good, and they who had many didn't have too many, while we (I wasn't the only unsociable one on the team, it turns out; at least two others on the team had no contacts as well) who had too few still managed to meet people by sitting in the canteen and being recognised and being available for people to just plop down and talk.

(One thing which still amazes me about Cambodians is their willingness to plop down beside people or have people plop down beside them; there's never any worry about intruding on people. Then again, the orientation did say that Cambodians regard being alone as something to be avoided--the polar opposite of my general inclination!--so that explains that, I guess.)

And so we approached the end of the time of Cambodia, in meetings and sitting around and talking and so on; it was around this time that I think I began disconnecting myself from the people around me. Perhaps fatigue, perhaps because I knew we would be leaving soon; but my journal around that time has "with but not of" as something of a motif. I just, for some reason, found it extremely difficult to care about the people I was talking to, and I think at least one of them sensed it, because of an outburst--well, outburst makes it sound more violent than it was--Cambodians are peculiarly gentle and given to physical contact, which I rather enjoyed--more like a plaintive question? an interrogative? but he suddenly noticed that he was the one asking all the questions in the dialogue and I hadn't been seeking any information throughout. And I thought about it and I came to the conclusion that for whatever reason, I just wasn't... interested. And that was terrible for any number of reasons, a major one of which was that it probably made me appear a lot more arrogant than I am. And uncaring, too, but... well, goodness knows. Perhaps I'd simply exceeded my monkeysphere quota.

August 5, Thursday 11.11pm

Egads; even when there's little to nothing to do, I manage to procrastinate the typing of this blog... still, not much has happened over the past five days, not really. Today, maybe yesterday, have been somewhat more filled, and that's why I'm typing now really.

So I shall recount the latest things first, and then return to the last few days in Cambodia, if I have the time; tomorrow I must wake very early and I think I shall need the sleep--either the sleep or a steady supply of mints and sour chews, and I definitely have not the steady supply.

I downloaded a cracked copy of Plants vs Zombies on Saturday, and then a walkthrough; it's been the main occupation of my free time for the past few days. It's ridiculously cute and fun, and the Zen Garden definitely is something of an addiction with me, the way I keep playing the minigames to get new plants for it. But it's fun!

On Sunday my father was sharing with the church... I should note that before coming to Patience, the family attended a missions camp with some of the people from the church here, after which one of the local church members went on a missions trip to Nepal (I do hope that mentioning it doesn't cause a huge problem for the Christians there). With me having just got back from Cambodia, my father decided that it'd be a good idea to have the local church members and I to share about our experiences: one sharing about the camp, one about Nepal, and one about Cambodia (no prizes for guessing who did which). The one who went to Nepal, incidentally, was the one who was bothering me about my missions on Friday night.

As it turned out the church members gave very--I don't mean to be condescending or patronising, but I am trying to be kind to them--very lacklustre is the kindest way of putting it--their sharings consisted mostly of photos of the scenery while they said "next" to get the projectionist to put the next slide up. I mean, really. The man who'd been asked to share about the missions camp decided to put up a series of photos of the beach and food and group shots with just one or two photos of the camp speakers (and even then the only information given was their names--nothing about what they'd taught), and the one who'd gone to Nepal... showed photos taken from the plane of roads and buildings. And that was all; nothing about how long he'd been there, what they'd done, who they'd been with, nada, zip. You'd think his mission trip had consisted entirely of two plane trips. I had no photos but I did have an outline, and I don't mean to brag but I'm convinced that I conveyed a lot more than they did. (As it turns out, "and whatnot" is a new verbal tic of mine, which I append to the ends of lists: "we met X, and Y, and whatnot" for example... I'm not sure, but it's a much nicer tic than most anyway.)

Monday passed uneventfully, I think; at any rate I don't remember anything about it. Yesterday evening I went out swimming; the pool was quite crowded, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the changing room has got turned into a sort of informal pick-up place for the local homosexual population; at least that would seem to be the logical inference when people start randomly stepping out of the showers and grabbing their crotches in each other's direction. Still, nothing terribly overt (but if there had been it wouldn't be a sneaking suspicion!) and it may just have been adolescent machismo showing-off. I think I may have some degree of alexithymia; I'm no good at describing my own feelings or those of others, and as far as nonverbal cues go I'm almost always completely in the dark. It probably contributes greatly to my preference for electronic communication over face-to-face: at least this way, body language doesn't come into it and I can carefully pick and choose my words to convey the appropriate tone. I only got to swim for about half an hour, though, and I swam without goggles: I'd forgotten to bring mine from Spore and I had originally intended to buy some at the sports complex store, but as it turned out I'd underestimated the price of the cheapest pair of goggles by nearly RM7. In addition I'd had a surprise dinner sprung on me by the parents, which necessitated a short swim.

