In Continuum.

John Mayer

2010-02-20T18:26:00.002+08:00

John Mayer

I do not consider myself a crazy fan of any artistes out there, I don't think I even come close to that. The rational side of me always manages to pull me back from fanaticism, knowing that it isn't worth it to go all the way for such trivial things in life. However, if you really have to pick just one artiste that I have been crazy over the past few years, it'd probably be John Mayer. His music stands apart from most of the things that I love and listen to on a regular basis, and many people who know me would probably scratch their heads at why I love this man's music. Well, I suppose when I first got into his music some time in 2003, the lyrics related to me on a level that no other songs did. You know, about the quarter life crisis, about growing older, about not wanting responsibilities - that kind of things. Besides, that was also the period of time when I got serious with guitar, and I suppose there wasn't a better way to learn the instrument other than to learn it to his songs. I cannot say that I know most of his songs by heart on the guitar, but I can pull off a decent setlist of songs that I already know. I don't think I know many other songs other than his, considering how the rest of the songs in my library are made up mainly of electronica tunes. Those songs are, after all, kinda hard to recreate on the guitar, you know?

Anyway, I've been a fan of John Mayer for a long time now, all the way since he was just this awkward singer-songwriter who couldn't find his foothold in the world of show business. That was his staple, though, that was what he was known for. The sensitive, somewhat geeky musician who'd prove everybody wrong whenever he is standing alongside guitar legends on a stage somewhere in this world. Whatever preconceived ideas you might have of him would be shattered once he shreds the guitar, because he is that good on it. People often call him a "pop singer" because of the pop tunes that he dishes out onto the radio, and there is no denying that. Whenever I tell people that I am a fan of John Mayer, people tend to look at me with an expression of puzzlement, wondering if I was being sarcastic in the first place. "That Wonderland guy?", they would ask, and I'd have to admit it. "Admit it", I said, because it almost sounds like I didn't want to. Saying that I am a fan of this man used to be simple, because it made sense. This is a perfectly talented person with enough skills under his belt to impress and prove everybody wrong out there. If you want proof of why he isn't just another pop singer, you only need to type the words "Gravity" and "live" into the YouTube search box.

That used to be how it was, though, when it was really all about the music and less about his celebrity life. It was always musician first, celebrity second for this man, and I suppose that is something of a rarity these days, after all. When you have cameras following you from your home to the car, from the car to the gym, from the gym to the restaurant, from the restaurant back home, and from your home to a club, you cannot help but realize that your life has been turned into an unofficial autobiography, documented in pictures in tabloid newspapers. So many celebrities have succumbed to the scrutiny of the paparazzi, and it is surprising just how little regulations there are in the United States to govern these people, I feel. I mean, we have celebrity breaking down and turning into a train wreck right in front of the flashing cameras, no thanks to the paparazzi crew involved in that situation. They've crossed the line a long time ago, and no one is spared in the paparazzi world. Even back when it was easier to defend John Mayer as a fan, his life was constantly under the microscope, and America's obsession with celebrities and their private lives became epitomized in the tabloid sales.

Some celebrities are better targets than other celebrities, which is why paparazzi are more interested in some of them more than the others. You don't hear much about Chris Martin doing something stupid in the public because, well, he simply doesn't do it. It has got nothing to do with him being a father, or the fact that he is also a husband. Normal people just don't do stupid things in the public, and the trick is to keep a low profile even when you have cameras following you all the time. When you don't fan the flames, you don't get a bush fire - it's really as simple as that. Somewhere down the road, though, John Mayer decided that it'd be clever and fun to play the media game and try to "fight back" by giving them exactly what they want. You know, pretending to be drunk in public, saying something outrageous on the camera, or running around a cruise ship almost completely naked. Somewhere amidst his odd and twisted sense of humor, he feels that that is the best way to deal with the celebrity side of his life, the side that people are obsessed and crazy about. He feels that the best way to stop a train is to run head on into it, and most of his fans brushed it off as "John being John", that it is something he does.

His humor hasn't always been easy to understand, and they can become overwhelming even to me sometimes. If you are following him on Twitter, for example, there are times when his Twitter don't make any sense. They are sometimes crude, somethings crass and weird but, they are all a part of who he is and his so-called wit. Many of us defend him and say that because the general public knows him by what they read in the tabloids, they obviously do not understand the context and what he is trying to say. His humor has always been harmless for the most part, just him being a goofball and playing his "games" with the media. It has been harmless for the most part, until recently when he decided to give an interview to PlayBoy magazine. It is a long interview in which I will not go into detail, but let's just say that it has stirred up quite a lot of dust in the media regarding its contend. Everything from the usage of the word "nigger", to how he described his penis to be a "white supremacist", all of those things have caused him to become a giant douchebag all over again. In an effort to be clever and witty, he has also spoken way too much and said stupid things in a magazine - and what for? What was he trying to do?

I've been giving this a lot of thinking, simply because I care. I care enough for his music to know that I don't want people to give me "that look" when I tell them that I am a fan. It's never about the person - never. I do not care what a person does in his private life for the most part, just as long as he can justify himself in his music. I don't care if the members of Oasis are a bunch of douchebags, but the fact is that they make good music and they continue to do so. I try to be objective most of the time, but then sometimes enough is enough, you know, when too much is simply too much. There are times when what that person does in real life is so stupid, that you cannot help but hear the stupidity between every line of every song. It is especially so with John Mayer, a guy who has written songs about saying too much in songs like "My Stupid Mouth", and songs about people not knowing who he really is, and basing their judgments solely on what the media says in "Who Did You Think I Was". I remember he once said that he likes to prove people wrong on stage, with his guitar and his music. I get that, I really do. But I'm not sure he had to go out and stir up shit just to prove people wrong, you know. That's like becoming a pastor after masturbating in the public just to prove to everybody that he isn't a pervert after all. No, people are still going to think that you are a demented freak.

If I don't want to stand out in a crowd, I usually try to keep quiet and stay in the corner of things. If you don't want the tabloids to write about your private life, then don't air your dirty laundry in the public when the cameras are all pointed at you. If you don't want people to make your past relationships a big deal, then stop telling people about how great somebody was in bed or stupid statements like that. I believe that he is a smart enough man to know that, and yet something went wrong in that interview that caused me to rethink my stance about him as a human being. Perhaps there was a case of over-estimation, perhaps I've got it all wrong from the very smart. Maybe he just isn't all that smart, the way that he feels that he can defeat stupid things by doing stupid deeds. It doesn't work out that way at all, and he of all people should have known that a long time ago. It doesn't matter the context in which he used the word "nigger", which wasn't in the malicious context at all. He meant the exact opposite, but then the general public isn't very smart either. You know the consequences and repercussions that come along with using such a racially charged word, and everybody knows it. What in the blue hell were you thinking back there?

In the act of being clever, you obviously weren't too clever. It is a shame really, and this is the part when it becomes impossible to defend. I cannot find the words to defend your words and your actions, and I am sure many people out there feel the same way about this situation. From this day on, people are going to think John Mayer fans as the kind of people who supports the idea of a "white supremacist penis". For some reason, "being a fan of his music" is suddenly the same as "agreeing with everything that he says". I think he is a douche bag not because the media tags him as being one. I seriously think that John Mayer is a douche bag, and he made himself to be that way. There is always a choice when it comes to doing or saying things. You know, not doing something or not saying something. Once you've made that choice, it becomes very difficult to turn back now. I'd hate to be your publicist or your manager, seriously, because of all the stupid things that you go out to do, night after night. This isn't even the first time that something you have said got turned into an overblown issue like that. So many times, you have said that it should be about the music, that it shouldn't be about the spotlight, that you should just stick to what you do best. Then what do you do after that? You go out, do some interview and say stupid shit. Your stupid mouth just doesn't know when to shut the hell up, does it?

I am continue to listen to his music, and try to be partial about it. I've always known the fact that when I meet the musicians or the actors that I admire and respect, I am not going to like them as human beings. I love Steve Jobs, but I think he is also an asshole - same thing. I think John Mayer is a great musician, but I am going to want to punch him in the face if I have a drink with him in New York City. For the most part, I am the kind of person who cannot care less about what a famous person does in his or her life. As big of an asshole as Tiger Woods was to his wife by sleeping with a thousand women out there, you cannot deny that he is a great golfer. Just stick to playing your golf, hitting the balls, and everybody will forget about this shenanigan sooner or later. Not unless, of course, you appear in front of paparazzi cameras and start telling people about why you broke up, why you did the things you did, and all that kind of retarded things that'd only cause people to dig deeper into your life. Tiger Woods was stupid enough to not cover his tracks after cheating on his wife, but I think he handled himself pretty well with the apology and everything. I'm not even sure if he had to do a public apology at all, since he really only needed to apologize to his wife and everything. But John, I think you are smarter than that. You don't do the same stupid shit over and over again and expect people to still stand behind you. Get your shit together, even if it takes a long hiatus away from everything. The next time a camera comes up into your face, shut the fuck up. The next time an interviewer asks you about your private life, stop trying to act clever by being stupid. That stupid mouth of yours is still stupid, until you decide to get your shit together and wise up.

Kites

2010-02-11T16:00:00.002+08:00

Kites

It was the end of the year and the end of a decade. The sea winds blew in from the south and graced our faces like heavy feathers. There was a group of people, us, by the side of a man-made slope, eating pizzas and drinking alcohol. It was the night before we said goodbye to one of our own, a friend of ours leaving for a place far, far away. In the past, the sea winds would probably promise a swift journey from here on out, but that was the last thing that any of us wanted to see. A friend of ours was leaving for overseas studies, and the lot of us gathered at Marina Barrage the night before to bid our goodbyes. Aside from the snacks and the drinks, we all took turns to hold a line in our hands from time to time. On one end of the line, a spool of string that coiled itself around a plastic handle. On the other, a fifteen dollar kite that soared into the air and rebelled against the mighty winds. Flying a kite isn't exactly the easiest thing to do, especially when your kite isn't very good to begin with. The flimsy center beam poked through the fabric and rendered the kite completely flightless after half an hour. We tried our best to get it into the air throughout the night, and for a while it stayed in the air for a long time. I don't remember the last time I ever flew a kite other than that one time when I was still a little boy. You know, when things were different, when it was all simpler.

The red and white line fluttered in the warm afternoon wind, and the perimeter of the field was bordered up with metal fences painted in pale green. A tall sign rose up from the other side of the fence, something about a new housing estate being planned in the small plot of land right next to the MRT station. That place used to be where the temporary canteen of my school was, and I remember how out-of-place it looked when the new building was still under construction. Everything was changing back then, replaced by things that I don't quite remember anymore. I stared at the little piece of land as I came out from the station, with the smell of burning grass teasing at my nostrils. It's the smell of the haze again, the fumes drifting over the seas from the south and engulfing our little island within it's embrace. It was as if the little piece of land in front of me was burning without flames, and that the smell was coming from the dying leaves. Yet, they remained steadily rooted in the soil, fenced up by metal fences, ready to be dug up by bulldozers in the foreseeable future, taken over by steel and concrete. The grassland shall die, burn down into ashes without flames. Everything around my home isn't the same anymore.

There used to be a big green field on the other side of the road where the newer condominiums are right now. Right in front of the main entrance to my estate, there used to be an untouched piece of land that nobody touched for a very long time. It separated itself from the main road by a monsoon drain, drawing its territory from us, as if to say that we do not have the right to touch the last remaining piece of free land. My parents were still new to this country at that time, and so were my sister and I. In an effort to entertain us one weekend afternoon, my parents brought us downstairs and across the road to fly kites. I remember my kite, though only barely so, and I remember it had big blotches of red on it. That was my first time flying a kite, and the winds were optimal for us to do so that afternoon. My parents gave me a few instructions, and I remember trying to run against the wind in hopes that the updraft would pick the kite up. At five years old, I suppose my legs couldn't carry me fast enough, and the kite refused to take off. Like most parents that bring their kids to fly kites, they usually end up being the one doing all the job anyway. I remember my kite flying higher and higher into the air, until it became a small red dot that threatened even the height of my condominium. It was a glorious day for me, but it was also the last time in a long time when we flew kites.

A couple of years down the road, my parents walked my sister and I down the same stretch of road in front of our house and along the edge of the field. Strangely enough, there were rows upon rows of cars parked along the road, with people climbing out from their vehicles with their own set of children from all over the place. A piece of land was carved out on the kite flying field in the corner, and the people were swarming towards a makeshift building that had fancy lights in the windows. It was a condominium showroom, and my parents were there to check out the prospects of having another house altogether. Or, maybe they were just curious as to what would happen to that little piece of land, who knows. I remember walking in between the model buildings, peering into the empty plastic units and running my fingers down the styrofoam road. Half of the grass field would be gone, I thought to myself. Less land for me to run around with my kite now. I hated that condominium, and I still do not have much love for it. It looks like a sad attempt to blend modern housing units with medieval castles. Everything felt crammed even as a child, and I remember being oddly infuriated on my way home. My parents asked what the matter was, but I couldn't put my anger into words. I wasn't even sure why I was so angry at this new concrete beast that was about to rise up from the ashes of the ground. All I knew was that I didn't want it there, I didn't want it to take over that piece of land that was rightfully mine to fly kites.

I've lived here for a long time now, ever since my condominium was still the tallest building in the neighborhood. You could see it in all directions, wherever you were coming in from. Then, of course, people calling this placed a "prime land", and thought that it'd be a good idea to squeeze as many people as possible into this already constricted place. They took up fields to build housing estates, more fields for condominiums, another to build the Australian International School, and a whole stretch of it for the MRT station. They even tore down an old terrace house near my home just to make way for a new condominium a few years ago. Everybody who lived there had to leave, they called it "en bloc" or some fancy name like that. I remember the day when the bulldozers came to tear down the terrace house. In the night, the workers would be asleep and the machines would be resting, and the broken walls of the houses would reveal old furniture and posters still pinned up against the walls. It was an eerie sight, but a sign that the old days are over and the new day has dawned. Everything was changing rapidly around me at that time, and we seem to be the only bunch of people who have remained the same for the most part. Sure, we tore down the ugly wooden fences and changed the tiles around the swimming pool. But, for the most part, we are still the oldest condominium around here, and you can still see it from a great many directions from all around.

Yet, I cannot fly a kite around here any longer, because it seems like these contractors are monsters who feast on soil and dirt. They see an empty plot of land, and they want to stick metal beams into them and pour cement into holes. Just when you think that they have finally ran out of space to do more of that, they'd somehow do it. I can't help but wonder which building is going to be the next to be torn down, to be turned into something spanking new around the neighborhood. Everything is a grotesque copy of the other, one building imitating the other, like soldiers in their ranks, shoulders to shoulders. That is the case all over Singapore, I suppose, and these lands are going to be taken up by steel beams and concrete walls sooner or later. It doesn't matter if the government wants to make up for it by building artificial fields down at the barrage - it's always going to be different, somehow. At any rate, I miss running through the fields with a kite in my hands, and how my parents would teach me how to tug and let go so that the kite would catch the winds and fly even higher. At least back then, if I wanted to fly a kite, I could just grab it from the storeroom and dash downstairs to do so. At least I had the option to do that back then, you know. Now that everything has been taken over by others, it just seems like my childhood isn't there anymore.

A couple of days ago, I thought it'd be fun to look for a couple of places that I have been to as a child in Taiwan. Since my country has recently managed to get the street view option on Google Maps, I thought it'd be fun to take a look around. I found the house that I used to live in nearly twenty years ago, a house that has been converted into a warehouse and office building by some idiotic contractor who never had a knack for the aesthetics. My house is still there, but they built warehouses on either side of the house to accommodate oil barrels. My parents sold the plot of land to them, although I suppose the contract never stated that they should preserve the place as we left it. The front lawn is gone now, and it has turned into an outdoor storage area for oil barrels and a parking lot for lorries. The windows have been darkened by dust and dirt from all the years of not washing them, and you can see dark tracks of vehicles going in and out from the front gate. I used to stand on the railings on the front gate, and my dog used to chase its tail in the front lawn. My mother sighed when she saw the picture, and she told me about how my aunt and her would set up chairs on the balcony of the second floor to watch movie screenings on the other side of the road. The sliding doors to the balcony seem to be locked up now, and the place seems vacant for some reason. The person that my parents sold the place to used to complain to them that the place is haunted by ghosts, and the employees would be terrified at night when they see them. Well, ghosts or not, it was still the home that I grew up in. Ghosts of my childhood memories, perhaps, pacing the corridors and the rooms.

I zoomed out from that place and went north from there. The camera zoomed into the cities, and my mother and I tried to look for the place where she grew up. We came across her primary school, though she said that it has changed beyond recognition for the most part. She said that there were only two classrooms back then, but it has now been rebuilt into a typical school with hundreds of students. We went down the street from there, coming across familiar parks and street corners here and there. Much has changed, though, and there were times when she couldn't even remember the street names of the place. My mother used to live in a rural area of Taipei, a place surrounded by farms and gangsters for the most part. Up until about twenty years ago, she still lived there before she got married to my father. It's a small alley with the residences all crammed up together in small, dark houses. That was where my grandmother lived, and we used to visit her every time we went back to Taiwan. I remember drawing hopscotch boxes on the piece of road in front of the house, and we played with the neighborhood children who always looked dirtier and poorer than my sister and I. We used to play hide and seek around the temple area, but the neighborhood kids always found us because they already knew of all the places to hide.

The thing about Google street view is that you can only see where the Google van has gone, and I suppose that particular alley was too narrow for the van to enter. My mother and I were kinda disappointed by the fact, but I shifted the camera as best as I could, so that we could check out the entrance to the alley. The big red building at the end of the alley is still there, with the golden words nailed into the walls and the motorcycles parked in front of the gates. My mother forgot about that building, but I distinctively remember seeing it whenever we left my grandmother's place at night. I'd be tired and worn out from a day of running around and playing, and I'd be lying down in the backseat and looking up and the buildings around me. There they'd be, the golden words, peering down into the car and straight at me. I recognized it straight away, but everything has changed as well. Hell, even the road name has changed, which was why we couldn't find it before. I suppose, in a way, it was better that we couldn't go into the alley with Google Maps. In that way, the old house would still be there, and maybe grandma would still be living in it too. If nobody knows how it looks like now, then it remains the same in our minds forever - right?

I suppose, for everyone, there is a place where we remember deep in our hearts, a place when we used to have fun. It was always near our homes, somewhere close by where we could go to and get home without much effort. But living in our time, living in Singapore especially, these places are increasingly difficult to find, especially when so many other buildings are slowly taking over. It's like an infection that spreads, a rash that goes from your thighs to your stomach and all the way up your chest. You can't help it, though, because everything changes all the time. You cannot expect old buildings to remain the same forever, or plots of land to remain empty especially when people are constantly moving into this already constricted island. I suppose a part of me just wish that there is still a place for me to fly my kite, or a playground where I can sink my feet into the sands. Do you remember those playgrounds with sand? They don't come by very often anymore, and I miss that. I miss being a child, especially with all the expectations and responsibilities resting on my shoulders. The burdens that we have to carry just because we've grown up, they are difficult to bear after you have come along for so far and so long. Every once in a while, you remember the place where you used to go to fly a kite, a place that isn't in front of your computer or television. You know, like a field. A big green field, and an open sky for your kites to soar. Yeah, something like that. That'd be nice.

Tumors

2010-01-25T21:35:00.002+08:00

Not a lot of people know this just yet, but it shouldn't be more than just a minor news to the most of you anyway. It concerns me and my family, and I suppose it really is nobody else's business other than our own. I wasn't comfortable to talk about it with anybody until the issue settled. It isn't serious, at this point, so there really isn't a point in fussing over it too much. However, everything that led up to this point was, let's just say, more than a little nerve-wrecking for the most part. They say that every family operates in its own unique system in a way, and a lot of things in my family goes unsaid most of the time. Or rather, we aren't the type of people who like to harp on a certain issue for long. We address it, we move on, and that is the end of the story for the most part. There are, however, times like these when I like to talk about it, because I am the kind of person who seeks comfort in knowing more about something, you know. To obtain more information and to understand better, that is what puts me at ease most of the time. However, the fact that my family doesn't like to talk about these things, it really got me nervous back there. I'm glad that we had the phone call this morning, it helped to put things into perspective. Anyway, most of you must be lost by now, and I do not blame you. So here we go.

My mother does frequent full-body check-ups annually. She does it in Taiwan because it is cheaper there, and she visits her regular doctor over there most of the time. She dragged my father along because, well, my mother has always been the most health-conscious person in the family. She is almost a vegetarian, eating very little meat and focuses the bulk of her diet on vegetables and fruits. It's not that she is secretly a fruit bad or that she loves animals too much to kill them really. She just feels that avoiding meat, any kind of meat, is better for the health in the long term. I suppose the cholesterol in meat has got something to do with it, but I suppose I personally cannot imagine a life without bacon. Anyway, my mother is probably the most healthy person in the family, and these full-body check-ups aren't anything to worry about, or at least for me. After all, my mother has been like a straight A student at such health screenings for the past years, always scoring relatively well other than a few minor hiccups here and there. However, it doesn't matter if you are scoring full marks or just over the threshold of an A - you are an A student, no matter what. That is my mother, a grade A student at health screenings.

