I've been going to school every frickin' day since FTB ended. If it's not some official school activity, then it's using school as one of the coolest and most inexpensive places you can just head to in town to sit around. I can't see why people find this disturbing - the rationale is simple: anywhere else and you'd have to pay $5+ for chill out space; campus is totally free and if you even want board games, Mr Tea has drinks at less than $2 and are much nicer than many other places! And I haven't mentioned the selection range.

So as it were, I kickstarted this week by meeting Kee. I think we're good now, and it's really much better off this way for the both of us. I'm still having my fair share of friends who can't seem to comprehend why this is so, and I must admit that my very rational approach to this matter sounds more than cold considering the 3-year relationship we've been through, but it's not like we're not talking anymore. We've kinda transcended the boyfriend-girlfriend part into something else, and perhaps we were just meant to be that way. And it's not like its awkward when we hang out or anything. The laughs and great company - it's all still there, minus the romance.

So we watched The Simpsons, and I won't bother talking about the movie other than stating that I enjoyed it. I'm here to blog, not to report. Hah! Okay lousy I know.

So Kee and I talked about stuff, and well you lose some and gain some when stuff like this happens. There were things I wouldn't have said in the past that I'd tell her about now. But that's quite duh la.

Yinyin and Jianming moved into hostel on tuesday so I went over to check out the bunking area and it's pretty decent I'd say. For either $1.7k for a double room (shared with someone else) or $2.2k for a single room, you get lodging near school and in town which really rocks. Next time I have overnighters to pull, I'll bunk in with them.

Had fun showing Yinyin, who's a Malaysian, around town and playing Scrabble. Jianming joined us a little later and they accompanied me for the Samba Masala audition/interview, which went pretty well. Thankfully I was allocated an earlier timing, as the event snowballed and got pushed back quite late.

After that, Leonard and Jacq joined us to have supper and goof around Clarke Quay taking crap photos. It can be mildly therapeutic but guys like me have enough of it really quickly haha.

Today, wednesday, there was StarringSMU which is turning out to be a very frickin' lame CSP. We had to do this amazing race thingie (which is really blowing a hole in my wallet for transport alone) and eventually got pissed at the locations we had to go to so we did like 2 or 3 stations and then headed back to Cathay to bum while waiting for the cut-off timing to come.

I then met Qinhong and we played more Scrabble. Got a little too engrossed in the game that I missed the ending off for the day, and then he and I went to some GSR to practice some dance moves. I think I'm getting the whole handstand freeze business, though I'm still barely there yet.

Just so you should know, I've been shortlisted for the 'talent' thing during Convocation to do breakdancing and juggling, cos bloody Joel sabo-ed me. Gah.

So it's basically 1-2ams home each day recently. Tomorrow I'm skipping the StarringSMU NDP thing to go for frisbee. There's floorball, handball, softball and many other things coming up, but I'm kinda liking it this way for the time being. It's the people I'm meeting who're making this a very interesting time.




On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Today's Listenables:
Within Temptation - Final Destination

I know there's a lot I should be addressing but I haven't. Stuff that has been untouched since up to 3 months ago - the science of religion, the 'break up', the the the... - I just haven't found the time and energy to do so. I've been incredibly busy with many things varsity-related - orientation, community service, getting to know people, trying out CCAs, even thinking of forming a philosophy club - and time has truly flown.

I shall attempt to run through some recents.

Community service through StarringSMU kickstarted the meeting new people process after my summer term class ended and it was really the start of everything that would define the people I meet and the things I do with them nowadays. Last year, SMU was involved in the smiles campaign that saw collages of smiling people lining up MRTs and buses, so this year we are doing 'kisses for the nation'. Lazy to elaborate, and not that it really matters anyway. Then we did car washing to fund-raise, and we're gonna be involved in the NDP display by moving red and white umbrellas (that will form the national flag).

Then there was The Fourth Estate - Social Science Camp, which was quite fun because of the fantastic company of social science people. But after learning about other camps like Asoc and Bondue, I guess SocSC camp was actually pretty tame in comparison. But oh well.

A very recently, I had my Freshman Teambuilding Camp, which was just basically orientation camp. It didn't quite turn out that fantastically but I wasn't expecting much anyway so it was alright. The thing is that we had to undergo activities that assumed that your team was really well-bonded; anything less and you would'nt have been able to comfortably complete or win at the activities. So there were quite a number of instances where the failure to complete the activities caused the mood to nosedive. But of course there were some activities we excelled at, like rafting, which really put us on a high.

And yesterday, I went for the Samba Masala tryouts, which was really fun.

Today, we were at Kopitiam and we had this extremely engaging discussion regarding the value of sex and the definition of love and chemistry, which kinda led us to wondering if we could establish a philosophy club.

All in all, I made a lot of new friends and everything kinda gave me the time and space to keep my mind off things, whether I needed that or not.

