Monday 30 April 2007

Wasted

It was only when I got out of bed and took my infant steps for the day that I realised I'd put myself through a battering for the soccer morning the day before. My glut-muscles (on my ass), groin muscles and muscles in all random areas of the body - right shoulder, left ab, lower back - ached with such an acute and annoying intensity that I felt it a chore just to do something as simple as walk.

I'd played right out of my skin that day. So much so that, I realised, we'd demolished the inadequate, unnecessary obstacles of the AJC teams with an urgent ease so as to move on to the 'ultimate malay team' and 'ultimate chinese team', so coined by Zhiquan and quite possibly his other soccer friends. And amazingly, we did away with the both of them too, one after another, before failing to rise to the challenge of the 2nd UMT (they had enough people to form 2 teams), but considering the impossibility of this eventual occurrence (of the winning streak since my team was quite an oddly assembled one to begin with) it was ridiculous enough to find yourself up against one ultimate team after the other, without the familiar respite of another random mediocre team in between, and even more ridiculously so to have had them booted out by your own doing.

Without a bigger challenge, I can sometimes labour to a hard-earned victory over the random, more mediocre teams present and on some occasions, even lose to them. If only I was stronger-willed with more consistency in the desire for victory and stay more focused. Adrenaline is a powerful drug indeed. It wasn't til I got home that I found huge bruises on my shins and calves and a bleeding left toe, preceding the muscle aches.

It's Kee's liberation day as her final paper ended this morning in bittersweet fashion, i.e. crappy paper but whogivesadamncositsover nonetheless. Poor girl hadn't slept the whole night; I was amazed at her ability to even last our date! It's the start of our holiday together and I've got ideas swirling in my head. Nothing heavy for the day, just some light shopping and food; an easy-going prelude to more interesting propositions.

I'm getting reinitiated into narrative writing by reading Life Of Pi now. The amount of descriptives in the novel is colossal to say the least and I was having trouble deciphering and imagining Yann Martell's lengthy and tedious written portrayals, of the boat especially. For the most part since my JC days, I've been reading more stuff that's angled towards opinions, facts and pretty much unnarrative stuff. At the moment it's quite passive reading, but credit to the author definitely for those descriptions I can vividly capture, as the writing is indeed beautiful. Just a pity that most of it is wasted on me.




Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.

Today's Listenables:
Waking Ashland - Hands On Deck

Sunday 29 April 2007

Every week, I look eagerly forward to my weekend soccer games. It's like everyday, I just go through the day so that that weekend kickabout draws closer. Miss one session and I feel completely fucked up for the rest of the week to come.

Today was fantastic. Usually, the weather would be mercilessly scorching but it rained in the dead of the night so the sun wasn't blazing up the courts this morning. We had up to 8 teams, which is pretty insane for one street soccer court, but I felt good and my makeshift team that didn't really gel anyway made good for 5 games. Notched a couple of goals myself.
My love for soccer is pure and simple.

I left Love Airways on friday and I was given the 'farewell lunch' treatment at where Wei claims serves the best Thai food place in Singapore. For a 45min quick bite, $131 is quite a bomb, but the food was good. Just a bit too exotic (I couldn't picture anything on the menu when I was ordering) and not filling enough, but I'm not complaining!

Chinhong is taking over me in the admin role and in the whole of last week, half the time was spent handing over stuff and the other half... Well, just finding fillers to justify my time in the office, such as watching shows I'd meant to watch for the longest time but didn't on my laptop and finally checking out the Love Airways TV show (which really sucked la).

Sorted out some things with Wei and gave him some feedback, like what I didn't think the admin person should have to be responsible for and why I felt the pay, at $6/hr, wasn't justified. Some points taken, some not. If things work out, then I'll be offered a $400/mth freelance sub-editor role for the magazine, which would have various leverage factors for the company anyway, the main reason being that I'll still be kept in the loop, but the rest of which I'm too lazy to elaborate about.

Now that I'm off work, it's time for the month of important personal pursuits before school term begins and I'm back to being stifled by academics in the name of future survival's sake in the workforce.

1) Reading. Have kicked-started that off already with 2 books in hand - Life of Pi and Prozac Nation. Linda lent me Life of Pi and bought Prozac Nation for me, and I was quite pleasantly surprised at the gesture. Whenever I thanked her profusely for it (cos I'd probably not have spent such money on myself), she'd just say that it's like sharing a passion so she'd do it anytime. Have started reading Life of Pi already.

2) Watching good movies. I've a list of good movies to catch - some arthouse ones and some not, but not your mainstream flicks. On the list are An Inconvenient Truth, The Pursuit of Happyness, City of God, and Fight Club (Richard swears by this movie), just to name a few.

3) Possibly embarking on another run-to-nowhere attempt.

4) Picking up Spanish.

5) Picking up percussions (this one's only hopeful, depending on the capital).

6) Having a great time while the family's away in Macau from the 29th of May til the 4th of June.

7) Soccer tournament at Jeremy's church carnival on the 26th.