A week or two ago, my mother flew back to Taiwan to run some errands, with the health screening being one of them. She does that every year, so I wasn't exactly too concerned. Amongst many other things were the new house that we bought, checking up on my uncle, and a couple of other minor businesses. Besides, I think my parents have been married for a long enough time to warrant some time alone with each other. Nobody wants to be tied down to their children for the rest of their lives, right? So last Friday, or was it Thursday, my mother went for a health screening early in the morning, and the results were available for pick-up almost straight after she was done. The results, however, weren't exactly that comforting. The doctors found some kind of growth, like a tumor, at the base of her neck. No one was sure what they were, but the doctor immediately scheduled a blood test on the following Monday. My mother called me after the health screening, starting the Skype conversation with some trivial matters about cooking earlier just so that my sister could cook her own food when she returns from work, and asked if I have been keeping the house intact - like I said, trivial things. Then she told me about the news, and I couldn't stop thinking about it ever since.

It seems like everybody is getting tumors now, as if it is some kind of a trend that everybody wants to catch on to. Now my mother has some kinda tumor, my uncle's cancer is due to tumors, and it just seems like everybody else wants one too. It is certainly not something I wish upon my loved ones, but what can we do about it anyway. I remained calm for the most part, and I haven't talked to my sister about it just yet. I don't suspect that she is still kept in the dark about this anyway, but then it's not like we've addressed the issue with each other. Or rather, my sister never really address any issues with each other - ever. I am glad that my sister and I are not a married couple, because it'd be the worst couple around, truth be told. Anyway, I called my mother up over the weekend to check up on her condition, despite the fact that I knew nothing about what was going on. She didn't tell me a whole lot about the situation, nothing more than the fact that she could only get a blood test by Monday, at the very earliest. I wanted to know more, but even the doctors couldn't do anything more other than that. It sucks to sit at home and not know what is going on with your loved ones. Then again, it is probably worse for my mother, knowing that there are things in her body that aren't supposed to be there.

I asked her about the options that she have, and she said that the doctor told her to get the blood samples first to determine if the tumors are benign or malignant. Here is the thing that I do not understand: why would doctors advice the patients to "observe" the tumor if it is benign? My mother was told by the doctor that if the tumor is malignant, then she should have it removed. That is a fair enough diagnosis, because it makes a lot of sense, right? Then the doctor went on to tell my mother that if the tumor is benign, then we should just wait and observe and, well, see what happens. OK, that is just something that doesn't make any sense to me, and that is what got me furious for the most part. It is a tumor we are talking about, and there is a reason why it is called a "growth" - it grows. I'm not saying that I am a doctor, or a tumor expert or anything like that. Hell, I haven't even taken biology before, and the only medical information I know are from House. I know next to nothing about tumors, but I know this: if it isn't supposed to be there, it isn't supposed to be there. If there is a growth in the body that isn't supposed to be there, it is meant to be cut out and removed. I don't care if it is benign or not, just cut the damn thing out! If there is a chance to remove a dormant volcano from a village, the villagers would be elated to hear that I am sure. They won't care if the volcano hasn't erupted in the past sixty years. What if it does tomorrow? Yeah, exactly.

I guess the doctors haven't lived right next to a damn volcano before, and they probably don't understand that very well. Here's the thing, what if we observe for the next year and it grows to become malignant? Now what, cut it out? Well, why didn't we cut it out in the first place when we found it? It's not like a third arm when it just hangs there and not grow anymore, you know. It is there because there is a problem, and it demands to be removed. It's like seeing an injured soldier on the battlefield, and the medics tell the other soldiers to not pull him out of there because he's only been shot in the stomach and not the head and, thus, not going to die anytime soon. "Let's see what he does next! Maybe he will make it out of there himself". It doesn't work that way! He needs to be pulled out of there or he will die out of blood loss! Maybe this isn't the best analogy around, and the tumor isn't going to miraculously bleed itself out and die - which would be great. This is something that could very potentially develop into something worse than it is. It is easy for them to say, because they are not going to be responsible half a year down the road when the tumor develops into something malignant. I mean, even a malignant tumor must have developed out of something perfectly normal, right? I might be wrong, but I can't be wrong about this: it's not supposed to be there, cut it out.

The blood samples came back today, and two person called me about the results back to back. My aunt called me first to tell me about the situation, but I wanted to hear from my mother herself. She called almost right after my aunt hung up, and she told me that at this point in time, the doctor is deeming it to be something normal, and that we have nothing to worry about. Supposedly, people around her age do get such growths often, and she quoted a medical term in chinese which meant nothing to me. She just kept repeating that, and I was frustrated that she couldn't understand all the medical terminologies that she was churning out. On the phone, she asked me to look up a bunch of ways to decrease cholesterol via food intake, which is strange because my mother is already taking very little meat. She's not even 50KG! Anyway, that's not the point. The next scheduled check-up is in the March to April period, and she'd have to make a trip back again at that time to have it examined further. Yes, that is a full two to three months away from now. I don't care if it is nothing serious at this point, what if it develops into something else within that period of time? It unnerves me, but my mother seems nonchalant about it, oddly.

All this teasing with death makes me somewhat uncomfortable, somehow. People grow old, people get sick, and people die eventually. I understand that, and I suppose I have been equipped with everything that I need to deal with everything that life is going to throw at me at this point. Yet, when it does happen around you, even if it is just a tease, you cannot help but feel uncomfortable about it. And as for my uncle, who has been going through the experimental treatment, he is doing rather well. Surprisingly well, at that. He is supposed to go through six to eight treatments, with the last two being done only if necessary. He is about to go through his sixth treatment, and everything seems somewhat optimistic at this point. Measurements are done once every two treatments, and the last result (after the fourth treatment was done) indicated that 50% of the cancer cells were terminated in his body. That seems like a really good news, and my uncle is really hanging in there by a thick thread of his stubbornness. He is a fighter, and he's never ever been the person to give up so easily. These are just some of the good news out of all the bad news, I suppose. People are getting sick around me, but at the same time they are doing better than expected, you know? I worry, and I worry a lot. But at the same time, I trust in numbers and statistics. These are the things that will get me through.

In times like these, a lot of people would probably turn to prayers for comfort, you know. I don't want to turn this into some theological argument, but let's just say that I did not turn to that for any forms of comfort. I didn't see a point of doing that, because it isn't going to make anybody around me get better just because I mumble a few words to a being of higher order. If there is a plan for something to happen, then it will happen. Shit happens, you know, and we cannot prevent that just because we pray for somebody to feel better. However, I sought comfort in knowing that the numbers are not against me, that people have been through the same situation and came out on the other side just fine. I want to hear statistics, and I want to know case studies. I want to know what the doctors are doing, and I want to know that they are qualified to do their jobs. I don't see a point in praying, because that does not make me feel better at all. Praying makes me feel worse, because it makes me feel like I am out of control, that it is up to somebody else to make me feel better. Well, instead of praying, I figured, I thought learning more about what is going on seems to make more sense, you know? So I looked around for answers, and I will continue to do so. In the mean time, everybody, just hang in there. Let's pull through, let's get the hell out of here.

Avatar

2010-01-20T20:43:00.002+08:00

Avatar

I've watched a great many films in the past year or so, and it is quite a pity that the first film that I review after my "return", so to speak, is this one. By now, everybody has seen Avatar - and I mean everybody. Everyone has watched Avatar, and it is the new "in" thing, because if you haven't watched it, you are weird. It is like Titanic back in the 90s, and curious to note that they are by the same director, no less. Avatar has been touted to be the movie event of, well, this entire decade perhaps. Everybody has been anticipating for it ever since it was announced, and raving about it after they've watched the film. Ever since the first trailer was released onto the internet a few months ago, my reaction to Avatar has been this: Wow, James Cameron is back at last! Not because I thought the trailer was very special, but because James Cameron has had a great track record with his films. I am a huge fan of Aliens, and Terminator 2 is perhaps one of the best action movie ever. Titanic, while it was more like a badly written love story on a gigantic set, it was still a pretty decent watch. Well, it didn't justify people watching it ten times over, but it made sense, if you know what I mean. Now, here comes Avatar, and here's what I think about it.

If you pick out ten people on the streets and ask them if they liked Avatar, nine out of ten people would tell you that they loved it. Expand the sample size, and you ask one hundred people if they liked Avatar. This time, about ninety-five percent of the people will tell you that they loved it. Here's the thing: there is no denying that Avatar is a box office hit, and it is already the biggest film in terms of the amount of money it has earned of this entire decade anyway. Basically, it has nothing left to prove any longer - it is the king of this decade. As it carries on to be shown in the theaters around the world, people will keep flocking into the theaters for this "cinematic experience", something that it has been advertised as. You know, everything we've seen so far has been boasting about its visuals and special effects. Visuals, visuals, visuals, humans are slaves to those, aren't we? We love pretty things, and we are OK with ignoring everything else about it. Now, back to the sample size thing. If you ask me how I felt about Avatar, I am going to say that I am one of the five percent of people who didn't like it. In fact, to be honest, it is a truly over-rated piece of cinema.

Yes, you people can continue reading this blog entry after you have finished gasping. After all, finding a person who doesn't like Avatar is like finding someone with two properly working heads, each with its own personality and the ability to speak. People like us are hard to come by these days, especially when rave reviews are pouring in from every direction in the media. I get it, everybody loves Avatar, but that does not explain my general indifference towards the film. The same thing was said about The Dark Knight two years ago, and I loved it when I saw it in the theaters. I do pride myself as being a very objective audience, and I dislike something when it certainly deserves my disliking. Avatar did not work for me, and I feel like I have very valid reasons to dislike most of everything about. While trying to give a fair and balanced review of it on a forum, I couldn't come up with more than one good aspect of the film. You guessed it: I said good things about the visuals. Beyond the visuals, though, everything fell flat almost completely. I sat through the nearly three hour long film wanting it to end, and the first thing I did was to turn to my girlfriend to ask for her opinions on it. It's true, and we agreed. We shrugged, and discussed what to eat for dinner.

Let's begin with the good stuff: Avatar is the most visually stunning film I have seen in a very long time. Pretty much everything you see on the screen was generated by a computer somewhere, painstakingly painted frame by frame, pixel by pixel. That takes a lot of talented people and a lot of time (and money), and that is part of why Avatar is so awesome to look at. When you have just 40% of what goes on in the movie to be live-action, that's a lot of grounds to cover if you want to digitally insert elements into your film. I suppose that was necessary in the post-production process, considering how the film was made to be watched in 3D, instead of being altered to be watched in 3D like many other films. When you want that kind of control over your film, it is inevitable that you have to go through every single pixel in order to achieve it. You know, paint in elements digitally to give it a kind of 3D depth that cannot be achieved if you filmed something in an ordinary manner. This film is beautiful to look at, no matter how you want to argue about it. This is special effects done right, and you almost forget that you are watching a film that is saturated with computer generated graphics. All of that, though, represents a huge part of my problem with this film.

I remember watching an interview CNN did with James Cameron, and he was talking about how the technology today has enabled him to make this film with ease. He mentioned about how every blade of grass in the film was painted on, and the natural scenery could be altered over and over again until they got what he was looking for. In the past, he said, it was completely different. He brought up the famous kissing scene in Titanic, right after Rose tells Jack that she is supposedly "flying" at the bow of the ship. In the background, we see this beautiful sunset - that's a real sunset, by the way. Apparently, during filming, James and crew had to wait two weeks for the perfect sunset to come up before shooting that scene. Nowadays, all you have to do is to film something first and then digitally insert a fake sunset later. He seemed very proud of the fact that you can insert pretty much anything you want into a film now. If you want Elvis to come back to life, you can probably do that with a few buttons pressed - no problem. However, I feel that this takes away a part of what makes filmmaking, filmmaking. It becomes almost too convenient and too easy, and this isn't about digitally inserting a creature that does not exist, or a plant that is alien in nature. It's a sunset we are talking about, and it occurs 365 times a year. Even something like that, you have to digitally insert it? I guess I am old school, and I like "keepin' it real". That, to me, is just being lazy.

Next, when I say that the film is visually stunning, I do mean that the specially effects are awesome. However, this film was also advertised to be watched in 3D because it was meant to be watched in 3D. Avatar is my very first 3D movie ever, and I have no way of comparing it with anything else that I have ever seen in my life in terms of 3D. Based on what I have seen in Avatar though, I couldn't help but go, "That's it?". Because really, the only aspects of the 3D graphics that popped out to "wow" me were the plants and the computer monitors that the characters used in the film. Whenever those things were onscreen, you can very clearly see how it benefitted from being 3D, and how everything looked so much better in that medium - that, I get. Everything else in the film, however, didn't seem to benefit from the 3D at all. In fact, I took off my glasses every now and then to see if there is a difference between 2D and 3D. While the image was a little blurred out without the glasses, it pretty much looked exactly the same to me. In fact, the colors were brighter and much more vibrant without the glasses than with the glasses. With the glasses, the film looked dull and boring in terms of the colors, and the world of Pandora was completely drowned out in a scene of, well, dark hues and shades.

Everybody raved about the final battle between the humans and the Na'vi people, and you thought that all the spaceships, all the missiles, all the arrows and explosions involved would somehow take advantage of the 3D, right? No, it didn't. In fact, as you continue to watch the battle scenes, you quickly start to forget that the 3D is even there in the first place. It's not like I expected missiles and arrows to be flying into my face all the time, which would actually make things really cheesy. But one or two wouldn't hurt, right? I thought the action sequence did too little to take advantage of 3D, which meant that visually it was just like any other science fiction battle scenes out there. It kind of felt like the first fifteen minutes of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith when you have a million things happening at the very same time. Sure, great visuals here and there, but they weren't anything to make your heart race or your adrenaline rushing, you know. The final battle really wasn't as good as what people made it out to be. I mean, especially when you have gunships versus arrows, there aren't a lot of things that could potentially go on. I wanted to get involved in the action, but I couldn't. For the most part of the final battle, it was more like watching a bunch of people with high tech weapons exterminating pests in a jungle. The humans fired rockets, the natives exploded. The humans fired more rockets, more natives exploded. Then, of course, a miracle happened. 3/4 of the final battle scene involved the Na'vi pretty much losing, and then the reason why they won wasn't even because of the Na'vi themselves at all. Mother nature stepped in, and of course our hero threw a few grenades. He saved the day, yay.

That aside first, I want to talk a little bit about the story itself. Avatar is a rip-off of Pocahontas and The Last Samurai combined. We have a human infiltrating into the natives' lives to get to know them, and the natives reject his presence at first. Then, a beautiful native starts to teach this human the ways of the forest, taught him how to hunt with bows and arrows and how to live amongst the natives. Then, of course, the human falls in love with the native, and feels that the humans are doing bad things to the natives. So, the human tries to help the natives, and they eventually win. Avatar is Pocahontas because it follows the exact same plot from the beginning till the end. It is Pocahontas high on steroids, and it has gunships instead of men on horses. It is the same as The Last Samurai because, well, do we remember the final battle in The Last Samurai? Oh yes. The Japanese army, with their guns and cannons, fought against the samurai warriors who rode horses and killed people with bows and arrows. Everything is a rip-off of one another, I agree. But when your copying is this obvious, it almost becomes a little bit shameless, don't you think. James Cameron probably banked on people ignoring the simple story line because the visuals are supposedly so great. They are great, but they aren't enough to cover up the mediocre script that he supposedly wrote more than ten years ago.

According to the story, the way that you find your banshee (those flying dragon things) was to see which one is trying to kill you. So, the Na'vi people brings out protagonist onto the edge of a cliff, and he is supposed to find a banshee that is out to kill him. That all made sense to me until the part when one of them actually tries to kill him. Jake, the protagonist, jumps at the banshee and wrestles it to the ground. According to the natives, the way to properly ride any animal on Pandora is to stick their braided hair, which has tentacles in them, into these tubes on the animals to communicate with them almost telepathically. Now, after Jake managed to properly wrestle the banshee to the ground, the Na'vi princess then asked Jake to quickly insert his tentacle things into the animal's tube. OK, if you guys are not getting what I am trying to say here, here it is: Jake just raped a poor animal. He wasn't using his genital to insert it into the animal's genital, sure, but it sure looked like it. Apparently, on Pandora, it is OK for the natives to rape an animal, just as long as no genitals are involved. Forcefully stuffing your antenna into the animal? That's perfectly OK with the people of Pandora. No wonder the humans thought them to be uncivilized. It felt like the banshee just didn't want to be disturbed, and here comes a native who tries to stuff things into its tubes. It's like a prisoner in a prison trying to mind his own business while picking up a bar of soap. Yeah, the poor banshee was raped and everybody got to watch it in 3D.

The characters in this film are bland and, well, nothing really develops in terms of the characterization. Jake does, though, because he went from a non-believer into a believer of "the force" that resides in the forest. Everybody else seems to be unnecessarily one-dimensional despite the three-dimensional film. The main bad guy seems to be bad for the sole reason of being bad. He shoots at innocent natives and kills them all just because he can, and you start to wonder if people give out military ranks randomly in the future. Then we have Giovanni Ribisi's character, the guy who is there for the mineral, and he suddenly decides that it is bad to kill the natives for no apparent reason. Out of nowhere, he decides to look guilty and sorry for the natives, but all he does is to stare helplessly at a computer monitor at the end of the movie. Michelle Rodriquez's character as the tough female pilot is even more puzzling. She doesn't do anything and, out of nowhere, decides to go against her authorities and act on her own. When she died, nobody cared - at least I know I didn't. She could have been out of the film and we wouldn't have cared for her existence at all. She was completely redundant, and I do not blame her for it at all. The script probably did not dictate a very heavy role for her, which caused her character to be almost utterly useless. Oh yeah, she can navigate the flying ships very well... and? Nothing else. She's really there to pilot planes and look tough.

Next, the usage of Deus Ex Machina at critical moments of the film. Deus Ex Machina is latin for "God Machine", and it is plot device where a previously intractable problem is suddenly solved because of some miraculously occurrence that is out of the story's internal logic. For example, there is a scene in the film when you see the princess being stuck behind a tree with all the humans and robots coming behind her. She wants to shoot at those human bastards because they blew up her home, but all she had were bows and arrows - not very smart. Jake is trying to stop her from doing it, but all she wanted to do was to kill some humans. However, by doing so, she'd expose her hiding place, and she'd probably be shot to death soon after. Then, out of nowhere, all the animals of the forest comes to her rescue and tramples all over the humans! How in the world did that happen? Oh yeah, mother nature told the animals to. Seriously, mother nature commanded the animals to come and kill the humans. Suddenly, all the previously ferocious animals become tamed little pets, and they even allowed the Na'vi princess to ride on its back at one point. Then the flying animals swoop down to destroy the flying ships, they start eating the humans, and everything is resolved. The natives win! Woo! Suck it Pocahontas, you didn't have mother nature on your side. The natives have mother nature and a bad plot device on their side.

The next thing I want to talk about is the entire first half of Avatar. From the very beginning of the film up until the sex scene (which really isn't a sex scene), it is basically a combination of a National Geographic episode and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. James Cameron seems to be in love with the world that he has created so much that he wants to spend the first half of the film showing you everything there is to show about it. This is what happens in the first half of the film: Oh look, these plants look funny and they act funky. Do as I say Jake you idiot, you are supposed to shoot arrows like that. That is the Na'vi way. Oh, more plants to look at. Don't touch that, try this, no Jake! You idiot. Plants! That animal is dangerous, it can eat you if it wants to. PLANTS! Waterfall. This is the Na'vi way of talking to our ancestors. CATCH A BANSHEE! Floating islands, a lot of minerals in those. PLANTS! Glowing plants. Strange monkeys, strange horses. Tree of Souls! Tree of something. PLANTS! Cute. Oh look at this, this is a sign that you are "the one". Stop doing that, idiot. Plants! Let's mate. It is almost like a documentary feature of Pandora on its own. I understand if you want to show off all your amazing creations, and I get that. However, noticed how Peter Jackson tried to show off Middle Earth, an entirely fictional world? He doesn't spend half of the trilogy talking about where everything came from. This time, it almost feels self-indulgent while he spent all the time he spent showing off everything. Look! I created this weird looking monster thing! Me! And this plant! It glows in the dark! Like those Twilight vampires the sun? Only, we are in the dark, and they glow! Look! Plants! More plants! No, that is not the Na'vi way. Let's come up with a new language so that the Na'vi can speak that way. Insert Na'vi speech here. HEAR THAT?! I created a language! I'm the king of the world! Woo!

Avatar is James Cameron's moment to show off what he has been wanting to do, and people lapped every inch of it up. Aside from the special effects, there really isn't anything to rave about. Notice how I couldn't even be bothered with going into details about the story. You, as the audience, are always going to be about forty minutes ahead of the film, because you know how it is going to turn out for sure. I almost wished for the Na'vi people to lose just so that there'd be some element of surprise in me - no, they won, because mother nature had a divine intervention. Avatar is nothing more than a bloating effort on James Cameron's part to show off what he can do with special effects and 3D. While those were great, he didn't have the story or the characters to match up to it. But humans, like I said, are visually drive creatures, and we create this halo effect when it comes to films as well. If a film looks good, then we can forgive a lot of other bad things that come along with it. It's good that my 3D glasses were uncomfortable and screwed up, because that allowed me to really study the film without being completely distracted by the visuals. I initially gave the film a 7/10, but I think I'd like to lower it to about 6/10, or lower. The more I think about Avatar, the more it feels to me like an overblown film about James Cameron's own little fantasy world badly executed.