That's the past 1-2 months truncated, with lotsa details, significant or not, left out.




I don't find it hard to meet expenses. They're everywhere.

Today's Listenables:
Trivium - A Gunshot To The Head Of Trepidation

The Simpsons out today. Been really busy! Social Science Camp, StarringSMU community service and whatnot.

I'm not really a fan of lyric-posting for blog updates but what the heck.

If you'll be my star
I'll be your sky
You can hide underneath me and come out at night
When I turn jet black and you show off your light
I live to let you shine
I live to let you shine

But you can skyrocket away from me
And never come back if you find another galaxy
Far from here with more room to fly
Just leave me your stardust to remember you by

If you'll be my boat
I'll be your sea
A depth of pure blue just to probe curiosity
Ebbing and flowing and pushed by a breeze
I live to make you free
I live to make you free

But you can set sail to the west if you want to
And past the horizon till I can't even see you
Far from here where the beaches are wide
Just leave me your wake to remember you by

If you be my star
I'll be your sky
You can hide underneath me and come out at night
When I turn jet black and you show off your light
I live to let you shine
I live to let you shine

But you can skyrocket away from me
And never come back if you find another galaxy
Far from here with more room to fly
Just leave me your stardust to remember you by
Stardust to remember you by

Boats and Birds
Gregory and the Hawk




If at first you do succeed, try not to look astonished.

Today's Listenables:
Megan McCauley - Wonder

Finito

In 2hrs I guess we had a 2-year-long question that begged for resolve answered.

And it's the most bitter answer I'll ever have had to come to. I'll write more when I've gathered my thoughts and emotions a little more about what's just happened...

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

Today's Listenables:
Within Temptation - The Heart Of Everything

Rollercoaster riding time. I've never been busier in a long while - I'm juggling drawings, sub-editing and school work (which is killer with tests and projects at every turn) - and I think I'm barely hanging on. I mugged as hell and got 16/30 for the first test/quiz, which was pretty discouraging but as said many times before, it's really up to the individual if he/she chooses to be screwed up by something, so I just sucked it up, tried working harder and got a more decent 45/60 for my mid-term paper (yes, freakin' mid-terms at the end of just the 2nd week!).

Had my second matriculation today, which turned out to be a very messed up affair because I was being good ol' me - forgetting to do and bring everything at the last moment. So I'll have to go back again either tomorrow or next monday to finish up. Nonetheless, I got a part of second-matric done today, which included sitting through a rather boring community service talk and getting bombarded by seniors getting us to join all the camps. It's gonna be an extremely busy period in the near future for me, before school starts somewhere around the 20th of August.

Things have become a little complicated between Kee and I for a bit. It's not the first time Christianity has been an issue for the both of us - her faith in it and vice versa for me.

Let's just say that when it comes to the scale of being Christian to being Atheist, I'm somewhere in between rather than at either end. I've come a long way since those naive years of realising a faith like Christianity existed I think. During those early years I resented religion - they made no sense to me and sounded plain ridiculous. I did not exclusively reserve such sentiment to any one faith in particular; I thought all religions were foolish.

Over the years though, I've come to understand that everything is alot more complicated than it seems. To attempt to talk about the reasons that sum up to my stand now would be too herculean a task to handle; I could end up typing for hours and this post would go on forever.
Personally, I do believe that there is a system of sorts, quite possibly spiritual, that governs our physical (non-spiritual) realm and hence I do not doubt the possibility of a creator - God if you will, if personification suits your liking. We are all elements of this system and however you like to see it, we are either co-creators or pawns with a part and purpose to play.

To doubt that tremendously backed fact that everything today is a miracle would be silly; in my own scientific way of looking at it - the Big Bang - if, within one second of the moment of creation, the rate of expansion of cosmic energy had been different by one part per quadrillion (15 zeros), we won't exist. Less, and expansion would be too fast for anything to form. More, and the universe would have collapsed in on itself. I'm sure there will be other interpretations of creation, and you will be entitled to your own beliefs.

I'm not anti-religion, or more specifically, not anti-Christ. If having a particular faith makes you a better person, whether or not you embrace the faith to make you stronger or that the faith has, in some way or other, made you 'see the light', by all means do seek religion.

Around here is perhaps where the problem arises. While I believe that every religion is right in it's own manner, i.e. they are all denominators by which people seek the 'truth' or spiritual well-being and move closer to God, I am perturbed by the insistence of Christianity to be the one true faith. And while it is easy to pinpoint atheists and agnostics as the other extreme end against religion, Christianity seems to take it that all non-believers are wrong. This is said in very simplistic terms, so I'm sure there will be some who will attempt to disqualify this statement. Depending on how strictly the Bible is followed, people enforce this belief to varying degrees.

In other words, just not accepting Christ as a part of my life doesn't mean I'm anti-Christ.