Today I woke in the morning... Again I find myself compelled to provide some background. There is a group of Christian professionals called the Eagles, in Singapore, and they occasionally have conferences and suchlike; my parents are quite involved with them, somehow--my father has many connections--and they so happen to be having a conference in Patience, which (again) my parents are involved in. Somehow they inveigled an extra attendance form and signed me up: so I spent the day from the afternoon onwards in the company of about 600 people, predominantly middle- to advanced-age citizens. It hasn't been too bad so far, but tomorrow promises to be tiring. I shall sleep now, therefore, and leave Cambodia to another day's telling.

August 17, Tuesday 7.48pm

How time passes! And how long it's been since I updated! But at the moment I've got the time, so I'll go on; and let's see if I can't finish everything I want to type down tonight before I sleep--and sleep comes early in So Hour, where I currently am.

Let me therefore finish off the time in Patience, and then I'll end my recap.

The Eagles Conference was apparently the first of its kind in Patience, and it went quite well; I did get pestered for awhile with questions like "so what did you like best", "how can we improve", and (something of a personal peeve) "what did you learn from it"... my answer was invariably something along the lines of "a lot, I'll have to take time to review the notes and process", which is true; my life is a lot less sudden jumps than small nudges here and there that help me along to decisions and suchlike. I suppose in the world of business you're expected to process information a lot more quickly, or at least have some sort of acceptable canned answer ready on hand; I, however, don't usually rely on canned answers. Well, not usually.

After the Eagles Conference I spent a lot of time out with the Pig and Kelvin, mostly at nights when we'd head out for a drink and to sit around talking. Of course this means we occasionally proved the truth of the axiom that it is easiest to converse when one does not say "let us converse"; but on the whole it was a good time. Shisha, I have found, is an interesting experience; something like cigarettes, not as addictive and a lot more herbal. I got lightheaded partway through the shisha time, though, mostly because I did a lot of inhaling on the smoke and so (most likely) caused myself oxygen deprivation. At least, it didn't seem to happen to either the Pig or to Kelvin. I note at this point that the Pig's girlfriend has him quite firmly under her thumb: I inadvertently caused him trouble the day after the shisha by posting it on Facebook--to me it was an event, after all! and a first, too--but somehow she has extracted a vow from him to never smoke anything, and thus trouble ensued. Well, he's not actually under her thumb; he's just dead scared of her, which I'm equally amused and horrified by. (It also makes me want to give them a leather whip for their wedding gift.)

The Monday before I left was relatively busy; we had to do a fair bit of coordinating, because everybody had errands: my father had people to see, I had a pair of glasses to pick up--a most disappointing experience, that; the glasses were one week late and they were available on Monday only because we'd kept calling and threatening to cancel the order. I'm never going to patronise that outlet ever again.--, my kid sister had some paperwork to be prepared and done something about, and there were only two cars. Thus we had a bit of a heated discussion about what should be done first and by whom, and the upshot of it was that (as I had planned, actually!) I had got my new glasses and was free to sit around the house by 5pm or so--I had planned such because I wanted to visit the local swimming-pool one last time. Unfortunately, it turned out to be closed--I had thought it closed on Tuesday because the Pig had said so, but as it turned out he'd got confused with a different pool.

I returned to Spore on the 10th by a 7-hour journey; the journey began at 5.30am in Patience and ended at around 1pm or so. I completed my packing at around 1am that day (having been out with Kelvin and the Pig earlier that night), and now regret it; I left my rope belt in Patience and will not be able to get at it again until maybe December, when Kelvin and the Pig want to climb Mt. Killer (and I want to tag along). Of course I could simply buy more lengths of rope in Spore and use those, or I could modify the computer lock into a belt; but I did quite like that particular length of rope. At any rate it was one flight (the bag I had intended to be a carryon turned out to be too heavy and too large for the cabin and so it became a last-minute check-in, which irritated me quite badly--I hadn't had much of a breakfast), two bus rides, an MRT ride, a bus ride, and then a bit of a walk before I arrived at the room where I've been squatting. I got breakfast around 10am--a tin of coffee and a piece of bread--and lunch at the very end of the trip--an unsatisfyingly small and cold package of nasi lemak, which I suspect was practically thrown at me as the remainder of that vendor's breakfast supplies.