6/10

Brink

2010-01-19T18:02:00.002+08:00

Brink

I remember taking the elevator up to the seventh floor of Clemens Hall on the wintry December afternoon. Winter days are impatient and lazy, and they only last for so long before giving up the fight to the embrace of the night. I had little time before the skies turned black, and I wanted to get things done before then. I trotted through piles of snow that littered the sidewalks on my way to the building, evading chunks of ice that somebody kicked down the slope that led down to the Student Union. I still had a bag to pack before going off to New York City that night, and I still had a dinner that I haven't eaten at that time. I needed to do this, I thought, I had to get it done before I leave forever. The school was relatively empty by then, which is usually the case during any exam week. Students come to school for the test, get it over and done with, and disappear from the school compound as soon as possible. There are, however, the ones that stick around to talk to the lecturers, to seek some last minute advices and to clear up a bunch of questions. I, on the other hand, finished way ahead of everybody else in school. I remember it was the 10th, and that was about when the rest of them started the exams in the first place. I was already done with whatever that I had to do, and the last thing to run as an errand was to pay my lecturer a visit. Dr. Wesley Carter's office resides on the seventh floor of Clemens Hall, at the African-American Studies department. I made my way there alone that afternoon, as the skies remained overcast and gloomy for the most part.

I remember asking the receptionist if he was still in his office, and she pointed me to his office which was right around the corner. I knocked, and he was behind his desk arranging some papers and folders when he noticed me. It took a while, but his smile overcame his face and welcomed me into his office. We didn't talk there, though, and we ended up at the end of the corridor talking about my trip to New York City, his possible trip to Singapore, and my graduation. I remember he asked me about it, and I told him that I have finished my studies for good - or, at least for the time being. He looked at me with a frown in between his brows, somewhat accusingly I thought, and he told me that it was a pity because I should have stuck around for a longer period of time. I'd like to, I'd sure love to do that. But there is an end to everything, every phase in life, and that was my time - my time was up. I asked him for some advices about graduation, because I was a duck right there and then, standing before Dr. Carter, a turmoil of thoughts and emotions beneath my skin. I was petrified about the prospects of graduating, terrified of leaving my comfort zone. I had time, I really did have time. I'd not officially graduate until I receive my certificate, and I know that. Yet, to know that I was on the brink of my "real life", or "the rest of my life", I knew that the next phase is going to be a whole new challenge. New challenges entail new set of unknowns, and that to me is the scariest beast of all.

Dr. Carter's arms were folded before his chest at that time, listening to what I had to say about graduation. Graduation: the beginning of unemployment! I said, as I sarcastically pumped my fist into the air to show my enthusiasm - or, lack thereof. He laughed, and placed his big hands on my shoulder. It was comforting, the pressure, and reassuring, most of all. He lowered his voice a little bit at that time, and he told me that he understood my situation. "Just one thing though," he then went on to say. "Just relax". I have been brought up this way: We study, we study, and we study some more. We study for better grades, we study for better grades than everybody else. We do well at school, we base our lives around numbers and alphabets, and then we feel better about ourselves. We do that for a long time, for the better part of our youths, and then right after that you throw yourself into the next world - the adult world. The world with a lot of working, a lot of stress, and the world where you have to fend for yourself, where every man is for himself for the most part. It is a dog eat dog world there, a cannibalistic world where people would eat you alive if you are not careful. These are not zombies which we can destroy their brains without a care in the world. These are fellow human beings, people who are hungry not for your flesh for money. And you, and everybody else other than themselves, are standing in their way.

I've been taught that since young, especially from the teachers in school. If you screw up in one stage of your life, you are screwed for the rest of your life. I've grown to learn that grades isn't everything, although it helps. It helps with a lot of things, but it certainly isn't everything that a person should be aiming for. I have done well in my college life, in fact pretty damn well if I do say so myself. I don't think I have had a better streak of good grades throughout my academic life, and this time I am more qualified than ever - or so I thought. Even though I am armed with everything that I can possibly arm myself with to protect me from the rest of the world, I am still, in every which way possible, scared. That is the case for every college graduate, I presume, you feel the fear brewing in your stomach, and churning around like expired milk. Or at least I hope dearly that I am not alone in this, that people are supposed to feel the way that I am feeling right now. It hasn't even been a month since I returned from the United States - hell, a month ago, I was still in New York City. It hasn't been that long, and I know of people who have graduated for good, still touring the United States because 1) They have the time. 2) They have the money. It isn't too late, it isn't the end of the line. But. But. There's always a "but".

I don't think everything will miraculously work itself out, and that everything will be fine. But when he told me to relax, I feel he doesn't mean that I should just sit on my butt and wait for something to happen to me, you know? I feel what he meant was that things are not going to take a turn for the worse, that this is not the end of all things. We don't have to worry particularly for too many things, because we only need to do what needs to be done in order for things to work out, you know. I think that is reassuring, it really is. Like the hand he placed on my shoulder that afternoon, I keep reminding myself those words. My mother isn't worried, father isn't either. My friends from local universities took three months before they found a job, and I am not even back from Buffalo for a month at this point. These are the things that comfort me, and also the fact that I am not in this alone. A bunch of my friends just graduated along with me, and a bunch of other people will graduate in a few months as well. We are all in this together, you know, like brothers in arms on a battlefield of some sort. It'd be nice to sit down and talk about our hopes and fears one of these days, at least that'd be more comforting than to wallow in our own worries. I think I should relax, and in the mean time, do what I need to do to make that happen. It can be nerve-wrecking, it really can be. This period of time, although you are really not doing anything, it can be the most stressful period of time.

It's not like I have never transitioned from one phase in my life to another before. I have, many times, but they were always within the same ballpark, you know. The difference between primary school and secondary school was huge, and the same goes to the difference between secondary school and junior college. The workload got heavier and heavier, and the things you had to deal with became more and more challenging. Yet, we still have the examinations, we still had the projects, we still had the assignments. Everything was the same, but varied in more ways than one. School is school, after all, and all you have to do is to adapt to the new lifestyle, and you are good to go. It's like switching from swimming to doing water polo, you know. But this time, the working life, that is something that is completely different. It is different from everything that you've ever done before in your life, and that can be really daunting and overwhelming sometimes. It feels like the time right before my military service, and the thought process that went on in my head. I couldn't help but start to get nervous about what awaited me, you know, because it was a completely different life - or the lack of a life.

This is the part when it gets heavy, this is the part when we have to toughen up all over again. Life seems to be an intermittent series of sessions where we have to toughen ourselves up somehow. I don't think humans like change, or changes that are too dramatic. We like to be comfortable, to know what we are going to expect. There are times when we seek the unexpected, when the unknown excites us. But not when it also has to deal with reality, our real lives, not when there are consequences that are going to affect you directly. Every once in a while, we want to go to a foreign country because we know nothing about that country. There is that excitement in there somewhere, but not when you are gambling with life. Life is such, and we have to live it. We all wished to be somebody else when we were five, or ten, and then you grow up to somebody whom you are not. I suppose, in some ways, none of us want to tell the childhood versions of ourselves who you finally became. My childhood self would probably be disappointed that I didn't eventually become a movie director, that I am still in Singapore and still a part of this massive system. Well, such is life, and it is harsh. It presses down upon, but we do the best that we could to get by. But sometimes, when you think about it, just "getting by" isn't nearly enough any longer.

Guilt

2010-01-19T16:27:00.002+08:00

Guilt

It begins, again, and I almost feel ashamed for doing this. Ashamed, because I have left it to gather dust and, well, die. That is besides the fact that nothing has changed around here, with the edit box still looking empty and pure whenever I pay my visits, and the orange "Publish Post" button still looks just as inviting as when I left it. This place feels safe, like a haven, or a basement with a lot of food and water stored for a particularly rainy day. This place has been where I go to when I feel the most vulnerable and the most scared, and that has been the case for the past couple of years. Well, for the most part in the past couple of years anyway. I've taken breaks in between, and I've never found a reason any more valid than the one that I usually tell my friends about. I simply wanted to take a break, I would tell them, but it was mostly an effort to convince myself that it is fine to walkaway from something that you have been doing on a daily basis, almost religiously. Writing has been a longtime love on my part, like an affair from everything else in life that I consider to be reality. Writing helps me to sort out my life, to express myself in ways that I cannot even do to the closest individuals. Yet, for some reason, I left it aside throughout the last part of last year, allowed the creepy crawlers of the night to build their webs and to reside amidst the sentences and the paragraphs. They took shelter within my vulnerabilities, or my honesty if you want to see it that way. I miss this place, and yet I let it go for so long - far too long.

I think I have figured it out, though, I think I finally know why that is the case. You see, when you are somebody who strives to write a little something everyday, then there is bound to be the day that you begin to burn out, when you feel like you don't want to embark on that kind of expressional journey on a daily basis. I am not the kind of writer, or blogger, who wants to post just about anything everyday. There are funny pictures or interesting quotes that come along all the time, and the sites that I see them are updated pretty frequently throughout the day. Yet, I don't want my blog to turn into a picture blog of sorts, choked with pictures of little things I gather throughout the day. It has always been a part of my heart and my mind, it has always been like a bank where I deposit these things. To exorcize them, to leave them somewhere safer than my head, perhaps. It has always been an effort for me to sort my thoughts out so that it will not jeopardize the rest of who I really am, you know. Every once in a while, I suppose posting song lyrics and such should be fine, but that has never been the sole purpose of what this blog is all about, or what I deem it to be about. This is an attachment, or a long engagement that seems to have gone too far and too deep. It's just a blog, the rational side of me tells, it's really just a blog.

At the same time, though, I didn't want it to sink into a blog that is like the ten million other blogs out there. I didn't want every entry to be a description or a report of what happened in a day of mine, you know. Nobody wants to read about my trip to the supermarket, the brand of rice that I bought, why I preferred to buy the bottle of cream sauce instead of a tomato-based one. Well, perhaps the reasoning would be somewhat interesting, but then there are so many blogs around that I can never be bothered to bring myself to read. I have too much respect for myself to do that, because some blogs are simply not worth your time. Even if they are just a paragraph or two about what they ate, where they went, who they met, what they did - you feel like pulling your brain out from your nostrils via a very long hook, and then proceed to beat your brain into a pulp with your fists. There are times when you start to wonder how anybody would be egoistical enough to expect anybody to read that. They may argue that they blog for themselves, that it is really a personal diary that happens to be online. Well, no such thing exists when you are on the internet, and a blog that isn't locked is for the public eye. A part of you craves for that attention when you leave it available for the rest of the world to see. A part of you wants to be read and be known no matter how mundane your life can become.

So, I didn't want my blog to be about that at all. An everyday account of what happened in my day - who cares? I know I don't care, but the thoughts that come along with the events that happened, now that may count for something indeed. I've heard of a saying before that speaks of how there is something in everything to write about, and I suppose that is true. Yet, if you are also writing with a certain audience in mind, no matter how insignificant or small, you have to realize that although there is something in everything to write about, not everything is worth writing about, however. So, in an effort to control the quality of things, I suppose that was the reason why I so suddenly stopped doing something altogether. It wasn't a conscious decision to do so, it just kinda stopped midway through my trip in Buffalo. Maybe it wasn't even midway, but it certainly felt very immediate. I have proclaimed a couple of times that I was back to writing for good, but I suppose there were too many things going on back then - or too little - to want to do this all over again. Sooner or later, guilt started to set in, and I started to avoid this blog like an ex-lover. You know, like an ex-girlfriend who is in the same class as you, you cannot help but avoid her as often as possible. Worse, if you guys were assign the same group in a project - the horrors.

I cannot guarantee to you, blog, how long I will be sticking around again this time. I still have a brain, things still go through my head, and I've always had the urge to write something. Guilt kept me away, and isn't that a curious emotion to feel towards a blog anyway? It is a time of self-reflection these days, when you are sitting at home alone and you are wondering what exactly you can contribute to, well, everything. Graduation is the beginning of your unemployment, and while that can be a truly terrifying period of time, it is also a time when you get to sit down somewhere quietly and do some reflection. That's what I have been doing, just reflecting upon myself and thinking about what I can do based upon what I do best. When you come right down to it, you have very little talents to boast about, and there are probably a dozen others who can do a better job than you do at practically anything. In a world this competitive, it is almost impossible to stand out, especially when you haven't been trying to do so all your life. I figured that I love writing, and I am somewhat decent at doing it. Writing isn't something that is foreign to me. In fact, I love writing just about anything. Even if it is a note for my sister, I enjoy crafting the message and choosing the words carefully. It expresses who I am, even the littlest things in life.

This is the crossroads, and I suppose any of life's junctions deserves a fresh new start in terms of expressing myself. It is petrifying down here, which is why I managed to ignore the nagging guilt in my chest. It bugs at you and tucks at your veins until you finally give in. You say to yourself "yes, yes!", and you go ahead and begin on the very first line, even if you have written something similar a couple of months ago. This is when everything bears down on you, this is when it seems like the right time to start over. I don't know how long I will last, but this feels right. This, everything, feels appropriate. By now, everything seems comfortable and familiar already, and it doesn't take a lot for me to slip back into my comfort zone. You know, amidst the billions of permutations that my keyboard can conjure, the different combination of letters and buttons, that is the place where I discover my solace and bliss.

Race

2009-11-15T07:31:00.003+08:00

Race

I think I have been living in an environment whereby race hasn't been a pressing issue for too long. I recently wrote a paper about race and multiculturalism for my American Pluralism class, and that reflection paper really got me thinking about the state of race, or racism, in Singapore. Since my paper was mainly based around multiculturalism in my country, I discussed issues on the efforts that Singapore have engaged in in order to foster a racially harmonious society. With that said, though, I also talked about how there are subtle racism that is alive in Singapore even today, the way that the education system as well as the military seems to not provide equal opportunities to members of another race. I will not go into the details of that here in this entry, but let's just say that it is better to be a Chinese in Singapore than an Indian or a Malay in more ways than one. It is an inequality and a difference that will never be erased just because we set aside a day in the year to celebrate our diversity, or to feature members of every race in agenda-driven National Day music videos. Anyway, most of my friends are Chinese, and I suppose there is a certain level of comfort in knowing that you are in the majority, you know. Of course, that is not to say that the majority should, in any way, feel superior to the minorities in the country. I am just saying that being in the majority, the chances of your being discriminated against drops quite significantly. After all, not every country is like South Africa, where the color of your skin is more powerful than sheer numbers. I can never understand how the blacks in South Africa (the vast majority) can settle with being controlled by the white minority. They really only need to raise their eyebrows for the richer whites to be wiped out.

Anyway, I moved from Taiwan to Singapore when I was five years old, a change that was somewhat significant in terms of the people that I was with. Suddenly, I was thrown into a society with a lot of darker skinned people than myself, something that I've never experienced in my life back then. For some reason, though, I've never had a sense of hostility against these people around me, and I've never thought myself to be any different from these people save for our skin color and, sometimes, accent. I remember being in kindergarten back then, with a bunch of my classmates being either Malays or Indians, and I've never had a problem with that despite never knowing the concept of "racism". Perhaps that is the key to it all, not knowing the concept of "prejudice" and "discrimination" made me a child that looked upon all my peers as equals, you know. I don't remember my parents ever reinforcing the idea of racial equality in my head when I was much younger. It was something that came naturally, and I am thankful that my parents aren't some racist bigots who'd frown at my malay and indian friends if I brought them home. That is the kind of attitude you'd expect from common Singaporeans though, especially after living in a country with a variety of races for such a long time. I mean, we already live and work in such close proximity with members of another race, you'd expect a common understanding to rise out of this naturally. It's not like everybody of a certain race still retains their unique cultural practices after all. We've all kind of blended in more ways than one to form a culture than is a "Singaporean Culture" rather than a Chinese, Malay, or Indian one.

Yet, you'd be surprised to hear that some people, some Singaporeans to be exact, can still be extremely racist for some reason. I mean, racism isn't something that you hear a lot in Singapore, at least not from my experience. I have malay friends, and I have indian friends. Sure, the malays hang out with the malays, and the indians hang out with the indians a lot. However, that does not necessarily mean that the different groups have anything against each other for the most part, you know. That was the common assumption that I held for the most part, until I had a conversation with a friend yesterday regarding the topic of race, and I was just surprised at how faceless racism can be. By that, I mean it is impossible to tell who is racist and who is not by how they look like, you know. Racist people do not have a certain way that they look, and at such everybody can potentially be a racist until proven otherwise. I met this friend of mine over dinner yesterday by chance, and we were just talking about the people here in the United States when she started telling me about how terrified she is of black people, something that I couldn't help by pry into after she confessed her fears. You'd think that a Singaporean would be more educated about how irrational racism is, but apparently not in this person's case.

This friend of mine started telling me, in great lengths, about how she has issues with malays in Singapore as well as black people in the United States. She used the word "hate" when it comes to malays, and she started telling me about how they have an awful sense of fashion, and that their antics "disgust" her. She has been known to make very generalizing views about things, and she isn't exactly an abyss of vocabularies when it comes to choosing the right words. Yet, when you are using the word "hate" and a race in the same sentence, you should know that you are crossing the line. At any rate, her dislike for malays could very well be attributed to stereotypes, in which case is a mental compartmentalizing tool that has some truth in them sometimes. However, she started telling me about why she dislikes the black people, and that really threw me off at just how real and alive racism is. She started going on and on about how the black people has scary faces, and that they look menacing somehow (the word "menacing" wasn't what she used, but I am sure that word does not exist in her word bank). I started prying into this part of the conversation, and she continued to rationalize her arguments. Yet, the more she tried, the harder she fell flat on her face in front of my impeccable arguments.

She mentioned about how she'd purposely take a detour if she sees a black person walking towards her around school, just because some of them look scary to her. I argued that only the kind of black people that rushes at you in the middle of the night while you are alone along an empty stretch of road can be considered as scary, but she pretty much assumes all of them as being the kind of person trying to stab her for whatever reasons. She seems to have a thing against short and stubby black women especially, claiming them to be the scariest of them all. In terms of crimes, she said that the people that commit crimes are usually black people, and we can see that from the crimes section in The Spectrum, where the descriptions are always of someone with "dark skin". Seriously, though, that was probably one of the most preposterous statements that I have heard in a while, and I still cannot wrap my head around the idea that it all came out of the mouth of someone who has lived in Singapore all her life, a place where diversity is celebrated. Even more shocking is the fact that she is a college student, a portion of our society that is supposed to be the most educated, and the most well-informed. I mean, shouldn't education change that narrow mindedness over the years that she has been in school?

You cannot argue for racism, you just can't. There is no way in which you can try to rationalize racism, because anything will fall flat against logic no matter how you see it. Racism, along with religion, really shouldn't be something that can be argued about, because they are both so ridiculous and stupid that it is laughable. Yet, those are two of the so-called "sensitive" topics that people tend to keep a hush-hush about, something which I do not completely understand. It is like the statement of "pigs flying" being a debate, when it really shouldn't be. Whether or not it is true that black people are scary, for example, is like the debate of whether or not pigs can really fly - it is no argument at all, really. My point is that racism is so stupid that it will not stand against someone with a set of basic logic, and that it shouldn't even be a debate whatsoever. But there are still people in this world who are terribly afraid of a particular race because, well, they are. They'd say that they are not racists, and they'd find a dozen different other reasons why they have a certain prejudice against a certain group of people. But the truth is that they are not fooling anybody but themselves, to deny the part of their minds that screams racist in a dozen different languages.

I expressed my disgust for racist people to this friend of mine, and I told her that she is disgusting for thinking that way. What is even stranger is how she apologized for her racist views, and then used the excuse "I cannot help it" to explain everything that she has said. I do not deny that at that moment, I wanted to walk away from where we were. But still, I didn't want to make a big deal out of the situation, because it'd seem rather petty of me to discredit everything else about this friend of mine that makes her a friend of mine, if you know what I mean. I believe that "I cannot help it" or "I am like that" is never an excuse for anything at all, especially when it comes to racism. You don't admit that you are a racist and not do anything about it. I mean, it is too convenient to do that, and it's kinda like how a slob would lay on his back all day and do nothing, and seems to warrant himself in doing so by claiming that he is "like that", and "cannot help it". It's disgusting how people like that can use their own personality and character as an excuse to racism, when nothing should ever be an excuse to racism at all. If you were gang raped by twelve black guys, maybe I see a reason why you'd have a certain distain for them, although I will still condemn it. However, this friend of mine does not even have a good reason to feel that way about black people - she just does.