And this doesn't particularly go down well with me, because I strongly believe that to each his own, especially when it is clear that I'm not anti-God in any manner. I have my own ways; I just chose not to embrace the Christian belief of Jesus dying for our sins, leading a Christian way of life and seeing that it is most important to dedicate a lifetime to serving God - in fact it is counterintuitive to assume that I will be more orientated towards finding Spiritual well-being in doing so, because I would probably end up being more disorientated and further from it.

I once posted a joke that the kid in Pursuit of Happyness made - of the drowning guy who didn't wanna get help from passing boats and eventually died and asked God why He didn't save him, and God said, "I sent you 2 boats you dummy!" - there is a point beyond the seemingly innocent nature of the joke. Many people are so caught up with the idea of salvation and the laws of the Bible that they may sometimes overlook what's more important. Now, this is my own little humble personal opinion, but sometimes Christians are so caught up with the sentimentality of the whole thing (of serving God, of Jesus dying for our sins, of the law of the Bible), it almost becomes drama. But I do not doubt that this sentimentality probably works for them because it drives them to be closer to their Christian God, and closer to Spiritual well-being. But please, it is not assumeable that it will work for anyone else. It is like trying to align a rifle bullet with a bazooka and hoping it will shoot all the same.

Which leads me on to a more trivial issue (depending on how you look at it though - it is trivial to me but it may not be so for others). I've told Kee that I find the language of the Bible very haughty. Of course, you say, it is from the Lord Almighty and thus are commands and are rightly so. Everything is in black and white - sin or no sin. How do you judge what is really right or wrong sometimes? Is there no room for doing the wrong thing for the greater right?
I always like fighting a case for homosexuality, because it is a very scientific and religious conundrum. Do you blame or condemn people for simply being who they are? For many of them, the nature of their sexuality is often determined from their first sexual stirrings. It is easy for a heterosexual - especially a heterosexual christian - to say, "but it is wrong, because homosexuality is against nature and thus, unnatural and a blasphemious abhorration against God's will." Well, it would be most unnatural for a homosexual to engage in heterosexual intercourse. Just try and imagine the opposite scenario for yourself.

Ultimately, christian vs non-believer arguments will never reach resolve, unless one of the two is less knowledgeable or that either one or both parties are willing to take a leap of faith in the discussion and be the other person. In fact, the two are basically fighting in wrong directions, because they are assuming they know the right target points to hit when in fact the answers simply don't make sense. Until then, all answers thrown back at questions will hardly be satisfactory to either party. Likewise, any claim made by one side, any at all, will probably sound offensive to the other.

Just picture Christian reasonings. "But the Bible says so" and "because it is the work of Satan" barely makes sense to non-christians and yet they use it so often; it is almost ridiculous to the non-christian. The opposite can be said for atheistic views - to attempt to convince a christian, who is so grounded in his or her faith, that everything was created from a tiny speck that had all the energy in the universe and quite possibly more 'since the universe is still expanding', or that a person recovered from the brink of a fatal illness not because of prayer or God's work but because of fluke science and medicine, would really sound equally ridiculous.

Back to myself, can anyone actually ever perceive a christian Jose? It is just like imagining a rational, peace-loving George Bush or a murderous Mother Theresa, for lack of better examples. I believe I can put it on myself to accept things as they are, but then there are further potential complications.

I don't quite mean to be divulging very personal anecdotes but I think there is a bigger picture for everyone to see.

If you're not already sick from all that reading, do check out the following links. They are really good and insightful:
What the Bible says - and doesn't say - about Homosexuality
The Real Story on Gay Genes
The God Fuse - 10 Things Christians and Atheists Can - and MUST - Agree On

I've got quite a bit to comment about homosexuality as well.




Telepath wanted: you know where to apply.

Today's Listenables:
Puddle Of Mudd - Away From Me

Just a week into school and I had my first test on friday. I have a group of jolly mates. Lessons started getting dry. We've got 2 more quizzes to go and 3 projects to hand in (which is semi-madness for a 5-week course). Jonathan's the gym-freak and heartless romantic, interesting fella. First week of school summarised there.

And I've been studying hard man. I've been going out just to get my reading done before I attend lessons and doing my assignments. Yesterday, Zhiquan, Leon and I talked about JC days and how stupid we were to not have worked harder and hence suffer so painfully as the final exams drew closer. Of opening up your notes to find blank space after blank space of undone examples and thus having virtually nothing to refer to and study.

SMUgging here I come, way before the actual school term starts.

What do you do when you miss someone you love? You decide to head downtown somewhere near where she resides for a bit, on the premise of getting some air and having some reading done, but also providing room for other 'partly due to' reasons like trying your luck for a bump. And then you have a drink by yourself just below where she says she is for awhile, and then going home because the phone's silent and so you think she's probably busy and don't wanna disturb her.