8) Legs and Paddles with Kee on the 27th.

9) Field games. Bring on the field games! It's been a long while since I could experience 20-yard shots, sprinting down flanks and providing/receiving inch-perfect through-balls.

10) Lotsa time with Kee. There's gonna be food-hunts, urban exploring and cycling trips among many others cos she's on holiday!

11) Journalistic pursuits, such as sub-editing for Love Airways. Linda is also trying to secure the writing connections for me with some magazines and there's remuneration for articles too. Dody the designer might have copy-writing assignments for me as well with his clients.

12) The custom arts online business venture. I've already started working on some free projects for friends to beef up a portfolio of sorts. When everything works out, this custom arts service will provide people with the opportunity to have art that is customised and/or personalised for themselves, such as photos, names, other text and jewellery. Kee and her sis will have a hand in the jewellery aspect and names too. If it all goes very well, then we will quite possibly consider venturing into getting prints onto apparel such as shoes, bags and shirts.

So it's not all fun and games, but if everything works out fine, it'll be one great month.




Having a sense of humour as a woman doesn't mean you tell jokes. It means you laugh at his jokes.

Today's Listenables:
Full Blown Rose - In The Light

Monday 23 April 2007

Bang, Bang

Nat, Richard, Leon and I had a great time at Cartel's yesterday being the few supporting Newcastle against Chelsea in the most animated of manners. Especially Nat. Dude was fuckin' funny at times, like practically jumping up and cheering when Lampard blasted over the bar from between 5-10 yards out and when Nicky Butt calmly walked the ball away from the goal-line as Chelsea looked to prod one in desperately. Leon was basically the Man Utd guy so he was obviously against Chelsea too, so that made at least 3 of us. I know Richard likes watching Drogba play lol.

And Newcastle had quite a number of chances to knick the game away. We were contemplating celebrating in front of everybody if the score stayed 0-0.

Tomorrow should be the beginning of the end at Love Airways for me, unless the sub-editing job goes through. It's production deadline time again, and it was a pretty hectic but rather satisfyingly enjoyable day cos it's sardonically therapeutic when you get clutter, loads of it, and you get to class it all up and eliminate them one by one to find that you have a very neat, conclusible piece of paper with a summary of what little's left pending and what's already done at the end of the day.

Her boyfriend's a dick
He brings a gun to school
And he'd simply kick
My ass if he knew
The truth he lives on my block

- Teenage Dirtbag

I was walking home one day and Wheatus came on random shuffle on the player and during those kinda zoned out long, lonely walks, a hundred and one things actually spin around my head and my thought processes are simply unleashed and allowed to run wild.

Which brings about some level of zen to me like being in the eye of a hurricane. I think about everything and anything, from how I can actually attempt to map out the road I'm walking on in a 3D manner, politics of the world today compared to the past, to why I do things the way I do due to symbiotic or psychological reasons.

Anyway, I just happened to really pay attention to the lyrics and it led me into thinking about how much it'd actually suck to know that a classmate of yours brings firearms to school. It actually sounds bloody sickening to be honest.

That was two days before the Virginia Tech massacre.

Bowling for Columbine featured Chris Rock in a stand-up routine saying that he thought the solution for gun violence was making every bullet cost a bomb (that sounded wrong).
"I would blow your fucking head off, if I could afford it." And he has also said, "bullets should cost $1000. That way you can be damn sure there won't be any innocent bystanders."

Well, I'm sure there'd be plenty of homemade bullets to follow if this were to happen. Eric Thompson has some truth in his words when he says that while it is easy to believe stopping people from possessing firearms could've prevented such a tragedy, a person like Cho would have found other means to do so if he really wanted to kill. While it is true that perhaps 33 people may not have died that day if guns were not so readily available, it is counter-intuitive to assume that such ill-will is absent just because people don't have the immediate or convenient means to manifest them into a horrid reality.

Guns don't kill people. People do.




Anything can be a weapon if you know how to hold it.

Today's Listenables:
Something Corporate - Konstantine

Friday 20 April 2007

Will the sheer behemothicness of MP3s pull it through to legality one day? Just as how handphones used to be banned in secondary schools during my time, their necessity or influence can't be overlooked anymore now and assuming that the law can cap the advent of traded music is either blatantly ignorant or purely puerile.

Things are pretty unstable at LA since Jace's left and it's been sometime since the golden era of Alf and the 2 Js. Yilin was the hyper one that came in and found familiar friction with Doc and then left cos she's smart and stubborn in her own ways and he couldn't exactly 'manipulate' her in the way he'd like it to be.

But Yilin was fun in that really frivilous, lian kinda way. She came in one morning and basically said, "that guy cheebai one leh!" Which just left me in a mixture of surprise and amusement all the same.

Linda: "I don't have any friends. Maybe only 4 or 5 la."
Me: "Linda. Are you my friend?"
Linda: "No, I haven't seen you naked yet."

PWNT.




He who is hesitant is... Umm......

Today's Listenables:
Submersed - Hollow