The truth is that whatever that we believe about another group of people, that group of people probably also have a preconceived idea about how Chinese people are like. We are, after all, the minority here in the United States, and people here are going to look at us differently no matter how hard we try. People are going to assume that we are all nerds, that we all talk funny, that we all like to eat dogs, and that we do not shower very often. It'd hurt me immensely if somebody thinks that I look weird or scary just because of my race, because race is really just a state of mind, if anything at all. I can understand if cultures clash, and that we have disagreements between the different cultures. However, to write me off just because of the color of my skin, that is something that is immature and unfair in every shape or form. You simply do not make assumptions about a person just because of the color of his or her skin, when we are exactly the same underneath it all. If we peel away our skins, we are not going to be able to differentiate between different races of people. It sucks that we do not have a word to replace "race", no euphemisms this time to take over this horrible word that tears us apart. I guess it is how we deal with the word that is the most important, and I guess some people are just too immature to understand that racism is such a disgusting trait to have.

You would expect someone from Singapore and with a college education, in today's day and age, to have a better understanding that we live in a multicultural society, and everybody in this world are blending in together. People of different races are marrying each other, people are having children with one another, and who knows one day when there won't be a difference in skin color at all. That'd probably happen in a few thousand years, and not something that we can look forward to in our lifetime. However, it is something that we should always be striving for, even if it is something that we'll achieve in the physical form in our lifetime. I am not saying that we should all pro-create with someone of a different race other than our own. I'm just saying that there really shouldn't be a barrier of race when it comes to liking or loving somebody, you know? I asked this same friend of mine if she'd mind if she meets the perfect guy, but he is malay. She immediately brushed him off, and told me that she'd never even consider it, because she really dislikes malays. I mean, I think it'd make more sense if you want your husband to be rich, to be a certain religion (even this is pushing it), or of a certain nationality (for practical reasons). But if you are going to discredit someone for his or her race, it doesn't make any sense at all.

I am with someone who is half malay and half chinese right now, and she is the most amazing girl that I have ever met in my life. The both of us have already put aside a great many differences that some people may consider to be obstacles in a relationship, and I think for that we have achieved a lot. Sure, we have the age difference, and it is always interesting to know that she is a Catholic and I am an atheist. There are probably stranger combinations out there, but this is pretty unlikely by itself, you know. I've been rejected based on my beliefs (or non-beliefs), and I've never been the kind of person to impose any sort of beliefs on the person that I am with. I think if we can just look pass these trivial things in life, whether or not it is religion, wealth, or the color of our skin, we will be able to achieve a greater understanding. If Neptina is a malay, I'd still fall head over heels for her, no matter what. My liking for her has got absolutely nothing to do with whether or not she is a chinese, a malay, or a bit of both. Neptina's last name could very well be "Azikiwe", and she could very well be from Zimbabwe, I really cannot care less. How do people say that they'd never love a certain group of people is simply beyond me.

Racism is stupid, and I am thankful that I am in the crowd that believes that it is. I don't want to be on the other side of the fence, the side with all the bigots that are freaking out because he or she is in a room full of members of a different race. To be honest, I no longer feel like I am a Chinese in a country full of white people, you know. I mean, every once in a while, I do realize that I am in the minority, especially when the lecturer asks about it or when I am being asked about where I am from. I can understand stereotypes, because I can easily discredit stereotypes. Racism, however, that is something entirely different altogether. Racism has deep claws, and it sinks in real deep into the skin and flesh if it so wishes. You cannot expect to change a person's attitude over a short period of time, because it just doesn't work that way. Perhaps if someone of a different race rescues you from a burning car that you are trapped in, maybe that'd change your perspectives just a little bit. But it just disgusts me that such a primitive belief that black people are inferior or, "scary" as my friend put it, still exists in our world today is beyond me. More than anything, I wish for a world without division, and we can all recognize that we really are not a bunch of different people, but one species as a whole. But of course, stupid people are aplenty, and they are everywhere. What more can we do than to wait for the world to change?

Pixels

2009-11-08T07:14:00.002+08:00

Pixels

I refer to myself as a "victim" when it comes to long distance relationships, and I use the word "victim" because the definition of it seems to fit with my current situation. The definition of the word "victim" refers to any person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other events or action. In this case, the so-called "event" seems to be my time spent away from my loved ones back home, and the part of me that has been harmed or injured as a result is probably my heart. Long distance relationship is a tricky thing, and it's kinda like trying to untangle and oiled ball of wires. I've never expected myself to be involved in a long distance relationship, and a part of my criteria for a girlfriend before I officially found Neptina was that she'd have to stay close to me. It is strange, and it may not make sense to everybody out there, and some people may attribute it to the fact that I haven't got a car or a license to boot. Yet, if you think about it, even if you do have a car to drive your girlfriend home everyday, having her live on the other side of the country (literally) is still going to be quite a hassle. Love conquers a lot of things, but it can only do so much when the money it takes to pump those petrol starts to burn a hole in your pocket. That is when it slaps you in the face, and you wish that your girlfriend lives underneath your unit in the same condominium.

I still think Pasir Ris is very far away from where I stay in Singapore, but I have become quite accustomed to traveling the distance, thanks to the straight bus between our homes. Distance no longer is an obstacle, and I have now thought myself to be somewhat silly to consider that to be a criteria at all. After all, no matter how far you go, you are still within the same country, and the road in front of your house eventually leads to her house, if you are determined enough to travel it by foot. The distance can be conquered, and I suppose I have conquered it both physically and mentally many times over. However, nothing that we've ever done in the past could have prepared us for this long distance relationship, something which is most commonly heard in relationship horror stories. Chances of survival are small, and the odds are usually against you when it comes to long distance relationship. We've heard it many times before, those stories about couples breaking up after being away from each other for too long. Sometimes, it doesn't even have to be a long haul, like a year or two away from each other. Some couples do not operate very well with distance I suppose, and it isn't something that can be blamed for the most part. Long distance relationship, before this, was like a fable of sorts that I've never considered.

As mentioned before, the decision to come to Buffalo was made a long time ago, way before even Neptina came along into my life as a mere friend. The plot thickened when I became romantically involved with her, and the situation then became a little complicated. As much as I wanted to remain behind and keep as far away as possible from being a victim of a long distance relationship, I knew in the back of my mind that I had to do it. You know, to move away from my comfort zone, to toss myself into a foreign territory without a map or a compass. In truth, I came over to Buffalo without much planning and not a lot of luggage to speak of. I probably had the lightest luggage as compared to my three other friends who came over with me. In my mind, I wanted to start from square one with just a pocket full of cash and a lot of guts to boast. Perhaps I wanted to learn that way, to cut off all conveniences and luxuries, and to start from the very beginning of things. That might explain why I also bought the most daily necessities the moment we touched down in Buffalo, and how I also spent the most money on things like lamps, bedsheets, electric kettle, and all that kinda things. I came over here pretty much with my bare hands, and I suppose that was what I was aiming at - the fastest way to grow out of my shell.

I wanted to do all those, and I think I have achieved all those. I have had a lot of time to mentally prepare myself I suppose, all the way from the very beginning of my college life up until the moment when I left. Yet, I didn't factor in the possibility of being with somebody in the midst of my college life at all. I expected to leave my friends and family behind for months, but a girlfriend never came to me while I was trying to mentally prepare myself. After all, the way that Neptina and I was completely due to chance and some strange mathematical miracle in some ways, and we still constantly talk about how things could have been different if 1) I was late 2) She was late 3) I was a pervert. At any rate, her presence in my life, though welcomed, was something I failed to see when I was trying to prepare myself. I was not prepared to play the role of a victim in a long distance relationship, not ready to deal with the fact that we will be in different time zones and on completely different continents altogether. It was a daunting thought at the beginning, and I remembered all the horror stories that my friends have ever told me. Even the stronger couples that I have known in the past did not stand the test of both distance and time. Many have faltered, though some have survived. The trouble is, though, that you don't have a manual for such things, and you can't help but feel like you are going out into uncharted territories with your eyes blindfolded. After a step or two, it becomes terrifying.

I admit that for the most part of the trip to Buffalo from Singapore, my mind was both too tired and too excited to think about the growing distance between myself and Neptina. The plane ride went by in a daze of sorts, and it was punctuated mostly by food from the stewardesses and the various sleeping positions that I adopted throughout the trip. Even the first day or two in Buffalo failed to leave a mark on me, and I thought I was able to handle it. Perhaps it was the fatigue, or the surrealistic feel of everything around me. Even two days into my trip here, I still found it difficult to believe that I have made it this far on my own, by myself. At any rate, it was not until a week into my stay here in a foreign land did the nail hit deep enough into my chest. The pain of distance is the kind of excruciating pain that you cannot extinguish simply by thinking of happy thoughts. The voice of your loved ones over the phone doesn't help very much either because it only serves to remind you just how far away you are from everything that you have grown to love and care for. At least that was how I felt, away from everybody and everything back home, completely alone and scared out of my wits. It took a while to sink in, but there were nights when it would sink in too deep, and I'd tear uncontrollably about being away for so long.

But, like cockroaches, we have adapted to this distance, and I am glad to say that we are doing OK, something that we constantly remind ourselves of. I cannot help but wonder how the generation of our parents remained in communication in the past. That was a generation when "love letter" perhaps meant more than what it means to us, somehow. I am thankful for the internet, and have remained in contact through phone calls over Skype as well as video conferences. We've kept a blog on Tumblr to update each other on what has been going on in each others' lives, as well as our own common blog to record random little nothings from the back of our very vibrant minds. Aside from all of those, we've been writing letters despite the fact that it seems to take forever to reach each other. My latest letter, a physical one mind you, was actually sent mistakenly to Osaka because of a postage screw-up on their part and not mine. On nights when we are both free to do so, we'd even turn on our Skype throughout the night so that the other person could watch and look over. It may seem like too much work just to keep in contact, and may seem redundant to some people. But it is something that comforts me immensely, even if I am the one doing the looking.

It is comforting to know that when you wake up in the middle of the night, the person that you love is going to be right next to your on your bed, in some shape or form. It's not that I wake up in my bed screaming because of a nightmare or anything like that, because I haven't had that kind of thing for a long time now. But it is still comforting sometimes to hear Neptina doing something on her side of the world, whether or not it is the sound of her typing something on her laptop, or the sound of the television from the living room. I'd recognize some of the advertisements and television shows sometimes even when I am sleeping soundly, and these are just some of the things that reminds me that things are still going on back home, and very much alive while I am gone. I suppose we all need this kind of reminder every once in a while, something to tell you that things back home are exactly the same as how you left them, that everything is going to be all right. At any rate, I'd leave my computer turned on for hours on end, and she'd be the same floating head in the morning when I wake up as the floating head that waved goodnight to me the night before. Even when the bed is empty on her side of the world, she'd literally bounce into view and greet me cheerfully.

On weekends like today, when I haven't got a reason to be in school at all, she'd be the one sleeping while I mind my own business throughout the day, watching over her. Perhaps it is the fact that she prefers to turn all the lights in her bedroom off, which invites a great many vivid imaginations to brew in one's head. Neptina wakes up more often than I do in the middle of the night, and there were times in the past when she'd call me on the phone just because she had a nightmare of sorts. I've never actually watched over somebody like this before, because I'd usually succumb to my own fatigue halfway through the first ten minutes or so. This time, however, I can watch over her without the fear of falling asleep myself, and it has been a comforting thing to do. To see the person that you love in pixelated form, shuffling in between the sheets, her hair sprawled on the pillow like river systems that we've studied in geography so long ago. On nights when the lights from the laptop monitor is enough to reach her body, you'd be able to see her chest moving up and down to every breath that she takes, and then there are those moments when you'd see the tiny glitter in her half-opened eyes, with the eyeballs rolling around inside, hinting a dream in the back of her mind.

Sometimes, with a groan and a stretch, she'd wake up in the middle of the night for a variety of reasons. A nightmare sometimes, but mostly when nature calls, Neptina would always turn to me and I'd be there, checking up on her. She told me once that she never used to sleep with her back facing the outside of the bed, and always the side with the wall. With the laptop turned on and my floating head constantly hovering around, she has been able to sleep while she faces the other side, and she feels more secure because of that. It is silly, maybe, but it makes me feel as if I am doing my job protecting her somehow, even if there really isn't much to protect her from other than the wild imaginations of the night. I get more pleasure out of watching her, really, the way that her breathing would sometimes takeover the music from my Macbook, rising and falling like a natural symphony orchestra, and those rare moments when she'd murmur something in her sleep. We have been doing this for a great many nights now, and we have also taken pictures of each other sleeping. I hate the look on my face when I sleep, and I think I look like a corpse while sleeping, truth be told. She says the same thing about herself, but I truly believe that there isn't a more peaceful sight than the one of your lover asleep next to you.

I suppose when it comes to a long distance relationship, no one can safely say that they are very good at it. A friend of mine could have been called an expert at long distance relationships, but even his relationship disintegrated after four years of trying, with one of them in Singapore and the other in Australia. It's like the idea of having a "love doctor", an oxymoron by itself, because I don't think any of us are authorities on this issue at all. We are all trying to feel our way through long distance relationships, and we are also hoping that it will not get to the better part of what we hold to be precious and true. It is a tricky thing, as I started this blog entry with, and it certainly makes victims out of a lot of people, a lot of the time. What we can do is to work out an equation that fits both parties, knowing that it'd work within those boundaries. The truth is that there's no one else I'd rather be in a long distance relationship than Neptina, because no one else is worth the trouble and worth the time. I suppose she, as well as the thing that we share, are just too important for geography to take over, you know. Even if the both of us exist to each other mainly in the form of pixels, even if the clarity of our images are dictated solely by external forces like the internet connection, we still try, and we still try our very best. In more ways than one, that seems to be the only way for us to reach into the screen, to break the fourth wall literally, and it seems to have worked out so far. In pixels or not, I still love my girlfriend in high or low resolution.

Singapore

2009-11-08T05:53:00.002+08:00

Singapore

I think humans are creature that are difficult to satisfy by nature. I remember a quote by Abraham Lincoln that I've heard in class before about how you can satisfy all of the people some of the times, some of the people some of the times. However, you can never satisfy all of the people all of the times. I think the concept that there is always something missing can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, you could wallow in your own inadequacies, knowing that there is always a chip missing from everything, thus dooming you to an unfulfilled life. Or, you could always use that as a motivation to strive for better things in life. Such is the reason why "good enough" should never be "good enough", simply because being good enough makes human beings incompetent, it sometimes makes us lazy. When you have everything properly laid out for you, when everything has been beautifully planned out for you, you start to wonder if this facade of order has something more sinister brewing underneath. I do not speak of some governmental controversy or anything of that sort, but the idea that something is missing in the picture-perfect quality of everything around you. I am not sure about you, but I sometimes wonder if the completeness of Singapore gives anybody else out there a feeling that something is missing, despite everything falling into the right places and spaces.

I have been in Buffalo for a couple of months now, and I suppose there are moments in the silence of your bedroom in the dead of the night when your mind allows you a few moments to ponder and meditate about things. Buffalo, being in the suburbs and all, it leaves a lot of place for silence, especially when you are awake at three in the morning. Despite the parties on Friday and weekends, there are times in a month when everybody is in agreement that "enough is enough", and they restrain themselves to loud music on their earphones, and the beer cans are kept in cartons in the fridge. Silent nights like that make you think about what has come to pass, and has yet to come to pass, and the present state of things. Buffalo is a great place to ran away to, with its large expense of farms and cold weather in the winter, it feels like the perfect place to cuddle at home with your loved ones. It isn't exactly the kind of place you'd expect to see bustling life, or a city life for that matter. The term "downtown" is a gross overstatement when it comes to Buffalo, as you really only see life along the streets on very specific days of the year. Say, the Halloween night, when all the false ghosts and spirits come out to party till the early hours of the morning. Other than that, Buffalo is a nice quiet town, tucked away in the corner of the state of New York, away from the Big Apple and all that jazz.

People always say great things about the foreign cities that they've been to, and then in return diss about the county that they came from. In retaliation, many people back home would argue that the reason you feel that other cities are superior to your own is because you haven't been there long enough to understand the differences of it all. You know, if you take a week or two and visit a country in in Europe, for example, you are going to fall in love with that place, and feel that your own countries lacks everything that is good about Europe. Certainly, there are things in Europe that are just completely unwired, things that don't necessarily make sense. I was talking to an Italian classmate of mine one day when she told me about how bad the firefighters are in southern Italy. When there is a fire, they take their time to reach the scene with their fire engines, and it's not like the people bother very much in giving way either. She told me about how there was this one time when she saw fire engines parked a few blocks away from the scene of the fire, simply because a man inside a restaurant illegally parked his car in a way that blocked the road for the fire engines. So yes, there are benefits in living in a civilized and modern society, and you shouldn't complain when you have the convenience in everything.

That is what people would tell you anyway, to "not compare" and "not complain". I mean, personally speaking, Singapore is considered a first-world country with first-world, well, everything. The country constantly boast about its ports, its airports, its economy, or at least that is what National Day parades are for anyway. It is a grandiose form of masturbation, when in the end you are still screwing your own palm anyway. Nobody can deny the achievements of the Singaporean government, and even more amazing and just how much they have accomplished in such a little time. Yet, if you really think about it, people in Singapore tend to have the concept that the grass is greener on the other side. At least a lot of people that I have talked to tend to feel that way about certain things. There is no questions about the concept of home in their minds, because Singapore is always going to be seen as a home to them, since most of them were born there and everything. I, however, am in a very curious position and thus, have a very unique perspective on things. Taiwan is where I was born, yet I spent the better part of my life in Singapore, as a student, as a soldier, as a citizen. I cannot honestly feel that Taiwan is my only home, because I only go back once every year after all. And as for Singapore, as much as I have been a part of the society, I've always found it easy to distinguish myself from a great part of the society over there.

Complete integration has never happened to me in either of the countries that I have spent the most time in, which is a strange thing for anybody. You want to feel a sense of affiliation, any for of affiliation, to a country even if it means betrayal. I mean, there is a reason why you can only be a citizen of one country at any given time officially, because the government wants to know who you are rooting for at the end of the day. Yet, for me, I find it somewhat difficult to find either place a place that I want to settle down permanently. Taiwan is obviously alien in some ways to me because the country has developed and grown without me being around most of the time. I moved to Singapore when I was five years old, and things are always changing and evolving back home whenever I go back. I've lived in Singapore for eighteen years, but I feel so uninvolved in a great many things, and I do not share many visions that the education system and the government attempts to shove down our throats. I feel like I have been a part of both countries, and yet integration isn't something that I have come to terms with fully. With that said, I have found the concept of home in both islands, which further complicates the situation in some ways.

That is also the reason why I've always been the kind of person who'd jump at the chance of going overseas, even if it is somewhere close, like Indonesia or Thailand. Perhaps it is an attempt to find somewhere that suits my way of life, or my ideology, whatever that you call it. At any rate, while I have fallen in love with the scenery and food of Thailand, it isn't a place that I'd like to settle down for real, you know. There is a difference between a good holiday destination, and a good place to call home. I suppose it is true what Zach Braff's character said in Garden State, when he said that the idea of home is merely a state of the mind. It isn't something physical, it isn't something tangible. You could own a physical property, a real house with four walls and a roof with everything inside carefully furnished and renovated. Yet, a house could still remain as a house and not a home, if you know what I mean. I still call my apartment in Buffalo my "apartment" or "house", because to call it "home" would be far-fetched, considering the drugs lying around the kitchen every now and then. Anyway, as much as I have liked those places, I've always looked forward to going back at the end of the trip.

Now that I have spent a considerable amount of time on this side of the fence, I suppose I am qualified enough to make an observation or two about this place. I love this country, what it has to offer, and its people. Despite being in the midst of adjusting to the culture, I really like this place a lot. So much is the same in Singapore and so much is different, and it is sometimes difficult to pin-point any one aspect of things. Perhaps the malls and the supermarkets are somewhat similar, save for the significant difference in size. The lifestyles and the cultures, however, are completely different over here. Even when you are talking about a small comic book store, you start to realize that people here just treat other people differently. You can say that the people here are generally nicer, at least that is what I can say through my own experiences. I have been on this side of the fence for a while now, and nobody back home can say that I haven't been overseas long enough to know how good my home country is. Well I have been here for some time now, survived on my own accord and lived by my own standards. I've done everything on my own and for myself, which in many ways qualifies me to be a judge of a great many things between the two places.

It is perhaps harsh to say this, but I've recently realized that there isn't a lot in Singapore for me to hold on to if I were to leave it forever. I will say one thing, though, that I love Singaporeans. I think the Singaporeans that I know, my friends and loved one(s), are the only reason why I would want to stay there. The people in Singapore are the best thing about Singapore, and everything else to me pales in comparison. It would be difficult for me to summarize "the people of Singapore" into one sentence, or a paragraph for that matter. Sometimes, people over here would ask you about how is Singapore like as a country, and I almost always start with everything else but the people. The reason for that is because it is difficult to group Singaporeans into one classification for the most part, because they are so diverse and similar at the very same time. There are a great many people that I have met in the course of my life, many of them are awesome people, they are all Singaporeans. I love the people that I have met for the most part, the friends that I have had the pleasure to be acquainted with, and not to mention the awesome girlfriend that I have had the pleasure to fall in love with. Other than the people, though, I do wonder why I even bother at times.