She may not know it, but Kee provides timely reminders of my propensity to be silly. :]




It is the nail that sticks out that gets hammered.

Today's Listenables:
Within Temptation - Bittersweet

First day of school yesterday!

Marketing is a very interesting subject. I don't say that because I can't find a better word to describe it or something. It is really interesting. Maybe it's my professor, whom I thought was good though he's from India and his accent might pose an issue. Maybe it's interesting so far because we were doing some case studies. Did you know that the symbolic image of Santa Claus in a red and white coat was created by Coca Cola in 1930? Or that companies like IBM actually hold official corporate meetings in the virtual world of Second Life?

Met some not so interesting people, formed a group with one fellow NSman Special-Termer called Irving and three SMU old-timers, of which 2 are ladies. The laojiao guy dispensed some interesting tips about SMU-first-day-must-dos, one of which is that when you go to class for the first time, spot the chiobu and immediately sit as close to her as possible, if not beside her. This is because usually the more good looking, charismatic and, thus, confident guys would try to sit near her too to get to know her, and they'd eventually make better groupmates for projects than the quiet loner ones sitting at the corners so you end up sitting near them too and can eventually establish better connections as early as possible.

Went to SMU today though I had no lessons cos I wanted to study my text (crazy huh), and ended up meeting Leon for dinner. And Leon said something funny.

Actually Irving yesterday mentioned about the locally-flavoured proverbial '2 years of not using your brains in the army'. I'm fucking sick of hearing this because it's quite nothing more than some stupid excuse most people like to use for zoning out during NS. I have to assume that such a statement is made out of a need to complain (cos if it isn't objectively so then it's sadder in my opinion), which leads me to think that if it really pained anyone to have their brains rot in the army, they could have easily done something to prevent it. Nobody stopped anyone from bringing books to camp to read during those admin times in bunk rather than do anything and everything else that was unproductive and then bitch about it.

I personally made it a point to capitalise on the learning freedom (with regards to mental stimulus in this sense because there wasn't anything else you needed to cram your mind with, although as a specialist and sea soldier I had a shitload of SOPs to familiarise myself with) to read up on things I won't bore you with and worked on some other stuff such as art during my free time. It just kinda pisses me off to hear someone else whine about how stupid the army has made him, simply because he let it.

Maybe being a 2SG platoon sergeant purely out of responsibility (with no extra pay) gave me work that enabled my mind to leverage on to prevent itself from idling too much, but I suppose I'll never know what a 'man' (as in soldier man, non-commander) really thinks of. This notorious 'man mentality' that people talk about.

So Leon was telling me about a stupid colleague (whom I had the pleasure of bumping into and immediately developing a disliking for) and I said that maybe he really has that 'man mentality'. Then Leon exclaimed, "please, he has ULTRAMAN MENTALITY!"

Haha!

We both later wondered why nobody has ever thought of such a term and decided that if either one of us had thought of it during NS, it might've become a part of fond army lingo.




The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.

Today's Listenables:
Breaking Benjamin - The Diary Of Jane

I am actually starting school next monday, but it sure doesn't quite feel anything like what I think I'm supposed to feel when I'm about to commence university. Maybe it's because it's just special term and supplementary stuff but that's probably a somewhat negated and diluted explanation too. Gone are my days of expressive avant-garde-esque fervour in the light of new (but anticipated) experiences.

To sum up over a month of attempted esoteric pursuits, I:

1) Learnt a meagre amount of Spanish (harder than I thought!)
2) Read Life of Pi and am halfway through Prozac Nation
3) Learnt about the scientific and philosophical relationships between (possibly spiritual) consciousness and quantum physics
4) Did and am still doing freelance sub-editing
5) Quite successfully set up my Bric Brac d'Art custom arts venture website
6) Joined two soccer tournaments

I've spruced up the Bric Brac d'Art site quite a bit and am pretty pleased with the outcome of the layout revamp. Honestly, I used to get pissed off seeing the site because it really lacked a definitive touch to it.

It's been an interesting week for the family because my mom found work and my dad had to take up the chores in a reversal of roles, which gave my brother and him more opportunities to be together. I thought that'd really do the both of them good.

The other day my dad and I suddenly started talking about shares and market investments. I think we've come a long way since those secondary school days where we just couldn't exchange a word that didn't spell trouble. I suppose his being unemployed and staying at home gave him time to sober up a little too.

One thing I didn't get to do was to pick up percussions. Since I'm gonna have some allowance anyway, I'm thinking of using the money I'm earning from sub-editing to get myself a small electronic percussion set. The capability of muting the system is a necessity.




Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Today's Listenables:
Kill Hannah - Kennedy

In the dark, I grabbed my popcorn box and felt what I thought was a rubberband until it started wriggling like a madfuck that I realised it was a house lizard and threw it reflexively, making me feel quite gay thereafter. But it sure proves the adage that sometimes, the less you try to get something, the easier it comes to you.