The main reason I left Patience so early on was that there was the SMC beginning the next day; as with the FOC, what happened was that I threw things out of the bag and then threw other things in, then went out for dinner with the roommate and then slept and the next day I set out.

The SMC went well; it was quite tiring, and I took lots of naps, but it was very fun. Also rather saddening, because it looks likely to be the last SMC I ever attend unless the December one falls on a very convenient date, and also because it's a big reminder that my school life is coming to a rapid end.

After the SMC? I've been hanging around in the hostel; the roommate and I are quite comfortable. And of course over the weekend there were the House of Bread reunions and a karaoke session on Saturday during which I found out that the musical tastes of practically the entire House of Bread community are widely varied; very few songs were sung by more than two people. And now I'm here, in So Hour, having just come over this morning; so far I have eaten, gone out to buy food from the buka puasa pasar, watched some TV--it is ironic that I only watch Singaporean TV channels when in Malaysia--and talked to the grandfolks and the cousins.

And now that we're up to date on what is now, I have only the end of Cambodia and the FOC and the journey to Patience left to detail.

August 18, Wednesday 10.51am

Well, then. The last few days of my time in Cambodia passed in a haze of slight fatigue--I am an introvert, even if I've learned to enjoy the company of other people--and then there were three events that week: one follow-up and two farewells, all three of which were to some extent organised by ourselves.

The follow-up event was actually planned even before we knew for certain that there would be anybody to follow up on; "planned in faith" was the way the team leader put it, and of course we had backup plans just in case. Thank God, though, that the backup plans weren't needed, as it turned out. Actually I was rather worried at the beginning of the event, as most of the new believers (towards whom the event was geared) hadn't turned up yet; eventually I did a mental throwing-up of hands and went "well, if it helps even one person then I'll trust that it was worth it"... and within the next half hour or so a bunch of new believers showed up, apologising for lateness due to rain.

The two farewells were interesting; lots of gifts exchanged hands and lots of hugging occurred, as well as exchanges of emails and promises to keep in touch. I was... a weird mix during that time, I think; weirder than usual, at least; I was happy to be leaving for more familiar places, but it was a pity to leave those people--the Cambodians, for all their flaws, are a ridiculously friendly and happy people, and very prone to hugging, which I rather enjoy.

We left Cambodia on a quite sunny morning, and were sent off by a large group of people who'd inquired about our flight times and so on; they turned up at the airport in their large numbers, took loads of group photos, and made us almost late to get through the security scans before the boarding time was announced.

We arrived in Spore around afternoon, somewhat sleepy, and the group almost immediately dissolved as people's parents showed up to claim them and so on; I had nobody claiming me, so I was about to drift off to the MRT when Sir Bob's (he had been my roommate and the only other male teammate in Cambodia) parents decided there was space in the car for one more and besides it was lunchtime.

Thus our time in Cambodia ended; since then there have been team meetups and random get-togethers and lots of Facebook conversations with the Cambodians--I feel quite guilty about having introduced them to that massive time-waster, but hey, it keeps us in touch, right?--and so on. All my Cambodian souvenirs are still lying around the room somewhere.

The day after I returned from Cambodia, I set out again: this time for the NTU Crusade Freshmen Orientation Camp. It's basically an annual camp for people who're going to enter NTU, and of course seniors are encouraged to participate to help the juniors out. It was fun, and tiring, and a pretty okay way to reacclimatise to Spore after Cambodia; the hectic, full life, where jaywalking is not allowed (or safe!) is vastly different from the more relaxed life in Cambodia; although I'm sure that had we stayed on longer, we might find ourselves becoming a lot less relaxed and a lot more hectic: after all we had our moments of tiredness as well, amidst all the stuff there was to be done.

It was during the FOC that I decided to visit Patience--the tickets were actually booked by my mother on the first night of the FOC--and so I stayed just one day in Spore after the FOC to do my laundry and packing, and then I left the next day's evening.

And thus my recounting is up-to-date and complete.