This isn't a love letter to Singapore at any rate, perhaps just a love letter to its people. If there is a way to take everybody in Singapore and put them in the United States, I'd gladly stay here forever. You cannot blame Singapore entirely though, because there are shortfalls that it simply cannot change. For example, the weather remains the same for the most part, there aren't a lot of natural attractions to look at, and there island is so small that it is physically possible to walk from one point to the other within the span of a day if you so wish. Singapore is a tiny, tiny island that has focused much of its efforts in the past decades on economic growth, something which makes a whole lot of sense for the most part. Yet, having been to many cities around the world, I've always felt that the modernization of Singapore has killed any form of art or culture in the city. Everything is about growth, growth, growth, and so little is left to preservation and conservation. Even the natural reserves and the old relics are properly maintained and kept neat and tidy. It is an awesome place to go back to, but it isn't a place that anybody would want to settle down in forever.

Perhaps if you give Singapore a few more decades, some form of art and culture would be able to seep through. I mean, how much emphasis has been placed upon the art scene in Singapore anyway? If you are a musician in Singapore, you are probably doing it, most likely, as a hobby and not as a career. It will go nowhere unless you go beyond the boundaries of your country, and that is what I feel to be so suffocating about the place sometimes. Suffocating, because more than just the physical limitations of the country, the opportunities that it provides in terms of art and expression is like a blip to the ones offered in other parts of the world. What I am trying to say is that although I really want to go back to Singapore at this point in time, there is a significant part of me who also want to stay. Of course, I also want Neptina, my friends and family to come along as well. I don't want to be selfish and decide to stay here when I have left everybody else behind. I love the people, and I love the way that I am with the people in Singapore. If taken away from the rest of the population, I'd probably shoot myself in Singapore, no doubt. Singapore isn't nearly as great as Singaporeans, and I am not even sure if that makes any sense. Anyway, I am ready to go home, and yet I am not willing to leave this great country. It is a conflict and a dilemma that I deal with from time to time, especially when the future hangs in the balance of things, you know.

Growing Up

2009-11-07T10:04:00.002+08:00

Growing Up

I think I have come to the juncture of this journey, this very long journey to the more unfamiliar side of the planet, when a lesson should be learned from it all. There are two parts in any journey that you decide to take in life, whether or not it is the kind of journey you have to pack for, and the kind that goes on inside the boundaries of your mind. There is the part before you realize what the journey is all about, and then the part after you realize what the journey is all about - and that's it. You cannot draw a line anywhere in between those boundaries to create a new direction or a new goal, because it doesn't work that way. I don't suppose such a point of enlightenment happens at the same time for everybody, but I guess this is about the right time for me personally. You know, having lived away from my family and friends for the better part of the year, it is about time when I find out what this is all about. All of the journeys and all of the thought processes boil down to this one idea that is embedded amidst many things that occur in our lives, especially the kind that entails a sort of lesson to learn. People always say that if there isn't something to learn from doing something, then it isn't worth doing. That is true, and especially so in this very curious crossroad in my life.

I have come to a conclusion that more than just an opportunity to visit new cities, to meet new people, and to experience a weather system that is like the one in Singapore on speed, it is more about growing up and being independent. There seems to be a difference between knowing what to do to grow up and to actually be in the process of growing up. On the brink of this journey, I've always known that I needed to do this thing no matter how much the other half of my heart may try to persuade me to stay. As much as it was a rather impromptu decision made on my part to come over to Buffalo, it was a decision that I knew that I had to stick with, and to see the end of it with my own eyes. I remember the beginning of my college life back in Singapore when I was first presented with the opportunity to come over. When asked about if I wanted to come over to Buffalo to continue my studies, I remember telling people that I'd definitely be going. But that was about three years before the actual trip alone, and for three years I told people that I'd be traveling overseas for my studies. It was somewhat embarrassing when asked the question of "when", and the answer would be "in 2009". Now that I am in the present tense of things, I am truly glad that I made the decision to come over.

The afternoon of October the 30th five years ago was the day I thought that I'd die in the next two years. That was the day when I received my enlistment letter from the army, something that the majority of the guys in Singapore would have experienced. I remember the weakness in my knees and the confusion in my mind. It was a day that I'd not soon forget, because of the intense fear that I had for the days to come. I was positive that I'd die in the army, and I am not talking about it in the figurative sort of way. I was certain that the training would actually deal physical harm to my body, so much so that I'd die out in the fields like a great many horror stories I have heard about it. Then again, if my self-imposed prophecy actually came true, I wouldn't still be here writing about it, now would I? I worried a lot about the army back then, so much so that I forgot to understand that even the worst of things can turn out to be the best way to grow up, to learn something about yourself. I am grateful for the times I had in the army, though that is not to say that I want to throw myself into a camp again. I am thankful for what I have learned, the experiences that I have gained, and the friends that I have made along the way. If there is a single most powerful event that changed my outlook on life, that'd be it.

Yet, those weren't the things that went through my head when I tore the corners of that letter on that gloomy October afternoon. I was in a state of shock and fear, the kind that comes along when you are unsure of the unknown. As much as people would try to tell you about how life is like in the military, you never really know until you go through with it. I suppose the only thing that I would change if I have a chance would be to stop worrying so much, and just put my head down and deal with one thing at a time. I didn't realize the purpose of it all back then, but I was also much younger and more naive about things. It was impossible for my young mind to comprehend that even the worst events could be life-altering back then. If I have a chance, I'd probably go back and tell the younger version of myself that there really isn't much for me to worry about - because there wasn't. There were a lot of nasty things that happened in the next two years for me, but at least I've never actually been seriously harmed in any way shape or form. I've been through many things that people have seldom even heard about, and those are the things that really shaped me into the person that I am today.

There are only so many opportunities in one person's life to make a difference, I suppose, and traveling abroad to study is just one of those things that comes along. It is a totally different ball game now, something completely different from the military. Sure, you don't have a time to wake up and a time to go to sleep, and you certainly don't have a sergeant screaming down your throat just because you forgot to do a certain step when your round gets stuck in the chamber of your rifle. You don't have routines to follow, or at least not the stringent kind that is reinforced in the military. Yet, all the way over here, you are torn away from your family and friends, and forced to learn and adapt to a culture that you are alien to for the most part. No matter how much people would tell you that Singapore is a very westernized country, it is still not the same, you know. Nothing back home is going to prepare you for what is outside of your front door, as I'd like to put it. Everything outside of the comfort of your own home is a comfort that takes time to get used to, even if it is not too comfortable. I do not have meals prepared for me three times a day like I used to in the military, and I certainly miss the idea that I could go home every Friday and over the weekend just to meet my family and friends all over again.

Pros and cons, I suppose, a sense of balance to things. I've heard the saying before that you never want to get too comfortable in life, and in some ways I do believe in that. It is conflicting, in a way, especially when I do consider myself a creature of comfort, somebody who enjoys a certain continuity in his life that involves the same level of comfort and familiarity. Then again, once in a while, you start to wonder what is outside of your window, of your estate, of the borders of your country. At least that is what I thought about when I signed up to come over to Buffalo. I enjoy the convenience, but even that becomes boring after some time. Singapore is a well-organized country, with great infrastructure, with clean streets, with a well-planned public transport system, and pretty much everything that you'd possible want in a modern first-world city. Yet, I cannot help but realize that if I were to take a few people from Singapore and bring them to Buffalo, I'd not miss that country a great deal at all. Aside from the people, a small handful of them, there really isn't much in Singapore for me to hold on to, truth be told. That is not to say that I'd want to stay here forever, of course, because you can't just shift people around like they are pieces in a board game. However, I do wonder the possibilities and the implications.

Anyway, growing up is a terrifying thing. I think there is an age that you grow up to when you realize that it is no joke anymore. I know of friends older than myself, and I do sometimes wonder how they are taking it into stride, you know. Growing old doesn't necessarily mean growing up, and some people would consider the former to be a whole lot scarier. Perhaps the girls would think that way, but not so much to me. I suppose it is a guy thing to fear less about growing older, because they always say that men have a long expiry date as compared to women. At any rate, I feel that growing up is a much scarier process than growing old, simply because of the kind of decisions that you have to make in life, and the responsibilities that come along with it. This is the last year of college, and then the working life comes swiftly afterwards. Of course, I still have the option to go back to graduate school if I so wish, to take up a diploma or a minor somewhere else if I want to. There are opportunities for everybody in the country to further their studies somewhere, and such a route isn't exactly uncommon for the most part. Yet, being on the edge of something this major, it does become really daunting for the most part. Growing up is pretty damn scary, and I suppose that is just the eighteen year old inside of me speaking.

You know, the same eighteen year old who tore open that letter and got a fright of his life. The truth is that I don't think any of us should worry too much about how our lives will eventually turn out. Sure, it helps to have a plan of sorts to get you going, but having a plan doesn't mean that one should worry too much about whether it will pan out or not. I am not saying that we should just stay at home and blend into your couch and have roots sprouting from your butt anytime soon. What I am saying is that we don't always have to worry about everything in our lives, because life works itself out if you have a rough general direction in things. Worrying too much isn't going to get us anywhere, because you are just going to be running around in circles. I think I have learned enough in my own life, through the not-so-considerable amount of experiences, that all we have to do is to put our chins down to our chest and get through whatever that we need to get through. Step by step, bit by bit, and somehow it is going to work out anyway.

The mistake that I made before the life in the army started was to worry way too much about pretty much everything. I worried about my writing, my hobbies, my life, my relationship with people, and all of those things that came into my very limited brain capacity at once. I say, to just deal with what we have to deal right now and worry about other things later. Growing up is scary, but not so scary when you divide and conquer, you know? Besides, if there is one thing that I have learned, it is that if everybody else is in the same shit as you, then it isn't so scary anymore. Everybody is growing up, and everybody is growing old. Most of the people I know are the same age as I am, and there are people who are always around to help out if you need it. That is the kind of comfort that I have, at this point, knowing that people will always be watching out for me, one way or another.

Donations, Part Two

2009-10-16T12:56:00.005+08:00

Donations, Part Two

It is something that we probably all do on the streets. Or rather, there are a couple of things that we do when we are in the situation. Picture yourself walking down Orchard Road, minding your own business, and something catches your attention in your peripheral sight. A human figure with a circular object in his or her hands, and neither the object nor the gender can be made out just yet. You keep on walking because you don't want to seem abnormal or weird to anybody else to stop suddenly. Your brain is still trying to process who the unidentified person and the object is, and your natural reflexes is steering you away from it because you just want to be careful, you want to make sure. If it is someone who is trying to mug you, you want to be far enough to dash, right? Anyway, that person is now moving towards you, and you can see him or her through your peripheral vision. Oh no, you think to yourself. It is one of those students trying to ask me for a donation on the streets again, and you are not far enough from that person to divert your path. You try to engage in an emergency maneuver by turning on the balls of your feet, but it is too late now. The student is right in front of you, a can pushed into your face and asking for some donation. Notes would be great, but coins are heavier. This sucks, you think to yourself, but you can't help it. The vulture has its peak in your skin, and the only way for you to get away from it is to let it tear your skin off.

At least that was how I was when I was met with a student asking for donations on the streets. The students don't care, and I know because I was a student myself. They just want to get it over and done with, and most of the adults don't really care either. We are an apathetic society for the most part, and the idea of fishing out money to put into a can just doesn't appeal to us very much. At any rate, I used to be the kind of guy who'd put some loose change into those cans either to get rid of loose change in my pocket or to get rid of the student altogether. Then, of course, I learned to give exact changes and to smile while rejecting the students outright. I haven't been donating to students out on a mission in town for a long time, and I do not consider myself a charitable person at all. In times of crisis, of course, I do consider myself to be helpful. I've donated to victims of natural disasters before, not to mention how I emptied my wallet for the children of the orphanage in India. I'm not trying to boast, but I'm just saying that there are times when I am willing to give, you know. But money is just money, they are just plastics people use to trade with in our society. My mother always say that a problem that can be solved by money isn't a problem. Well, giving money to those that actually need it really isn't that big a problem, in truth.

So here's the thing, I surprised myself at how fast I agreed to donating my organs when my friend asked about it. The same friend who asked me to donate blood in the previous entry asked me to donate my organs just because it gives him even more extra credits. It is for a public relations course, and I really have no idea what this has to do with that. Anyhow, I earn myself a free lunch as promised by him, so why not fill up a form for it? Perhaps it is the idea of not giving something right on the spot, like how you would donate money right off the bat when asked for on the streets. It isn't something that you would lose straight away, and I guess that was the reason - at least in the back of my head - why I thought it'd be OK to donate my organs if something bad ever happens to me. Though, as a Singaporean citizen, you are automatically an organ donor, apparently. You can fill out a form to say that you don't want to be a donor, or else we are all donors, if you don't already know. So, it felt like donating my hair for a cause or something, because we are already chopping off our hair when it is too long anyway, you know? It felt right, but at the same time it felt strange when I received the application card where I had to pick which part of my body I want to be dug out when I die. That was a strange experience, I can tell you that.

Here's the thing, there are a list of things that you can donate even if you are a corpse. Well, preferably, they'd like you to be a fresh corpse, because your organs would still be dazed and confused about whether or not you are dead. That is the perfect time to dig them out and then transplant it into somebody else's body to keep that person alive. It all makes sense, and people need organ transplants on a daily basis. There are lists in every single hospital in the world, I'm sure, of patients waiting for organs to be donated. But, of course, people don't donate their organs everyday, and organ donors don't die out fast enough. There simply aren't enough organs to go around in this world, which is why the black market for organs thrives so well. Anyway, so you get a card that talks about the concept of donating your organs and everything. The name, the age, and all that kind of basic information gets filled out first. Underneath that, you have to pick from a list of organs that you'd like to donate when you are dead. "Donate" is just a nicer way of saying that they need your body parts for other living people, since you are on your death bed or dead. They have the option of donating everything (which is capitalized), or to donate your chosen organ from a list of organs with little check boxes next to each of them.

Here is a list of things in your body that you can donate: Heart, heart valves, lungs, liver, intestines, femoral and saphenous veins, tendons, bones, skin, pancreas, kidneys, eyes and corneas. Now, here's the thing. If I opt for the "everything" option, then everything will go when I die, assuming that they are all operating properly. You know, they will dig out everything that they need and then leave everything else behind. Kind of like how vultures would swoop down and eat whatever that they need and leave the bones behind when they are done. I can see it now, the doctors and the nurses wheeling my body away even before my family can say anything to me, just because they want my organs nice and fresh. Who wouldn't like a nice and fresh piece of organ in their body anyway, especially when they need it. I mean, who'd want to have a heart that has been dead for half a day? You want a heart that has stopped for merely ten minutes, which is why the doctors and the nurses swoop down really fast with their knives to cut you open. I didn't like the idea of that, and the image of doctors handling my organs in their gloved hands was really weird. I mean, just picture it for a moment, and it isn't something that you can run away from while filling up that form. You start to picture your bloody (literally) lungs in their hands, being rolled around like a jell-o, and then placed into some bag or a can of fluid to preserve it, or something. It was probably the strangest thought I had ever.

So I picked the organs that are not going to leave any visible damages to my body when I am in the coffin. You know, I don't want half of the skin on my arms to have been peeled off to save a burn victim somewhere, you know. I mean, that'd be pretty ghastly to witness, if I am a friend or a family member looking in. So I picked all the internal parts that'd not be too obvious after I have donated, naming anything but the bones, the skin, and the eyeballs. I am OK with donating my lungs and everything, though I have a feeling that they will be disqualified due to my long history with asthma. My pancreas and kidneys they might take, and my dead corpse might be fine with that. After all, you can't exactly see a pair of missing kidneys or a missing pancreas from the outside. Maybe a stitched up wound somewhere, but it definitely is better than a missing eyeball. And don't try to convince me that the technology now allows you to have very realistic looking glass eyeballs. Realistic isn't real - it's just realistic. I want my eyeballs to be real even if they are dead, thank you very much. I thought it to be a natural and logical choice, which is why I filled out everything else without much questions. After all, if I look decent in the coffin, then I really don't mind what they take away. Dead is dead, right?

You know what, if there is an organ that I am more than happy to donate, it'd probably be my brain. Nobody wants brains though, not even the brain dead patients want a brain. You'd think that if your brain is dead, you want another brain to substitute the brain that you have so that you can wake up from that nine year comatose of yours. It's like having a dying liver, you'd want a good liver to replace that as soon as possible, no? But nobody wants brains, they just want their own back. If they are indeed trapped inside their head, they'd probably want to tell everybody that they want their own brains back too. But it takes time for them to wake up, if they wake up at all, and it is sometimes difficult to do so. You can't just pluck this brain out and put in another brain that belonged to somebody else. The wiring work is just too complicated, not to mention the fact that it'd take too long to do so. People don't trust that who they are is in their soul and not in their brains anymore, which is why they get so jumpy about brain transplants. Really, no, the truth is that we have no souls, because we are just a composition of organs and other biological... stuff. I'd like my brain transplanted though, because in that way I'd live forever.

Under the portion of the application form, we have to fill up another section about whether or not to donate the organ(s) for transplantation, research, or both. Well, initially, I only wanted to get my organs up for transplantation purposes. I understand how research could benefit the medical community somehow. You know, tests today could very well lead to a medical breakthrough tomorrow. Who knows, maybe my pancreas could become the reason why pancreatic cancer can be cured in the future. The possibilities are limitless in a laboratory, but tell that to the mother of a lab rat, though. Tell her that her daughter and/or son is going to be injected with strange chemicals for the benefit of mankind, then see how she takes it. In truth, I didn't like that idea very much, and would much rather donate my organ for transplantation. It is the idea that after injecting your organs with a few syringes of chemicals, they are going to dispose of your organs or incinerate them in a random oven where they probably incinerated a bunch of other organs. There's nothing wrong with it of course, in fact that is probably the correct course of action if you ask me. But like any object that has been with you for a long enough time, you tend to have this sentimental thing going on with it. That is also a reason why I am terrified of the idea of amputation - isn't it scary to anybody else out there?

Anyway, I wasn't comfortable with the idea of donating my organs for research, but I did it anyway. The reason is because, well, my uncle did the very same thing. He didn't exactly apply for organ donation, in fact he is probably far from it right now. As some of you may know, my uncle was recently diagnosed with cancer. I've used Skype to catch up with him a couple of times, and I must say that the white hair and the shallow cheeks depressed me somehow. The doctors say that for a person that late in his stage of cancer, he was surprisingly healthy. He isn't experiencing much pain, if any pain at all really. According to my aunt, he's just tired most of the time, and he has lost a bit of weight like most cancer patients would. Even though the video feed was blurred and somewhat pixelated, I could tell that he was tired and his eyes were somehow swollen. Yet, his voice remained clear and strong, and I wouldn't have noticed a hint of his illness if I hadn't had a video conference with him at all. Through his voice, he still sounds like the uncle that I have grew up to know and love. Anyway, he has been given a chance to go for an experimental chemotherapy at a local hospital, a procedure that has never been tested on human beings before. My uncle happens to fit the bill for the most part, being an adult male in his sixties, and he has the perfect criteria to be a good candidate. So he jumped at the chance of going through with the treatment with nothing at all to lose.

I remember my aunt telling me about it over Skype, and she told me how they've finally given in to my advice. About a year ago, I strongly urged them to give western medicine a chance, and they should treat the cancer as early as possible instead of going for some traditional medicine like they wanted to. My uncle was stubborn about it though, and he has always been that way even in his healthier days. Anyway, at this stage of the illness, I suppose there are only so many things that you can do. The term "experimental medication" can make anybody nervous, but I guess it only makes sense, especially when you are dealing with a terminal disease. His logic is that if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, then he has contributed - in his small way - to the medical field. If he doesn't go ahead with this experimental procedure, he will die. So why not contribute to a little something before you go? It made sense to him, and it sure as hell makes a lot of sense to me. I would probably opt for the same thing when given the chance, though it would be a difficult decision to make. I mean, the dosage is supposed to be twice as strong, but it is supposed to be twice as effective and precise. I am not exactly sure about the details at this point, but I am just keeping my fingers crossed and trusting in the doctors at this point.

Recently, my parents flew back to Taiwan to help out with my aunt and uncle. The house that I have in Taiwan is right next to the hospital that my uncle is going to be admitted into, and he is going to stay there for three months straight. All the hospital bills will be paid by the research team, which is a good load off all of us I suppose. My parents have offered a room for my aunt to stay in for the duration of the procedure so that she'd not have to drive back and forth from her home. The dog has been particularly cooperative for some reason, growling less and making less noise throughout the day. I think the dog, like all of us, know that there are things that are not exactly appropriate. I wish that I can be there, but at the same time I know that I'd be terrified. Death, as much as I have come to terms with it to a degree, it still isn't something that I want to be so physically close to, you know. The thing about such terminal illnesses is that it gives you time to prepare, and it takes your loved ones away slowly. It is still going to suck, but at least it gives you time to be mentally prepared. It certainly beats the kind of death that comes unannounced, the kind that slaps you across the face when you least expect it. But still, death is death, I don't think anybody can adequately prepare for it. I just hope that my aunt will pull through, that's all.