The Lifestyle paper on Sunday had an unfuckinbelievable (UFB) article about the two girls with 16k friends from Friendster and Myspace. What was more UFB was the girl who said "who only has 1000 friends? [sic]". I'm not really questioning the possibility of their acquisition of 16000 'friends' and I think there has been more than enough commentary from the rest of the world pertaining to what's quite ostensibly wrong with the picture. But damn, for the Lifestyle section of our national paper! Is there such dire desperation for a frontpage angle?

One of the sisters even goes on to say that she once spent a whole week staying at home all day surfing Friendster. It is so mind-boggling that I am quite stumped by the incredulity of it all, and not by anything specific in particular. I suppose you could say they're Xiaxue's saving graces. Haha. Oh well as it goes, publicity, good or bad, still is publicity afterall.

Here's a little pointer to add to Friendster 101 that I somehow came up with while talking to Richard:

If you are at a girl's profile and there is a picture of her and her friend as her default picture and you do not know which one of them in the photo is her, chances are the better looking one is. *note: generic statement ahead* A girl would rather die than put up an unglam and, quite possibly, inferior photo of herself especially when she is in the company of other females in the same picture.

The folks are back, the crazy's been sobered up and everything's back to routine once again. It can be nice. I can't quite recall significantly what I've been up to this week, other than remembering the rather random meetups throughout the week with Nat, Richard, Ahmad, Dudley and Leon which summed up to be rather mediocre in terms of any specific developments in particular. There was a more interesting meet up involving Nat, Maxi and Cherene where I had my virgin trip to Minds Cafe and the game of Taboo (where Nat and I formed a very formidable partnership that saw us busting really insane words I can't quite put a finger to at the moment), but otherwise I guess I'm mostly waiting for school to start next monday, whether I'm consciously aware of it or not.

In the background of my daily routines I've been doing quite a fair bit of reading, mostly online. I saw a message posted on a forum thread in Funkygrad that pretty much hit the nail on the head:
"I looked through NUS's and NTU programs and I think both instuitions offer pretty adequate courses. But NTU's career aspect page on psychology seems rather narrow-minded. It's really more than just counseling individuals. This is the most loathed stereotype in the field of psychology. Much like how people think that mechanical engineering majors must know how to replace a connecting rod in a IC engine."

Other read ups:
Quantum physics and consciousness (I'd love to elaborate on this but another time)
Singapore as described in WikiTravel (every true blue red-dotter must read this!)Investments/stocks/etc (BLEAH.)
Movie analyses (namely Superman, The Skeleton Key and The Princess Blade)

And well... A little bit of 300 too but in a much less serious sense:

300 Will Transcend Pop Culture (taken from format.me)

“I haven’t seen 300 yet because I was banned from my cineplex. We had all lined up in front of the theater for about 30 minutes, and then they brought us in. I had to stand right beside these two fat, horse-faced lesbians eating each other’s tongues like they were making a political statement or something. So, like 30 minutes later, we end up shuffling in the theater and these fucking bitches start bitching about having to wait when the movie is about to start, mind you, it was 11 and it was a midnight showing. It turns out they were going to see that stupid Jim Carrey movie 23 and they were missing it. So, the ugliest of the two bitches just exclaims like no one’s there “This is the wrong fucking movie!” I just had to do what I did next. I shouted at the top of my lungs “This is SPARTA!!” and kicked her in the chest, causing her to fall down about 8 steps to the floor. Some were shocked, but about 80% of the theater started to cheer, and I was forcibly thrown out by 2 officers. Charges are going to be pressed against me apparently, but it was worth it.” (this is a very popular anecdote that is widely circulated on the internet now)

“My girlfriend entered the room 10 minutes after the movie was over and asked me where are we going to eat. THAT IS REALLY BAD LUCK! you know what happened. I basically went crazy smashing a chair to the wall and yelling TONIGHT WE DINE IN HELL!!!. A small amount of saliva on the corner of my mouth and the mad-man look completed this gruesome scene to the point that she started to cry asking wheter she did something wrong.”

And this from Likoon and Mr Brown:

Officer, in a dignified manner: "NS men!! Enjoy your breakfast, for tonight, we dine in hell!!!!!!"
NS man with the typical Singaporean uncle accent: "Sir, you mean cookhouse ah?"

ROFL.




Youth is wasted on the young.- George Bernard Shaw

Today's Listenables:
Within Temptation - Forgiven

Just came home from a soccer tournament organised by Melvin and Toa Payoh Methodist Church. I'm gonna cut a long story short. Melvin used to be some big time beng from Zhonghua Sec but I've been talking to him recently, unhampered by the fact that he stays very near me and he's really such a changed person now. A whole deal more mature. We were on the way home on the same bus and he was just ranting away at how much time he wasted in secondary school and that it was so stupid now that he has to waste money trying for SIM and is still struggling to find a place to further his tertiary education. Kept reiterating the virtues of studies and self discipline. Interesting.