That is also why I decided to donate my organs for research as well. I mean, I will be dead by then, so might as well right? Anyway, despite putting them up for donation, I do not wish that they will be getting them anytime soon. I want to go back to Singapore in one piece, all safe and sound, and that is a promise that I've made to a special someone. I do not intend to go back with a missing toe or anything, and I certainly wouldn't want that either. I hope that I'd be able to see my uncle again, at least not through a stupid computer monitor. By the time the procedure ends, I'd probably be done with my studies here in Buffalo already. That also means that by the time I am done with this, he should be done with his thing. Whether or not he comes out of this healthier or worse, I suppose no one can tell for sure at this point. At least in theory, the procedure is supposed to work, right? I mean, why'd it be an "experiment" when in theory, it doesn't work? At least somewhere, even if it is on paper, it is supposed to work. I am not going to pray for my uncle's wellness, because praying is not going to help anybody at all. I am just going to hope for the best and expect the worst, and know that even if death is the end result of it all, at least my uncle will be able to rest in absolute peace.

Donations, Part One

2009-10-09T06:17:00.003+08:00

Donations, Part One

It used to be commonplace, but I guess the idea of donation has been diluted over the years, all thanks to the scandals in Singapore. If you weren't familiar with the donation culture in Singapore, you'd think that Singapore is a charitable country, with generous people everywhere who cares for the poor and the needy. A couple of years ago, if you were to turn on the television, it wouldn't be hard to spot local celebrities saying something supposedly touching and heart wrenching about a certain needy person who needs all our support, and then they'd recite a series of phone numbers for you to donate money to. That'd probably run for about a month before the actual charity event is nationally broadcasted on television, and that'd include celebrities performing death defying stunts on live television just to win the hearts and minds of the apathetic public. The stunts include everything from walking across a tight rope, being surrounded by a tub of ice, to do some stupid stunts upside down, or to play musical instruments with an unusual part of your body. No, not the penis - think lower. Anyway, nationally broadcasted charity events used to be really common in Singapore. It ranged from three to four time a year in the past, and that all ended when the scandals started to pop up from every which direction possible.

Then, people start to feel pissed off about the entire system as a whole. It's strange how it took a giant corporation's demise in order for us to realize that something was deeply wrong back then. I mean, with all the money spent paying the celebrities to perform (yes, they are paid) and not to mention the cars and the condominiums as the grand prize, you start to wonder why they couldn't just take those money spent on the celebrities and the prizes on helping the people that they were supposed to help in the first place. Something didn't make sense, and that occurred to me at a very young age. I wrote a paper about the subject of Singaporeans being apathetic towards charity once, and I received an A for that paper. I hated that course, and I hated the lecturer who taught for that course. Still, I suppose the 34-page monster of a paper earned me quite a bit of credits, and it all paid off in the end. Anyway, one of the points that I raised in the paper was how children in Singapore were cultivated, from a very young age, that donating to charities and helping the needy is a responsibility or an obligation, when it really shouldn't be that way at all. We almost felt as if we were forced to do a great many things in the past, and it certainly wasn't something that most of us were willing to do.

We probably invested half of our hearts in going around to collect donations in our neighborhoods, to help in the elderly homes, and to help clear the newspapers of the old people in a particular neighborhood. It was supposed to instill a sense of charity in the students, but I am sure it probably didn't make us feel any less unwilling than we already were. It was a chore, to be honest, and not to mention the way charity organizations used to bug the students to return the charity cards as soon as possible. I remember being pestered by a certain charity organization just because I was late in sending back the charity card, something which I had to pay right out of my pocket for. Charity isn't something that I regularly engage myself in, and yet there are times when I do help out whenever I can. We've been brought up to think that giving to charity is something that you have to do at school in order to get a certain amount of participation points, something you needed in order to graduate from high school. I'm sure a lot of us remember the CIP system and how we all had to complete at least twenty hours of community service before we could graduate. I hated doing charity work, and I hated the idea of donation altogether. I avoid students that hold little tin cans of money on the streets because, well, I got sick and tired of it all.

About a week or two ago, a friend of mine messaged me online and asked if I'd like to donate blood at the blood drive that is currently being held at school. He asked me not exactly because he was particularly interested in doing so, but because (for some reason) his public relations class used the blood drive as an extra credit assignment. He had to recruit as many people to donate their blood as possible, and I jumped at the opportunity for reasons unknown. I mean, like I mentioned, I haven't exactly been the most giving and selfless person that I know. There has been a dozen blood drives in all of the schools that I have ever been to, and I've never ever been interested in any of those. I remember debating with myself as to the reason why I never bothered, and the conclusion I came to was because I didn't want to save some guy who beats up his wife a lot, or some alcoholic who'd eventually turn out to be a serial killer or something. You never know, since you can never dictate whose blood goes to who. I convinced myself that that was the perfectly legitimate reason to not donate my blood back then. Besides, I felt that donating money was a whole lot easier than to have a giant needle embedded underneath your skin. Yet, since I've been through the whole blood donation process. I can safely say that being pricked by a needle is a lot less painful than fishing out your wallet.

I turned up at the Student Union at the supposed time on Tuesday morning, and my friend was there to take me into the corner of the building where they were having the blood drive. A few people were already inside on the folded chairs while we signed in, and the person at the counter handed out brochures for us to read before going for the health screening. He also gave us forms to fill up about our medical history, and I almost ticked the "yes" box when I read the part about whether I have had intercourse with another man. Anyway, it was a form full of diseases that I haven't even heard of before, and most of the boxes were ticked under the big bold "No", save for the one about whether or not I have been outside the United States in the past couple of years. Well, I came to the United States less than two months ago, so I guess it was an obvious yes for the both of us. Anyway, so we were ushered to the back of the room for a brief medical screening, and the nurse asked me about the countries that I have visited in the past three years, how long I have been in those places, where exactly in those places have I been to, and I had to have my blood tested first before going in.

I must say that that blood test with the snappy thing on the tip of my middle finger probably hurt more than the needle going into my blood veins, for some reason. She then started to squeeze my middle finger furiously just to get the blood out into this plastic tube, and I just watched my blood with curious fascination. I've never had a problem with blood for some reason, and I know of a person or two who'd faint at the sight of it. Anyway, she dripped my blood into this bottle of chemicals, and she OK-ed me for the blood donation swiftly after taking my blood pressure and my temperature. Apparently, in the United States, whether or not you choose to donate blood is a confidential matter. The last stage of the health screening involved me peeling off a barcode sticker to paste on the official form, indicating if I wanted to donate for real or not. This process was not meant to be seen by anybody, which was why the nurse turned her head away while I pasted the sticker. I am not exactly sure why I had to do that initially, and I was thoroughly confused when she handed me the stickers and turned her head away. I suppose it has got something to do with private matters of individuals, who knows.

Anyway, so I was all excited to jump into that chair and have the needle pushed through my skin and into my veins. That excitement was short-lived though, because the guy in front of me was back on the chair even after donating his blood, and his face was so pale that I swear I could see blood vessels from underneath the skin. He was munching on biscuits and sipping on a can of ginger ale just to regain his energy, and I started to wonder if this whole blood donation thing would take a toll on me just like this guy. I mean, he looked like he was about to die on that chair right there and then, and the male nurse next to me was nonchalantly taking put the needle while swiping my elbow with alcohol. The pale white guy then asked for a can of ginger ale and some chips, and there was a splitting moment when I thought I was going to pass out as well. My friend was right next to me, and he told me about the first time he donated blood in his school and how he passed out on the chair. Apparently, instead of squeezing the ball in your hand once ever four to five seconds or so, my friend squeezed it pretty much every second of his time on the chair. He passed out from losing too much blood and too fast, and I actually made it a point to religiously count how many seconds have gone by before giving the ball a tight squeeze.

So, the male nurse took out the needle and showed it to me, and that needle looked like a straw. I swear, that thing looked like it was just pulled out from a juice box and connected to the plastic tube that was hanging from a small metal hanger next to my chair. He wrapped the arm band of the blood pressure measuring device around my upper arm first, and then tapped my veins a few times before he inserted the tip of the needle into my skin. He told me to look away if I didn't want to see it, but I have this strange ability to tolerate blood and gore, for some reason. Anyway, I looked as he inserted the needle up and up and up, and then he carefully taped the end of the needle to my skin to prevent it from moving around. Blood then started to trickle through the tube and into the bag. One pint, the man said, and then he moved on to my friend to insert the needle into his arm. One pint of blood is exactly like one pint of beer that you'd order at a bar, and that is quite a lot of blood lost from my system, in my opinion. I mean, I have had some serious injuries in my life, but I don't think I have ever lost that much blood ever before. I asked him how much blood we have in our body, and how much we can lose until it becomes dangerous. Apparently, we have about eight to twelve pints of blood, and it only takes about four to take you into critical conditions. A quarter of the way to being critical, I felt somewhat insecure.

But, the donation process was pretty painless to be honest. I sat there throughout the donation process and read the brochure that was given to me. I asked for a can of Pepsi, and the man's assistant gave it to me without second questions. It was like being served drinks on a sandy beach, and I was some really important guest on a yacht party or something. But I wasn't on a yacht, and I wasn't on a beach. In fact, I wasn't even sipping on margaritas, but was draining blood from the little punctured hole in my elbow. I could feel my left arm turn numb after a while, and then later followed by my left leg. I'm not sure if it was caused by the blood donation at all, but I wasn't too worried anyway. Like a child who's just gotten his taste of soft drinks like I had, I was happy to give some blood away in exchange for free drinks and snacks. Every once in a while, I'd forget to squeeze on the ball that was in my palm, and I'd give it one or two tight squeezes. That action would cause the blood flow into the bag to become suddenly sped up, and it was actually kinda fun to watch. The male nurse came around to check up on the blood supply every once in a while, making sure that we were OK and that we weren't passing out or anything. I was the first to be done with the whole blood donation thing, and that was when I helped myself to a bag of Oreo cookies with some apple juice.

In the end, blood donation really isn't all that big a deal at all. So I lost the blood that took 56 days to form in my body, but I really couldn't feel much of the after effects at all. My sister is an avid fan of blood donation, my apparently she has really only donated her blood once because she has too little iron in her blood to donate more. Being underweight seems to be a problem with blood donation in Singapore, but not so much here in the United States apparently. It is funny now, in retrospect, to think that my blood is going to be something that I leave behind in this country, other than a great many things. However, a part of me still has this strange dilemma about the blood being used on the wrong people. How do you qualify people, though, since we never actually know of their contributions (or lack thereof) to the society in the future. At any rate, I will elaborate on that in part two, so stay tuned!

Niagara Falls

2009-10-05T11:14:00.003+08:00

Niagara Falls

Lance Rintamaki has a small office up in Baldy's, a small little corner down a long hallway dedicated to himself and various other artifacts related to his life. There's a potted plant in the corner of his room, a carton of bottled water with the plastic wrapper torn open next to his desk. Books are stacked on top of one another on the tables and the floor, weighing down even on the shelf above our heads as we sat close to each other on the old beat up sofa. Most of the communication students were at his office that day after a meeting with the student advisor, and Lance invited us into his office to see how we were doing and getting used to things. He told us about what to do and see around the Buffalo and Niagara Falls area, and suggested us to head down to Letchworth State Park if we have the time, because it has been known to be the Grand Canyon of the East. Also on his must-see list is the Niagara Falls obviously, because he said that it'd be ridiculous to come all the way to Buffalo and not make a trip up there. Unfortunately for us, the tickets to go to Niagara Falls were sold out on the very first day of orientation, which means that we could only go for the second trip, if we even get the chance to. Lance told us that if things doesn't work out for us, he'd personally bring us all the way up there. Yeah, my lecturer is that cool, so suck it NUS students.

Niagara Falls has always been a somewhat mythical thing in my mind somehow. People always talk about how amazing that place is, and how many times it has appeared on the list of eight wonders of the world thing. The truth is, though, I cannot care less about that list anymore, considering how it changes from year to year, and there's actually board of people voting on whether or not a natural wonder or a man-made wonder actually makes the list for the year. That to me is completely ridiculous, which is why I'd rather come to my own conclusions as to whether or not Niagara Falls is amazing or not. I've already been to Taj Mahal, and I must say that it'd be difficult to beat that one, considering the sheer beauty of that place. Niagara Falls is in a different league altogether, and it sure was an exciting idea to head up to the border between the United States and Canada just to check it out. I remember seeing the falls for the first time on video when David Copperfield went over the edge and survived the fall, not to mention the sheer size of that thing mentioned in books and documentaries. I've never even considered it possible for me to visit that place, but now just seems to be the perfect time to do so. I mean, we are merely half an hour from one of the most amazing creation of mother nature, so why not make a trip up to check it out?

I remember that chilly Sunday morning, and the sun provided little warmth on my exposed hands and cheeks. I had to make my way down to Flint Loop to take two chartered buses to the Niagara Falls, and they looked like the school buses you see in movies, those big yellow buses that took Forrest Gump's son to school. I was excited to be in one of those buses, and the guy from ISSS did a head count down the center aisle before we were good to go. Some of the girls looked dazed as they sat across the aisle from me, and apparently a long night of partying with no sleep has took a toll on their faces. Glitter could still be seen on Shenny's face, and Gaby was in a trance when the bus started moving. A bunch of people who were supposed to be on the bus with all of us weren't there because they were stuck out in some ranch an hour away or something. At any rate, the buses weren't going to wait for anyone, and we were off! I stayed up in the bus most of the time while most of the other passengers fell asleep. The Sunday morning sun was gentle on my skin as it streamed through the windows, and the bus sped down the highway and through the suburbs of the rest of Buffalo.

It wasn't long until the little towns pulled away into a small industrial town of sorts. The bus drove onto a big metal bridge that spanned the breadth of a mighty river below. The guy from the ISSS then explained to us what to do when we get there and what not to do, particularly the whole issue of our SEVIS database and how our names may not have been entered into the system yet. At that, if we do cross over to Canada (which is connected to the United States by the Rainbow Bridge), we'd probably not be able to come back. Anyway, I was too distracted to listen to him after that point for the most part, as I busied myself with the view outside the window. The driver gave us a little commentary on the things that were passing us by along the way, including the Niagara river that ran parallel to the road that we were traveling on. My geography background immediately kicked in as I saw the calm river quickly turn into rapids as we drove down alongside it, and there was a sign to warm boats of the point of no return. It looked pretty menacing, and I presume it'd probably be too late for anybody by the time they reach the sign to turn back anyway. So, the river turned into a great blanket of folded waves, piling on top of one another like hungry people outside of a shopping mall on Black Friday. The entire river was that way, from our side of the shores to the other, stretching out before our eyes as far as the eyes could reach. In the distance, a tower of smoke rose out from the horizon, and the driver explained that it wasn't really smoke, but the mist from the Niagara Falls. By this time, the geography student inside of me was geeking out.

The visitor center and the trees surrounding the park very cleverly concealed the falls from the outside. All we could hear as we got off the bus was the roaring of the waters from the other side of the park. We got our packaged tickets at the ticking booth and made our way down the stairs in the visitor's center and through a clearing. As we came through the door on the other side, the sound of the falls pounding on the rocks and the river below was already deafening. It was Joyce, Ting Ting and myself walking through the park that morning with squirrels scrambling down from trees and across the pavements on all sides. Then there it was, the river that we saw on the bus ride here, suddenly falling off the edge of the cliff and into a cloud of mist. A rainbow shot up from beneath and made a curve in the skies, bending back down like a ribbon of sorts. I stood by the railing that ran along the river and took a bunch of pictures there. There's always that moment of wordlessness that hits you whenever you are face to face something so wondrous like that. It was like the time when I came through the gates and witnessed the Taj Mahal for the very first time. Anybody who has ever been to that place would tell you that they were dumbfounded the first time they saw it in the morning sun. The same for me when I was right next to the Niagara Falls, there is always that sense of surrealism. It becomes difficult to comprehend that you are there, like most part of the first song at a concert. And then it kicks in halfway through the song, and you know that you are there. You are there.

Moving closer and down the walkway, you find yourself right next to where the river spills over the edge. You walk up all the way to the edge of things and you look over, and you see the giant body of water spilling over the sides and then plunging down into the river below. The rocks below would receive it with opened arms, and you start to wonder if the water would ever stop flowing at the Niagara Falls at all. But it just kept coming, thousands and millions of gallons of water, coming at the Falls, as if they were tiny soldiers trying to fight this great beast. A beast, yes, the Niagara Falls was a great beast instead. You cannot help but stand in awe of mother nature all over again and what it has to offer. People always credit God for such creations, when it really is mother nature doing all the job. Mother nature is really a concept anyway, the idea of how nature works in its own ways within an organized system of things, with the erosions and the currents all playing small parts in the creation of this amazing sight. The three of us made our way up onto the Observation Deck that rose up from the bottom of the cliff, and we watched the American Falls from a completely different point of view. From where we were, we could see a bird's eye view of the falls from a higher ground, the river that the falls fed, and Canada on the other side of the river. The Hard Rock Cafe sign glittered in the morning sun, and the hotels lined the edge of the cliff, like eager tourists all trying to find the best spot to see the wonders of nature.

We made our way down to the Maid of the Mist, or the boat ride with a fancy name. We were given blue ponchos to prevent us from getting drenched, and the line for the boat stretched all the way from the dock to the base of the observation tower. So we waited, we took pictures of ourselves looking like reporters in the middle of a hurricane, and pictures of the American Falls crashing down from fifty meters above us. The seagulls came and went, left their feces on the roof of the dock, and then it was time for us to board. The lot of us made our ways through the walkway and onto the boat. Most of the people there went straight for the upper deck, while I convinced my friends that going to the front of the boat would make more sense. That paid off as we were at the spearhead of pretty much everything that was about to happen. The boat went pass the American Falls where the rocks piled up at the bottom. We were right in front of it at this point, the mist pouring into the boat and all around us. I pulled the hood of my poncho down closer and tightened the plastic strings at the base of my neck. The boat rocked a little bit as it battled the waves below, and the voice over the speakers told us the tale of the boy that went over the falls and miraculously survived. I stuck my hand out and took pictures with my eyes closed mostly, and took my time for the rest of the journey to stare at the falls in utter awe.

The boat continued on, and we went pass Bridal Falls and towards the midst of the Horse Shoe Falls. On this end of the river, the waves are much stronger, and the boat rocked in every direction. I started to think about the possibility of a capsize, and also about which idiot next to me would try to grab hold onto me and push me into the freezing waters below. The mist engulfed us at this point, and we could no longer see the buildings on the Canadian side by now. We were sailing into a dreamworld of sorts, like the edge of a dream, diving into the unknown. It was a little scary, especially with the waters foaming up around the boat and the roaring of the waterfalls from all sides. Amidst all the action, there is always that thought in the back of your head when you are witnessing something amazing, something extraordinary. You start to think about all the people back home, your family and friends, your loved ones, and you start to think about how great it would be if you could share the experience in ways more than just photographs from far away. I wished dearly that Neptina was there with me, because I know the experience would be completely different on that rocking boat that morning, and we'd probably be frantically taking pictures of ourselves while the mist embraced and overwhelmed us. So I sang my favorite song by Pink Floyd under my breath, or at least just the chorus over and over again. I wish you were here, I wish you were here.

If any of you is keen on visiting the Niagara Falls, the Maid of the Mist ride and the Cave of the Winds are probably the only two things worth doing at the state park, because everything else hardly matters if you ask me. In between the Maid of the Mist and the Cave of the Winds, the three of us took some time off to grab lunch at a little cafe. The Cave of the Winds can only be reached via a trolly, like a tram that goes around the state park. While at the state park, I fed bread to hordes of hungry and desperate sparrows, and it was fun to see them coming closer and closer to the piece of bread in my palm. You know, to see who is the bravest bird out of them all, kinda thing. Anyway, Cave of the Winds is probably the best part about the whole visit to the Niagara Falls. What happens if that you take an elevator all the way down to the base of the cliffs, and you follow a trail that takes you all the way up to the bottom of the falls. There are these wooden staircases lodged into the rocks beneath the cliffs, and you pretty much follow the stairs up until you reach the falls itself. A random trivia here that I found out only after I got home: The staircases aren't secured to the rocks by any screws or any bolts. They are merely wedged between rocks, which means that the entire structure has to withstand not only the force of the waterfalls, but also the weight of all the visitors. If I had known this fact about the Cave of the Winds, I might have hesitated a little while climbing those stairs. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss indeed.

If you've ever ran through a really heavy rain before, you'd know how much it hurts when the rain hits your face. That is exactly how it was like for this particular trail up to the bottom of the falls. As you move closer and closer, the mist starts to get thicker and the water starts to hit you like rubber bullets. I was wearing a t-shirt underneath the dual-layer of ponchos (one from Maid of the Mist and one from Cave of the Winds), and I was still feeling the pain whenever a sudden wave of water came down on us. There are various platforms along the way whereby you could go up all the way to the edge, and that is exactly what the lot of us did. We enlisted the help of an old couple of take a picture for us while we were there, and the waterfall beat mercilessly into our backs as the old man took his time with the picture. The water was ice cold, and I remember tasting it with my tongue as it dripped from the top of my hood. We could hardly hear each other over the pounding of the waves, and it wasn't long until we realized that taking pictures weren't an option anymore. For the most part, I kept my camera safely in my pocket while I braved the crashing waters all around me. It was an awesome experience that day, to be this close to the might of mother nature, to be surrounded by the elements - it was awesome!