Anyway, he's not a christian, but the church invites him to play for their soccer team cos he's good, and he had the task of organising a street soccer tournament and invited me. So I called the usual guys down. As expected due to who the organiser is, there were a great deal of his brother's ZHSS classmates who went down, and it was a total bunch of unholy guys playing street soccer under the name of a holy place. Those kids, though a year younger only, still looked terribly like little kids since those days back in secondary school when they were on a dead trip to cause all kinds of childish trouble. Fuckin' lost to them in the semis. Chester said he can't take it already and wants to eat zai (vegetarian) for a week to ease out the ill shit.

4th day of my total freedom, cos the folks and bro are in China now, and I feel like I'm not utilising it well at all. I haven't done anything semi-extreme (note: semi, no sneaking outta the country shit, no whatever) and I've been going home earlier than when my dad's at home to scold me for coming home late. This doesn't quite make sense. Well. It doesn't help when everyone else isn't quite available.

I did bring the car out for a spin when Kee came over though. Haha (not funny to those who don't get it, but my dad still forbids me from driving without his guidance. G4y). And I've got a CD of the music I wanna hear when driving by myself.




I got my hair highlighted, 'cause I thought some strands were more important than others.

Today's Listenables:
Skillet - Rebirthing

The Bric Brac d'Art site is up and running! www.bricbracdart.zom.sg check it. I've had no shortage of people wondering why it's '.zom.sg' and not '.com.sg', so I'm gonna attempt to explain it in as layman a manner as possible catered for best understanding but not necessarily in the most accurate of methods.

bricbrac.zom.sg is a secondary domain. It is like registering an account under the domain www.zom.sg and the address becomes blah.zom.sg and likewise, when you have an account under www.blogspot.com, your address becomes blah.blogspot.com. But well 3 cheers for being unique. 'com' is getting boring anyway.

Spent the most of the last 2 weeks working on the BBDA site, which has made me realise (or perhaps not so much of a realisation as compared to having made myself see more clearly) that this personal website of mine is quite a mess that has come all the way since my young webmaster days 7-odd years ago (yes, this site is more or less the same thing, just better evolved) and it is a compendium of messiness that has been identified and swept under the rug over and over again, more often than not inadequately dealt with. I've got alotta things I'm thinking this site can be cleaned up for now but it's just too herculean a task to bother about at this point of time, but I will attempt to make small chips at the big block of mess and see what comes along.

My dad had a fall last night which could jeopardise his China trip with my mom and brother. It wasn't a particularly horrific fall, but it was bad enough for ageing bones and he's got spinal nerve problems. That small jerk had a domino effect of repercussions that affected his neck and his hands and feet totally lost sensation for a good 5 minutes.

I ended up missing Legs and Paddles today which Kee and I signed up for cos I had to stay home.

His unemployment at the same time as mine has somewhat brought us a little closer together and we hadn't gotten on each others' nerves for quite a bit. I'm thankful for that.

I've been reading a book titled Shortcut to a Miracle. I must admit I'm slightly biased for it because it both reaffirms and expands on my view about the power of our consciousness, but the findings reported are quite revelatory. I'll write about it sometime soon.

Been travelling down to SMU to tap on their free electricity and wireless internet and work on my assignments. Magazine crunchtime just ended, which was pretty mad for a bit. Worked on a drawing for Winnie, Derek's friend, and her request proved to be quite an exasperating challenge. But that's $25 in the bag.

And yesterday I went for Jeremy's youth carnival to play for his 'SMU' street soccer team. Funny team, funny set ups, funny rules and circumstances, resulting in 1 win (6-2) and 2 losses (6-1 and 5-1) for the qualifiers. Crappy stuff. Won the juggling competition though which got me some male sport deodorant and shower bath thingie, which I guess can be always counted on as my personal trump card.

Friday marked the 3rd year Kee and I have been together. :]




A: Stop being such a pussy.
B: Yeah, well, you are what you eat.

Today's Listenables:
The Donnas - Everyone Is Wrong

I've actually been dedicating a gargantuan amount of time towards the custom arts site and the drawings pertaining to the site, such that I've kinda forgotten about updating this.

Did some layout readjustments here, so I hope the site'll be more viewer-friendly now.
Finally decided on a name: Bric Brac d'Art. Basically an amalgamation of the French words bric-a-brac and objet d'art, signifying the combination of something small, frivolous and cute yet classy and elegant at the same time.