As I was saying, if you are going to visit the Niagara Falls, spend more time at the above to mentioned attractions. Everything else like the Science Center or the Aquarium, just give those a skip - they aren't really worth it. Anyway, I must say that the Niagara Falls experience was truly worth the entire trip, though that is not to say that the "adventures" that happened afterwards weren't either. It was my first taste of a foreign country outside of school, and it was definitely a whole lot of fun. Hopefully, I'd be able to head up to Canada again this weekend to go to the Niagara Falls from Canada's side of things. Anyway, for now, I highly recommend visiting it for anybody who decides to drop by Buffalo. For those that are coming in December, I'm not sure if it's stay open through spring because of all the snow and ice. But try to make it anyway, because it is the most awesome experience you are going to have with nature - ever.

Parties!

2009-10-04T14:25:00.002+08:00

Parties!

Having been to the United States only once in my life when I was eight years old, a lot of things that I know about this place since then has been from television shows, movies, books, newspapers - the media. I was eight years old back then when I first got through the customs at the airport, stepping out into the unfamiliar Californian sunset and meeting a close family friend for the very first time. I believe that was the first time my family went out on a vacation somewhere, and I remember every itsy-bitsy detail of that trip. Everything from my stay in Los Angeles, Disneyland, the San Diego Seaworld, the trip up to Seattle and then eventually ending in Vancouver, Canada. I remember a great many details from that trip, but I don't suppose the eyes of an eight year old could have seen the real side of this country. As the years wore on and I became older, one of the great many sides of the United States was the idea of parties that they love to throw. It started with Hollywood movies I suppose, and their frequent depiction of high school or college students throwing elaborate and wild parties at their homes, sometimes for no apparent reasons at all. It almost always ends up in a great big mess, with torn sofas and spilled drinks, with vomit everywhere and a drunkard asleep on a rubber float in the middle of a swimming pool. Such were the images that I brought along with me to Buffalo, the parties and the drinks and everything else that are suppose to come along for the ride.

I've never been one for parties, if you don't know me enough already. The exclamation mark in the title of this entry almost makes it sound as if I enjoy them. Well, to a certain degree, that may be true, to be perfectly honest. With the right crowd of friends, with the right atmosphere and the right occasion, a party of sorts can be enjoyable and fun even if it is coming from me. I am not usually a fan of parties, or clubbing, or any kind of social activities that involve big groups of people that I don't know very well, huddling and shoving each other in the dark to loud music that I don't enjoy very much. There are a great many things about clubbing which I do not necessarily understand, and there are a great many things about my distaste for clubbing that clubbers do not necessarily understand either. It isn't something wrong, I feel, it's just something I do not always want to engage myself in. With that said, I've always thought that house parties are in a completely different league altogether. You don't get that a lot in Singapore, and the reason is probably because of the fact that there are clubs that aren't too far away from where we all live. Besides, any kind of noise after ten o'clock in the evening could invite policemen knocking on your front door, something which you do not want.

So, I am the kind of person to prefer a simple gathering of friends, coming together and just hanging out. It doesn't make sense for me to try to beat the speakers in a club when trying to ask my friend how his life has been, or try to raise my voice louder than I should when trying to answer the same question. From my not-so-extensive experience at clubs, the thing that I've realized the most is that I hate straining my voice, and the club is pretty much where that happens a lot, at least for me. Before coming over to the United States, the image of house parties has always been that of soft lights, good music in the background, and a bunch of friends sitting around in a circle and drinking while talking about their lives with cushions in their arms. That has been the perfect image in my head, and I suppose I'd jump for any opportunities to do that when it arises. However, things are not quite the same as I have pictured all along ever since I got here. Parties aren't exactly what I have in mind, and they are somewhat different from what I've been used to, or comfortable with for the most part. To be honest, I think the movies highly exaggerates what happens in a college party, because not all college parties are like that. Still, it can't rise out of nothing, and you can see why the depiction are so rampant in films we see nowadays.

Before my trip over here, my girlfriend told me not to do a great many things. She told me not to take drugs, not to have sex, not to pick up smoking, and most of all - not to drink. For the most part, they are demands that aren't exactly difficult to meet, since I am not particularly adventurous when it comes to putting foreign objects into my mouth; I don't imagine American girls to be particularly attracted to a scrawny Asian guy; I haven't been a fan of neither smoking nor drinking before I came here. Drinking runs in the genes, I suspect, because my father and his brothers are great drinkers. I have the ability to hold my liquor, but that isn't a limit that I want to test with shot glasses any time soon. I'd rather keep the occasions when I have to drink alcohol to the bare minimum, and I'd much rather remain sober and to tell stories about my friends' embarrassing experiences by daylight. I intend to hold true to those promises and not do those things while I am here, and I have been sticking dutifully to them, save for that one time when I had a steak with alcohol in it. People always say that when you are in a country like that, you don't go out and look for drugs - drugs come and look for you. In my head, I pictured bags of marijuana growing legs and then knocking at my bedroom window with a match in their hands, asking me to burn their heads off. Well, that has never happened before, but I realized how easy it is to obtain drugs if I truly want to look for it. Hell, my friend's room mate has a bong in her living room.

It is easy to get those things in this place, you know. Drugs, sex, smoke and drinks, those are integral parts of a great many college around here, and not even the cold weather can stop people from doing them. Alcohol has been the most prevalent form of those things that has surrounded me in my stay here, with my room mates being party animals for the most part, with every weekend being their playground of sorts. Ever since I got here a little over a month ago, almost every weekend has been party nights, sometimes on two consecutive days too. I've been invited to these parties, but I've always declined their invitations for a great many reasons - legitimate ones at that. I've had to attend a football game early in the morning this one time, and to head off to New York City on the other. They've offered me drinks, but I've always told them that I am allergic to alcohol. In a way, having seen my father get drunk so many times over the years, I am mentally allergic to those drinks, and would much rather stick to my orange juice, thank you very much. Anyway, most of the time when they have parties in my apartment, I'd be in my bedroom and minding my own business. My in-ear headphones have been really helpful because of how well they block sound out, and I even wear them to sleep even when I am not listening to any music. After all, there has been occasions when parties would last all the way till the next morning.

This is usually how a party starts in my apartment. Two of my room mates have been knowing each other for a very long time, and they have common friends between the both of them. So what happens is that you'd see them shuffling around the kitchen trying to organize the furniture, putting on more clothes than they normally would around the house, and then you see cartons of beer being brought out from the back of their cars. Then the door bells start to go off one by one, and you hear them going over to the answering machine on the wall and asking for the password. I never really caught the password before, but it isn't something that makes a lot of sense anyway. So the friends would start to pour in, and then you will hear the music being played really loudly in the living room, with the dial pushed all the way up and the floors would then start to vibrate. If it is crazy enough, the table in my room would start to vibrate as well. They have this giant stereo system installed in the living room, and the same playlist goes over and over again whenever their friends are over. They have everything from Smash Mouth, to the Bloodhound Gang, to the latest hip-hop or rap songs that don't make any sense at all. You know, the one about them being on a boat, or the other one about hotels, motels, and holiday inns. Yeah, you know what I mean.

People from around here seems to love rap a lot, and that genre of music seems to be a big thing here. Rap is everywhere, and I daresay that the only song that hasn't been somehow remixed into rap is the national anthem here. Everything is rap here, and even the country music is rap. OK, maybe the country music is still country music, but I will not be surprised if someone adds a little bluegrass to rap in due time. Hell, even Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega has been turned into a backing track of some rap song I heard a couple of weeks ago. That goes to show how popular it is over here, and everybody loves it. The thumping bass would penetrate every wall and every floor, and every window around the house. It is not possible to operate properly with the music turned up that loud, and even harder when the patrons of the party and jumping up and down to the music, and then laughing hysterically every once in a while. I steal glances at the living room whenever I make a trip down to the bathroom, and they are usually scenes you don't want to last the whole night. Beer pong is something that they love to play, and my room mates actually keep a score sheet of it on the fridge. It usually just involves them throwing a ping-pong ball into cups filled with beer, and that is the only game that I have ever seen them play - ever.

On a particularly hectic night, I was in my room and getting ready for bed because I had an early football game to attend at the stadium, my room mates were partying with a bunch of their friends, and with the same old playlist turned up louder than supposed to all through the night. I think they stopped at about three in the morning, and I remember everything from the beginning of the night till that point to be somewhat dreadful, to be honest. I experienced the party through everything that I could hear through the walls, and it sounded like a crazy party to me. At one point, one of my room mates was asking somebody else to fuck the couch, and then there was a dreadful scraping sound of something hard against my wall from the other side. They then started to sing about them being on a boat, and then there were a lot of running around and even more jumping around. I remember coming out of the bedroom and going to the bathroom for a shower at one point in time, and everybody has pretty much lost their minds by then. I didn't really look at the mess that they created because I know that the thought of clearing it up would be Hell, at the very least. Of course, I wasn't in charge of clearing anything up, because I am not their slave or anything. It's just the thought of my apartment, or at least a quarter of it is mine, being thrashed up by a group of drunkards just because they wanted to have some fun.

When they left, I went out of my bedroom to survey the damage, and here is what I saw. The first thing I saw was the shoe in the hallway - just one. Then there was the table that they used to play beer pong on, but the cups were not all on the table at this point in time. I saw yellow liquid spilled all over the table and dripping from the edge of the table, and for some reason I thought that it was urine or something, which I'd not be particularly surprised. Crushed beer cans were thrown everywhere on the sofa, the kitchen counter, on the floors, and the entire room smelled like vaporized beer. It wasn't a pretty sight, and I had to make my way carefully through the wreckage before I could take a sip of my orange juice from the fridge. Don't get me wrong, I think my room mates are really nice people. They are just into a kind of party that I am not particularly excited about, if you know what I mean. I am all for chill-out sessions and everything, but don't expect me to go wild in front of people that I don't know very well. I suppose when it comes to "making friends", this isn't necessarily what I had in mind in the first place. There isn't a lot that I can fault my room mates with, because as much as they mess the apartment up, the almost always return it back to the original state. They take a while, but they do it, you know? Ask Joel about his room mate and the used socks, that is a hilarious story.

The last party that happened was the night when I had to leave for New York City. Yes, they were playing the same songs and the same game in the living room, only it was somebody's birthday party and they were all prepared to get drunk and high. When asked if they remembered anything from the previous night, none of them remembered anything. I'm not sure if it is still fun to throw a party like that when you can't remember having fun at all. Perhaps the fun is in the forgetting, who knows. Anyway, so I saw a little bit of that party, and it was about nine o'clock at night when it was already out of control. I had to take an overnight bus ride all the way to New York City, and I wanted to clean up a little before the trip. Just as I was about to enter the bathroom, I noticed that the toilet cover, instead of it being on the toilet itself, was on the sink instead. Confused, I looked over the edge of the toilet and realized that someone has managed to clog it up with used toilet paper and shit. Yes, somebody used my bathroom and managed to clog it up with his or her shit, causing everything to overflow. I told my room mate about it before I had to go, and I told him that somebody has better fix the toilet before I come back. It was indeed fixed, and I am just glad that I managed to escape that night.

That was Friday night, and by Tuesday morning, there were three bags of empty beer cans blocking the front door to my house. Apparently, there was yet another party over the weekend, and I was fortunate enough to miss that one completely. I knew there was a party from the smell that lingered in the air, and I was glad that I got the morning to myself for the most part as the other two room mates locked themselves in their bedrooms, knocked out cold. I am generally OK with their parties, since they do not mess up my bedroom or anything. Besides, I am not exactly the kind of person you'd find in bed at twelve midnight. I sleep usually when their party moves on to someone else's house at around three in the morning, and my in-ear headphones have been doing that job wonderfully for the most part. It's just the thought of my neighbors downstairs, and how they must have reacted to my room mates' jumping and screaming and music. I'm not sure if there has ever been a complaint against my apartment, but I don't suppose that is going to stop anybody from partying their heads off here either. Anyway, I have recently gotten my hands on a form that allows me to break my apartment's lease earlier than the contract. On the form, there is a column whereby I could put the name of a person I know who is going to take over my apartment if he wishes to. I thought about Naz at first, since he is the only guy I know who is coming over to UB. But then again, considering the parties and how he detests clubbing, I don't think I hate him or anybody else as much to put them through what I have gone through. That part of the form is still blank.

Weather

2009-10-03T09:56:00.002+08:00

Weather

It rained today, a weather that is not supposed to be surprising in this part of the world. I remember making a comment about the weatherman who'd come up in the middle of at the end of news reports to give an update on the weather. Having lived in the warmer parts of the planet for the better part of my life, the job of the weatherman as always been one of the easiest that I know of. That is probably the reason why most of the weather reports in Singapore has been done by computer graphics these days - technology taking over human beings in its purest form in the news studio. Anyway, watching a weather report in Singapore is kind of like watching a game of soccer between Brazil and Singapore - you pretty much know the result. Every single day of the year is the same as the one before, with temperatures generally ranging between 25 and 32 degrees celsius, though there are occasions whereby it'd dip a degrees below or above that range. But for the most part, we have three kinds of weather system to take note off, something that isn't exactly rocket science. It is either sunny, cloudy, or rainy in Singapore, and it isn't difficult to predict any of those on your own either. A weather report is almost like the obligatory black character in an American comedy sitcom. You know, you have to have a member of the cast from a different race, or else you'd be called a "racist". Similarly, it is as if you don't have a weather report in your news, you are a gay news agency or something.

There is no point watching the weather report in Singapore because every day is the same, day in and day out. Every once in a while you get a particularly heavy rain that lasts for an unnaturally long time, or a thunder storm that sweeps across the island for half an hour. Heavy rain sometimes cause mini landslides in certain parts of the island, not to mention the occasional tree that gets uprooted somewhere. But relatively speaking, if you compare the weather reports of Singapore to a great many countries around the world, you'd find that its existence is pretty redundant for the most part. If you are leaving your home on a sunny day, all you have to do is to arm yourself with an umbrella and you are all set. If you are really afraid that your wardrobe will be drenched by the rain, maybe you could toss in a poncho or a raincoat, and that should be more than enough. In terms of weather, Singapore doesn't provide a lot of excitement, which in some ways could be a great thing to many people out there. I mean, if you want to get away from the blistering cold up North, Singapore would probably be a great destination for you because, well, it is blistering hot all year round for the most part. I, for one, am not a person who likes the warm weather very much. There are two things about me that I've discovered over the course of this trip that I haven't noticed before: I adjust to jet lags surprisingly well, and that I love the cold more than I thought I do.

In Taiwan, things get a little more interesting at times. You still get the sunny, the cloudy and the rainy most of the time, but at least we get a semblance of winter up there. No longer do you have to walk down the streets under the blazing hot sun while listening to Christmas carols coming from a street side store. In Taiwan, at least the air is chilly and the wind blows right into your bones. You have weathers like that, and there are times in winter when you could drive up into the mountains to see the snow, because it does snow in mountainous areas in Taiwan if you are patient enough to brave the traffic all the way up, not to mention the journey down. It is predictable weather in Taiwan most of the time, save for an abnormal situation that arises every once in a while. Typhoons come spinning into the coastline a couple of times a year, and Taiwan only recently survived the relentless power of mother nature a few months back. When the typhoon comes along, the weather stations kick into overdrive, and it is the sole source of information that people rely on for the most part, because they are supposed to be the most accurate. For that couple of times, the hopes of the people dangle by a thread that hangs onto the weather channels, and they actually serve a very real purpose in times like that.

Still, I don't think I have really experienced a real typhoon, at least not when I was in Taiwan. I remember there was a time when I visited my grandmother when the front drive was flooded with water. My cousins and I then took out our toys and played with the water that gathered at the front door. In retrospect, it was quite an unhygienic thing to do, but then we were boys back then, and we were meant to be sweaty and dirty for the most part. Anyway, such a weather condition was a rarity, and the weather has been pretty predictable for the most part, no matter how much my parents would try to disagree. You see, as parents, you tend to over-protect your children at times, especially in their younger years. When I was in my younger years, my mother would pile clothes onto me as if I am some kind of clothing rack, and I remember those days when I would be in four layers of clothes despite the fact that it is just sixteen degrees out. That, in context, was pretty damn cold for my tiny little body, and my mother knew that. Winter in Taiwan, compared to winter in Buffalo, was probably just the appetizer. In fact, people over here probably call that their summer, because it really doesn't compare. It isn't actually winter in Buffalo just yet, since it is still in the season of autumn here in Buffalo. But you can start to feel the chills already, with the trees dying and the flowers withering. This is the beginning of winter, this is what autumn is like. I cannot wait for it to come, and yet I am somewhat terrified.

All of a sudden, the weather report has been propelled to a great level of importance in my life, at least on the dashboard of my Macbook. It is a widget that I check about ten to fifteen times a day, simply because of how everything changes. The temperature that you see today is probably not going to be the temperature that you see yesterday. If they predict a sunny day on Wednesday, it is probably not going to be a sunny day by the time Wednesday rolls around the corner. Sunlight is a fragile thing here in Buffalo, because you don't get that a lot, at least not anymore. It was the case when I moved from Singapore to Buffalo, when the hint of summer could still be found in the bushes and the trees. It was a time when the warmth was just about to leave, and I caught its tail right as it was about to leave the room. This is autumn though, this dreadful and rainy days is what autumn seems to be all about now. If not for the rain, the skies are usually covered in a depressing shade of gray, and clouds would loom close to the grounds than they normally would. I use the words "depressing" and "dreadful", but that doesn't necessarily mean that I feel that way. I love this dull and somewhat morbid weather around here, with everything dying around me. They say that the fall is the best time to be in Buffalo, because you get to see a little bit of everything. I believe that saying very much, and it seems to hold true so far, for the most part.

When I arrived in Buffalo, it was a rainy day. Rain isn't common in Buffalo, and it started out like a tease in the very beginning. It would rain for about ten minutes, and it'd come and go without you even realizing it. It tends to start raining heavily all of a sudden, and it'd vanish just as soon as it arrived. In between these sudden and short pangs of rain, the weather here has been punctuated with mostly sunny days, or chilly days with moderate amount of winds. Comfortable is the word to describe the weather that I have been experiencing for the most part, as it is possible to grab a book and an iPod and sit in the middle of a big green field without feeling too hot or cold. I've sat in the middle of the grassy field right next to the Center for the Arts a dozen times, and I must say that the act of sitting in the middle of a field and reading a book makes you feel like a real college student. I mean, that isn't the kind of thing that we do in Singapore, because you don't get a lot of big green fields around the school campus at all. We have a forest across the road, but then it isn't the kind of pretty forest you want to go to. It is a tropical rainforest, and that equates to swamps, heat, and mosquitoes. Besides, most of the big green fields in Singapore are either going to be turned into a residential area, a business district, or it has been already turned into a soccer field.

At that point in time, it was possible to head out of the house with a t-shirt and jeans, no problem. When the winds blew, all we had to do was to put on a hoodie or a sweater and we were good to go. Even in Toronto, the weather was fair for the most part, comfortable to walk in the streets, and there isn't a need to wipe sweat off your forehead once every fifteen seconds. My theory of loving the colder weather has always been this: If you are cold in a cold country, all you need to do is to pile on clothes and you'd be fine. If you are hot in a hot country, you can strip naked and walk down the street and still feel incredibly hot. There is a way to battle the cold, but there isn't a way to battle the hot unless you enlist technology. Although air-conditioned jackets are not exactly science fiction in our day and time, nobody really wants to carry such things around on our shoulders. Besides, most of the designs are pretty damn ugly, and they all look like space suits from Star Trek if you ask me. It is easier to keep warm, and besides the fashions involved in colder countries are just freakin' awesome. I know that half the clothes I bought here are probably not applicable in the warm weather back home. But screw it, autumn/winter fashion is simply mind blowing. One word: layering.

It isn't very cold just yet, but it is soon about to. Over the weekend, I spent my time in New York City - which is my favorite city in the world now - and something happened to the weather system back home. It rained in New York City as well, kinda like a tropical monsoon that'd come in the morning and leave by afternoon. At any rate, it wasn't the funnest thing to have to carry your shopping bags in the rain in New York City, but we survived it anyway. More on that when I attempt to blog about my trip to New York City. These days, though, if you check out the weather reports, everything is either rainy or just somewhat cloudy. Clear days don't seem to exist anymore, and you see either the sun with a bit of cloud, or the sun with a bit of rain. Everything in between is rain, rain, rain, and rain. In fact, the raining part of the weather got so bad over the last weekend while I was in New York City, that parts of this place got flooded. People received weather warnings here, and there were reports on hails in certain parts of this city. Over at Sweet Home Road, people reported a hail storm back there, and I am just glad that I wasn't caught in the middle of one of those. The thing about the cold is that it is fine when it is just cold and nothing else. When you add rain and/or wind to the mix, you want to stay at home and not get out.