It's been about a week of basically sticking my ass to whatever exalted throne there is available and just drawing and site-designing and digital editing all the way. I go out once in awhile to find yet another exalted throne to plant my butt on and get more inspiration just to continue working on this, bringing along the huge sketchbook that Alvin gave me. *Arty-farty yuppie mode* :\

I think I'm actually quite fuckin' hardcore. If everyone put in the amount of effort and concentration I'm putting in now for this, I reckon the total output harnessed could quite possibly save a third world country or something... Anyway whatever.

The site has undergone some developments too, so you can check it out here: http://www.freewebtown.com/customarts. We're considering the domain name registration possibilities, but that's just one out of a myriad of potential concerns, such as marketing, site layout development, payment procedures etc.

The past week, I:

- Once slept at 4am and woke up at noon the next day and I was a total wreck the whole day. Will probably be the last time I will ever attempt to do something like that. It's not like in secondary school and JC anymore when I could just sleep anytime I wanted and get away with it I guess. Must be some age factor, though I'm just somewhat being dismissively hopeful in a totally whatsthefkingpointanyway manner.

- Went to Grapevine with Dick, Dud and Thiampeng, and we talked some of the funniest shit I ever had in awhile, regarding government and politics. I won't elaborate much cos it's not so much of a free-speech country I live in and I don't find the prospects of getting dragged away by intelligence cops very enticing at all. We were, to sum things up, just four rather noisily ignorant cocksters trying to comment on things like why Russia is developing nuclear tech in Myanmar and what are the repercussions of voting for opposition, as well as what would lead to people actually voting for opposition.

- Had a field soccer game at a totally fucked up, swamped out Yishun locale and lost 11-1. It was one of the dumbest, most uninspiring soccer matches I ever had in my life and I will forget this sooner than I know. But this does make me wanna have another go in future soon, something proper for once. Is it really such a pipe dream to have the opportunity to just play some decent football on a normal pitch in Singapore?

- My Creative Zen Vision M has died. The guys at Creative can't save it. The bloody device has failed on me and along with it, traumatically, goes all my photos and videos. I still have songs on my laptop so that isn't an issue, but all the pictures I've decided to invest in the player's storage are gone, stuff from family, army, prom and everything. All my soccer videos too. Sigh. But well, now's a good time to apply some self-philosophy so I can only be as upset as I can allow myself to be so wtf wheee. The bigger pain, though, is the warranty which is out for a good 2 months already. I'm trying to see how I can avert the costs of repair, which is a crazily whopping $350-odd (inclusive of $40 admin fees, wtf?) that I could use to get a new player altogether, and that can be waived if my warranty's still valid. I might forge or something.




Some people seem to read the Bible a lot as they get older. Maybe they think they're cramming for their finals.

Today's Listenables:
Stone Sour - Through The Glass

A quick run-through of just about the first week of being a funemployee:

1) Finished Life Of Pi.
2) Watched Step Up and Tenacious D: The Pick Of Destiny.
3) Busted my legs (bones and muscles) from soccer on both weekends; today's and last.
4) Secured the freelance sub-editing job. May be securing more copy-writing assignments too, if things go well on Dody's end.
5) Roamed all over town with Kee every other day.
6) Watched Spiderman 3 at the cinema.
7) Charmain's lunch treat.
8) Washed all the fans in the house.
9) Working on more drawing assignments (here).
10) Working on the custom arts website (here). Just a raw framework, so don't expect much. Still deciding on a name.

Next read in line is Prozac Nation. I've had a quick browse through some Spanish language instructionals, one of which was Spanish For Dummies, and it seems like quite a decent language to pick up. For starters, its phonetics are fixed so you won't end up having words with multiple sounds, like in English. Only problem is that the average cost of these books are about $35. That to deal with next.

Spiderman 3 had some hot action sequences, but I thought the plot was pretty convenient for itself to unfold. Like Green Goblin teaming up with Spiderman. Huh? And Harry's bitch telling him right at the end about his dad. Eddie Brock looks like a wimp, and I suppose the portrayal of an evil Peter Parker requiring him to dress and look like an emo kid says something about perceptions lol.

There's a play titled '251' about Annabelle Chong. The number, for those who are unaware, is the number of men she had sex with in that famous coital marathon. To a certain extent, with the right marketing push (whether called for or uncalled for, official or unofficial), she could end up being the next Che Guevara. Poor dude became a victim of pop culture because they portrayed him as the famous rebel. A few plays have already portrayed Annabelle Chong as the liberal feminist due to her sexual stunt and it, depending on perception, may have been something silly turned into heroics by the media. Imagine silhouetted photos of Annabelle Chong on t-shirts.

Women shouldn't give men the silent treatment and be pissed that they aren't doing anything about it. Men love the silence.

Today's Listenables:
Skillet - Whispers In The Dark

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

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

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

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

Touche

Oftentimes, for lack of inspiration I can only get down to something mediocre when I post and so I decide against it. That doesn't mean I believe that everything I eventually type is read-worthy. There've been blogs I've visited that made me feel that I'd be better off stapling my ears midway through reading and then there were those that just made me either feel inspired to get my fingers typing right away or want to give up writing anymore completely.

I've watched The Arena a few times and boy, can those kids argue. Having to follow through aggressive arguments, make split-second judgments, spot the smallest errors that can topple your opponent, dig into that bottomless pool of information in your head and sieve out an inch-perfect return ball. I could never do that.

The people at work run trains of thought at the speed of light. Wei, Linda, HJ; all top-guns in their line of work and ever-ready to mince your words and serve them back on a platter. I just let them go on and on cos I could never bother. I have my ways.

I'm not one to mentally multi-task and beat my conversational counterpart into pulp in an argument, but I'm not any less capable in the propensity of thought. It's just that I've met people who are so self-assured that idealism makes you a loser, but I'm sure we're all just pretty much on different ends of the personality plane. You've got yours and I've got mine, and then we'll never see eye to eye which can be such a pity but that's just the way it is.

At the end of the day, I'm all for pragmatism and a supposedly time-wasting whollistic conversation and I won't bother selling an idea if I know I'm not naturally capable of it.
Alv's left the office now; I'll always remember his laid back stance with a consistent fag in hand, and his "fuck la, just follow your heart, I say" will be etched in my head quite permanently.

Corporate gay-ness is quite an inevitable thing.

It's really not all the money and power in the world I'd wanna have, no matter how good you could argue in a that's-the-only-thing-that-ever-matters kinda way. I've got pursuits that'll make me feel a million-grand richer.




There aren't any virgins left, cos life has screwed us all.

Today's Listenables:
The Ataris - My Reply

The Lives Of Others is a really good movie. I'm only left pondering how much reference it has to any real events. If not, then it's a fascinating portrayal of 70s Germany.

Work has degenerated into a comfortably stagnate level and I'm pretty much left to my own devices now just the way I like it. I've dug up a fair bit of skeletons with the history of my work place and it's people, though I'm not saying that things are as bad as they seemed in the past, of which I wasn't a part of so it wouldn't be fair for me to comment.

CDS stories never fail to live up to their levels of incredulous insanity. The CO's changed, prominent figures have swopped roles and things are following their usual route of general decline... Climates that I can't imagine having to brave through if I was still there. Just hope that reservist isn't that such a pain in the ass to bear.

Another uninspired post and my chatterbox died.




Live today; it is where tomorrow's memories begin

Today's Listenables:
The All-American Rejects - Dance Inside

I'm in the office on a sunday cos I've got nothing to do at home and the office being based in town makes it quite convenient as a 'station' place for me to do my own stuff while waiting for meet-up plans to materialise. I'm meeting Wesley later anyway. I was supposed to be here at 1500h cos one of the temps under me wanted to work and we decided on this time, but I got quite carried away with the Pool - Man Utd repeat game and ended up coming here an hour late. And the poor sod doesn't have a handphone, so. *Shrugs. I have no idea where he is now either.

I've come to a compromise with my dad and I'm gonna try for the Marketing module in term 3B (June - July), which means I'll start earlier, but not as early as April.

I've said before that school's a good excuse to get by, cos parents get all sensitive and protective and leave you alone when you declare that you're studying, so you can actually just forsake everything and study cos that's the presumably responsible thing to do; unlike if you're a working adult. You can't tell the crying baby to shut up cos you're working.

Add this growing reluctance to work to the equation and that's a huge nudge in the direction of deciding to compromise and opt for the early enrolment as well. My work at Love Airways is exciting no doubt, as are the learning prospects and opportunities and all that 'working with the media' jazz. As a temp myself, I'm actually governing a lot of power here. But sometimes there are some things I'd rather not wanna be involved in, and at the rate we're going, I'm nose-diving right into the fray.

I think I can sum up my attitude towards this job as a one-week holiday where you'd like to be in day 3 or 4 and skip the rest.

Watching the Liverpool Vs Manchester United game, I can't agree any further with the commentator after O'Shea put the Red Devils in the lead at the death and exclaims, "isn't that the hallmark of champions!?"

I've talked to Eufai about this before over MSN one day. There's a significant difference between a 'classy team' and a 'class team'. Arsenal are a truly classy team and their search for the perfect goal is always a sight to behold when you watch it unfold in play. But that doesn't always mean they win games.

On the other hand, Manchester United are a true class act because they can grind out the results whether or not they are playing well and that really defines a true winner. And although there were hiccups, they have never taken more than 1 or 2 seasons to put their championship race back on track, and have been getting it right all the time. That kind of glory sends shivers down my spine and I'm not even a Manchester United fan.




Life's too short to be taken seriously.

Today's Listenables:
Metallica - Ain't My Bitch