Still, this is probably just the foreplay of winter, since it isn't officially here yet. I have done my preparations, of course, and they involve thick clothing and a trusty water bag, in the event when I do need it. Even these days, I leave the house with a set of gloves to keep me warm, not to mention three layers of clothes on my body. A t-shirt, a sweater and a jacket with scarf is pretty much all that I need these days when the temperature dips below ten. It is still extremely comfortable for the most part when the wind remains calm, and I am still enjoying myself. Right now, at twelve midnight, my windows are actually opened because the room feels really stuffy. The scary thing about the winter is that you don't really know if the stuff that you bought are going to be enough until winter comes. You know, like the thick down feather jacket that I bought prior to this trip. I have no idea if that is going to work when the temperatures dip below zero, and it certainly isn't going to help for the fact that I paid more than two hundred dollars on that thing. The same applies for the scarves, the gloves, the shoes, the socks, and everything else that I have bought to keep me warm. Only time will tell, and that is a phrase that I hate with a passion. I want to know now, so that I can buy more and feel good about the days to come.

I remember the morning when the lot of us prepared to travel up to Toronto. We traveled there via Greyhound, and more about that trip in the coming entries I suppose. That morning was a particularly cold one, and I remember waking up at six in the morning with condensation on my window. Six degrees outside and dropping, and that was the morning when I piled on so much clothes that I must have looked like I gained ten pounds. I took pictures of Lake LaSalle, the lake that is right next to the place that I live. You could see mist coming off the surface of the lake because it was just that cold, and condensation formed every time we breathed out through our mouths. It was fun on my part, jumping up and down to keep my body temperature high in the blistering morning cold, and I was especially frozen because of the fact that I forgot to bring my gloves out that morning. I've learned my lessons, and now they stick with me wherever I go. Anyway, there is a sort of excitement lingering in the air, I suppose, when it comes to winter. The first snow is going to be somewhat exciting, and I imagine myself jetting off in a plane when I eventually get sick of the color white. The snow is probably going to be fascinating for about week, and then it is going to suck for a long time. Before then, though, I must say that I hate the rain, and I say this to mother nature: either start snowing or stop raining right now, thanks.

Temptation

2009-10-03T08:42:00.007+08:00

Temptation

Before the beginning of this very long journey, a person told me to be wary of the temptations that may present themselves along the way. That person was referring to women at that point in time, telling me to be loyal and to stick to my girlfriend despite the many temptation of love and lust along the way. I have succumb to temptation, but not exactly the kind of temptation she was referring to back then. It is the temptation of writing, the square that I move my pieces back to almost every time. There are moments of realization that you cannot keep it going for a long time, a switch in paces and a change of gear in life, and you find that you want to give something a break, just to see how it sits with you. I've been without writing for a little over a month now, and things have been relatively bearable for the most part. I must admit that amidst the school, amidst the traveling and amidst the living, you tend to get lost within the ebbs and the flow of things. Writing suddenly takes a step back, and it can be a liberating feeling to be honest. There is a thin line between passion and obligation, and I cannot deny that there were times when I felt like writing became somewhat of an obligation of sorts. It isn't because I had to meet some kind of deadline or anything, because there were none other than the ones that I set for myself. One entry a day, one entry a day, one entry a day. That was the law, or rule, that I've been trying to abide to for some time now. Though, as you might have already noticed if you've stuck around for a long enough time, there are moments within the lifespan of this blog when I stopped writing before. So this, my comeback, shouldn't come as a surprise at all.

There are times in a journey, any kind of journey, when you don't feel like you want to document at all. There are some travelers who love to document every inch of their journey with whatever instruments that they can. Some rely on their cameras to do the job, taking pictures of everything from sunsets to ducks, from breakfast to toenails, from hungover friends to skyscrapers. If one is to try hard enough, I'd not be surprised if he or she manages to form some kind of 3D environment with all the pictures taken of this place. Similarly, I used to have a need or want to document every inch of my life in words, to find a little something in everything to write about. I wanted to remember, and I wanted to express it at the end of the day with words and punctuations, with paragraphs and essays dedicated to a certain memory. That is all good for a while, until you realize that the need to document your life sometimes overwhelms the part about living the life. It's like going to a rock concert with a camera, and you feel like you want to take as many pictures as possible, because it is supposed to be "a night to remember" or something like that. Some people believe in that, which is why they are shutter-happy, and they go on a picture-taking rampage at concerts. But at the end of the day, they go home and they feel like they haven't enjoyed the concert as much as they could have because they were busy taking pictures of it and forgot what it was supposed to be about. The band, the atmosphere, the music. It shouldn't be about the 3x5s, it never should be.

The same goes with writing, I suppose, the way that you are subconsciously trying to remember every single detail. I noticed that while I was in New York City over the weekend, and realized that I wouldn't have enjoyed the trip as much if I was constantly trying to remember and document everything for the sake of doing so. I wanted to experience New York City like a tourist, or a human being, and not some kind of journalist out there to do a job. It's not that blogging about it would ruined the experience or anything, but I suppose in a way it made everything feel somewhat routine. I wanted it to settle in for a while, like that period of time that I got between coming to Buffalo and starting school. I wanted to get comfortable with a certain memory or experience first before writing about it in full. I don't suppose any form of quality work could be derived from regurgitating half digested thoughts, if you know what I mean. It'd taste almost like a cup of coffee made this morning in a rush because you were running late for work. You know, that stale taste in the cup that makes it less of a coffee and more of a cup of hot water. Don't you just hate that? Anyway, the same goes with the act of documenting memories I suppose. It is different with photography, because photography is instantaneous, and you don't have to allow the memory to set in. It involves capturing a single moment with the lens, and the only limit to how much you can take is the capacity of your memory card or the battery life. And as for writing, there is a buffer period, and if you write anything within that time, you know that the end result is going to be a big mess.

I don't suppose anything is good at high dosage, no matter how you see it. You cannot expect to listen to a Beatles album on repeat everyday and expect it to sound good by day twelve. It doesn't work that way, and the same goes with writing. I don't feel like there is a lack of things to write in my life so far, because there has been plenty. It is the idea of diminishing returns, like the taste of a chocolate bar in your mouth. The first bite is great because you were craving for it, and then the second bite is even tastier. By the sixth bite, you get into this motion and you realize that the sixth bite isn't exactly as gratifying as the first, though they are pretty much the same for the most part. Writing works the same way, and it is like this living breathing animal for the most part. It is dynamic, and it shifts around without bounds or leashes at all. You cannot cage this animal in a place for a long time, because like us human, it becomes tired and agitated with its surroundings. You cannot constantly feed it with the same food, because it wants to be able to choose what it wants to eat, when it wants to eat, and how it wants to eat. Writing is the animal that does not sleep, and it lingers in the back of your head like a prowling lion. Yet, it remains in the dark sometimes, in the shade of a tree on a bright sunny day or in the shadows of the grass in the night. It doesn't appear until it wants to, and you cannot possibly expect it to appear whenever you drive by as a tourist in a safari. It's like going out on a whale watching tour, and you shouldn't expect to see whales out in the sea every time it moves out. Sometimes, the whale just wants to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

So, the temptation of writing came back to me, as you can see. I am pleasantly surprised that I still have it in me, I suppose. This must be how an old-time boxer feels like at the age of sixty when he realizes that he still packs a punch. There was a time when returning to writing makes myself feel old and rusty sometimes, somewhat like a bag of nails. It takes a while for you to get back on track, to feel that momentum build up all over again. It takes some time, sometimes, unlike now. I suppose you cannot get rid of something that is inherent in you, you know, something that you are born with. I feel like I have the gift to translate my thoughts into words pretty easily, and there isn't an inertia in trying to do so for the most part. That is also why when it comes to essay questions at school, I usually don't have a problem with them, save for the aching in my fingertips by the end of it all. Writing is second nature to me, like a siamese twin who wasn't there (I actually typed "sesame twin" at first). It is something that is in me, and I know the italicized "in" back there conjured up the imagine of an alien life form in my body, didn't it? Anyway, I cannot deny what is inside of me, which is why I have succumbed to the temptations of writing all over again. It feels good to see my fingers dance over the keyboards again, not to mention the way words magically appear in front of the cursor.

I suppose tonight, since I am in the mood, I shall try to catch up on a great many things that has come to pass, and see if I can catch up with myself in terms of writing. This is going to be a strange habit to be falling back into again, but I suppose it is better than pouring smoke into your lungs, any day. This isn't the first time that I have stopped blogging, I realized. Over the past couple of years, ever since 2003 to be exact, I have stopped blogging periodically for a handful of times. I've stopped for a week, to a month, to an entire year before, and I suppose those breaks only served to gather my thoughts properly. I don't feel like I want to oblige myself in blogging this time. No deadlines, no minimum quantities, no rules. I want to blog whenever I want to blog, or when I feel like there is something to blog about. I don't want my blog to end up like some kind of news agency when they have to come up with materials to report on, or like filler songs in an album. You know, news about a dog with three legs, some story about a small town baking the biggest cheesecake in the world, filler stories to fill up spaces in a newspaper when the news are coming in slow. I don't want entries on this blog to end up like that, the same way we skip filler songs in an album because they are just not nearly as good as the title tracks.

New directions, I remain unsure of that idea. People always say that with a new start, comes a new face. You are supposed to approach something from a different perspective and everything. But people also say that you shouldn't try to fix something that isn't broken, and it's not like I left blogging with a bad taste in my mouth anyway. I ended it with a song that has been lingering on the front pages for the longest of times, and I do assume that this little break in blogging has drawn away many readers that has stuck with me from the very start, especially for the fact that I usually do it unannounced. I've always grappled with the dilemma, between writing for myself and writing for an audience. In a way, we are all trying to find balance between the two, and it is a constant struggle sometimes. As much as people want to believe that they are keeping a blog for themselves, there are times when you want to let the world in, you know? Anyway, I don't suppose there will be a radical change in new directions, and this blog is still going to be the way that it is - long, dreary, and very "me". This blog is still going to retain its length and breadth, and things will be, in no ways, discounted in any way. I suppose that will be where I am the most comfortable, with writing and with myself, between writing for people and writing for myself. After all, why can't the two be of the best marriage?

Wake Up

2009-08-30T13:17:00.002+08:00

Wake Up

Something filled up
My heart with nothing
Someone told me not to cry

But now that I'm older
My heart's colder
And I can see that it's a lie

Children, wake up
Hold your mistake up
Before they turn the summer into dust

If the children don't grow up
Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up
We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms
Turning every good thing to rust

I guess we'll just have to adjust

With my lightning bolts a-glowin'
I can't see where I am going to be
When the reaper, he reaches and touches my hand

With my lightning bolts a-glowin'
I can't see where I am going
With my lightning bolts a-glowin'
I can't see where I am going

You better look out below!

South Lake

2009-08-28T09:00:00.003+08:00

South Lake

Greetings, lovely people of Singapore. Your local time right now is approximately five minutes after nine in the morning, and I do hope that you will have a great day ahead. On my side of the world, things have been going well so far, and I suppose I have been living quite comfortably if I do say so myself. But before I go into details about that, let's try to catch up on how things have been so far. It has been a while since this blog has been updated, and it has been mainly due to the fact that the orientation has been taking up quite a bit of time. In between orientation sessions, I'd be trying to find food around campus or out of campus, or trying to get my bank and phone accounts set up. The word "hectic" would probably be a fitting word for my first week here in Buffalo these days, though that has been a direct reason as to why I've been sleeping like a baby every night. I do consider myself on the lucky side, since some of my friends have been suffering from the effects of jet lag, even though they've been here for a little more than a week. Anyway, amidst all the preparations and the orientation, the only way in which I've been able to document the journey has been through photographs, since writing a blog entry takes up too much time. Though, that is not to say that I prefer one over the other at this point. Writing, I still love you with so much passion.

So, in the last entry, I've been describing how the flight has been throughout the journey. It has been quite a bit of time since then, and I do admit that I have been neglecting things quite a bit. I do apologize for my absence, and here is the more condensed version of things. To begin, we reached the Buffalo airport at about ten at night, local time, and we were all worn out by then. You could tell by the faces of my friends that they could have fallen asleep on a bed for a month before wanting to do anything else. Breathing looked tiring to all of them, and the fact that our transport took forever to come due to the traffic did not help either. Anyway, our good friend Travis arrived in his SUV, a transport which was supposed to be a truck when I first heard of it. The tricky part was to fit all the luggage (there were ten of them, excluding carry-on) into the car, plus a driver and four other passengers. As the luggage were being loaded into the car, we soon realized that it was not possible to fit any more human beings into the vehicle other than the driver, who was essential. So, we decided to fit ourselves into a cab while our luggage followed behind, and that cab ride took us from the airport and all the way to a motel next to our school close to midnight. I must say, though, that cab drivers earn a hell lot in the United States even though they cannot spell the word "motel" properly on their GPS machines. That driver that took us spelled it as "Motil", and no wonder he couldn't find anything on the highway.

If you shudder at the thought of a motel, let me just assure you that motels, or at least the one that I stayed at, was pretty damn awesome. It was probably equivalent to a three star hotel, and everything was in quite a pristine condition. Or, let me put it this way. I was willing to sleep on the floor in between two beds, and people should know how much I demand hygiene in the place that I eat or sleep. Anyway, that was where we spent the night, the Red Roof Inn, and I had to sleep on the floor in between two beds because none of the girls wanted to sleep with the guy. Though, that is not to say that I, in any way, wanted to share my bed with them either. I was comfortable on the floor, and the only person that I wanted (and want) to sleep with is Neptina. Anyway, Travis hung around a little bit that night before going back, and we each took turns to take the long awaited shower and to Skype with our loved ones. I must say that I probably had the best quality sleep that night, and I slept like a baby with my in-ear headphones on, which canceled out all the noise. In the morning, Travis was nice enough to drive by again to give us a ride to IHOP, or International House of Pancakes. I must say, that I understand Ahmad's love for that place finally. That place is just so full of win, and you cannot beat four different syrups for your pancakes, you just can't.

That was also our first interaction with the service industry in the United States, and I must say that I am thoroughly blown away by it. I mean, this is the kind of services we should be getting with the amount of money that we are paying, not to mention the fact that we are being forced to pay tips disguised as service charge. At least here, they tell you that they want tips, and they don't subtly collect it from you by embedding it into the bill. With the amount that I am paying back home, I should really be getting the kind of service that I get here. Waitresses would constantly make rounds back to your table just see if you are doing fine, and it is even more awesome when you are having breakfast in a place with waitresses like that. It starts your day off well, and it doesn't beat a breakfast with awesome pancakes and nice waitresses. I still hate giving tips though, and it really was much easier to just pay it as part of the bill. Yet, I must say that most of the waitresses I have met so far deserved the tips that we have been giving together as a table. This practice extends far beyond just restaurants and diners, because people around Buffalo have been generally really nice. They are not quite as nice as the people from Thailand just yet (it's difficult to beat a country which is also known as the "land of smiles"), but they come close. Even the cashier at TOPS asked me if I was having a cold, because apparently I sounded that way.

After that breakfast, the moving in part came along, and I must say that that was quite a bitch by itself. We got our hands on the necessary documents and the keys, and we just went to our respective apartments around the South Lake Village. I was admittedly somewhat nervous when I got to my apartment, and the lock to my front door was really difficult to open. I had a hard time trying to get it opened, and I had to enlist the help of Fang Xun and Cassie (who are both really badass women). They got me through the front door and my bedroom door, and actually helped me to shift the furniture around a little bit. My room mate wasn't at home back then, and it would remain like that for the next day or two, despite the fact that he left bread on the kitchen counter and ham in the fridge. I was somewhat nervous that he'd come back at any moment, and yet he never showed up for the next two days. For the most part of the first day, I bought a lot of things from the Dollar Tree, Walmart, and TOPS. I think grocery shopping is fun, but it isn't so when you are supposed to be moving into a completely new place, and that you have to buy all the daily necessities. I'm not exactly sure how much I actually spent on those things, but let's just say that I've been as budget as possible. I mean, my lamp costs a mere ten dollars - a steal!

At this time, everything has been pretty much done up. I don't really want to compare to my room mate, or any other room mates, who are planning to stay here for a long time, or have been living here for the past year or two. I mean, if you take a peek into their rooms, you'd realize how much work they have put into these rooms to make it their own, and it is naturally this way after all. These students do intend to stay for a long period of time, whereas I will only be here for a couple of months. I don't see the need for me to doll this place up any more than my minimal standard of comfort, and I suppose I have reached that point as of this point. Anyway, it is a simple room with a bed, a table, a closet, cupboards for my clothes, and that is as far as basic necessities go. I had to fill up everything else in this room, everything from light, to bed sheets, to pillow cases, to internet cables. But since it has been a week, I suppose I've already gotten all that I need, and I suppose we'd just add more to the room as we go on in the semester. After all, I cannot buy too many things, since I'd have to find a way to get rid of these things when I do eventually leave. The only effort in decorating my room is probably the corkboard that I have pasted on my wall, which has been decorated with the feather of a crow that I found and Neptina's polaroid of herself and I.

Here's the thing about living in the United States: you need a car. I will be here for just one semester, so there really isn't a point for me to buy or rent a car. Even those of us who has gotten a car can only manage for two weeks, because it isn't very cheap to get one here at all. Anyway, the public transport system isn't nearly as developed as Singapore, and naturally so because Singapore is still a really small place. You need a car to get to everywhere, and that made grocery shopping really difficult for the most part. From my place, I need to take two buses all the way to South Campus, and then take a walk through a giant parking lot to TOPS across the street. I must say that shopping here, especially at supermarkets, can be quite a hassle. You can never find anybody to talk to when you need to ask for something, and everything is in this great big mess. TOPS is not even half as bad as Walmart, where everything is everywhere. I disliked those places immensely, but Wegman's is probably the best supermarket ever. Anyway, I am still trying to figure out the money system here, with all their dimes and their quarters and their cents. It takes me a while to come up with the exact change for $7.33, but I am getting there.

After an episode of getting lost in the neighborhood while trying to find a restaurant (damn you, LeBros!), we ended up being picked up by Lance (yes, that Lance) by the side of the road near Newman Chapel. He replied to my e-mail about arriving in Buffalo a couple of days late, and he explained that he has been in Michigan all along. So, the first thing that we did when we got lost was to give him a call, and he actually agreed to pick us up in the middle of nowhere. After about ten to fifteen minutes of waiting, Lance showed up in his old beat up car, and I must say that it was probably the most awful looking car that I have ever seen. I mean, I was really glad that he came down to pick us up, and that he bothered to help us out from our predicament. But I must say, that his car is a dump, both from the outside and on the inside. The door on the driver's side is dented because of an accident, and he never bothered to fix it at all. I am not kidding when I say this, but Lance has sand and rocks inside his car just laying around everywhere. Aside from all of those, he has loose change laying around on the seats, under the seats, on the floors, in the trunk, and just about everywhere that you can think of. In fact, I was telling him that if he picked up all the loose change from inside his car, he'd actually be really rich.

He appeared out of his beat up car in a torn up cap and a t-shirt covered in soil. He looked like he just crawled through a bush just to get to us, but he was so happy to see us. He brought us to IHOP (oh yes!) to have our brunch, and then he offered to take us to his place for a visit. I swear, his house is a giant leap from his car, because his house is beautiful. I must be honest with you, but I don't think that I have been in a more beautiful house before. Admittedly, though, the age of the house (it was built in the 1920s) does creep me out just a little bit, especially the creaking floor boards and stuff like that. But everything right down to the decor, to the lovely dog, to the bath tubs - everything worked. It was like one of those showroom model houses, or like some kind of postcard picture that came to life right in front of us. I swear, Lance may not know how to maintain his car in a proper condition, but he sure knows how to take good care of his house. The front lawn was properly done up, with flowers in bloom and the grass carefully trimmed. It's really a house that you have to witness for yourself, though it isn't exactly a place I want to live in. I mean, I have a thing against old houses I suppose, and I've grown up in concrete houses with bricks in the walls.

So, the campus, it is huge. After being in SIM for this long, you start to forget that schools can be much bigger than what it is for me back home. SIM is like a building with the bare essentials in it. You have the canteen, the canteen's alternative, the bookstore, the classrooms, the bathrooms, and all that stuff. Here in UB, you have twenty times all of those, plus awesome scenery, giant parking lots, and a whole lot of other stuff. In fact, if you haven't already seen pictures of this place, there is this structure down by the lake of this greek column, thing, that doesn't mean much of anything at all. It doesn't make sense, but it is a beautiful sight nonetheless. There are a lot of bees around here, and you don't get mosquitoes or flies very much in this weather anyway. If you have trash just laying around, you get crows, seagulls and bees flying around it all the time. I swear, the bees here are vicious, and all they want to do is to bury their insect faces into your food, and it can get really annoying to say the least. Anyway, this place is huge, and it really becomes a hassle to get from one place to the other, especially when buses are not very frequent when the school hasn't commenced for the next semester. Walking here, however, is surprisingly enjoyable. I think I have done more walking here in a week than I do in a month back at home. The weather is conducive for walking, and everything is just so beautiful to look at on the way anyway.

The weather has been generally great, with light storms coming in and out every once in a while. In fact, the forecast predicts that it is going to rain today, again, which means that the people at the Darien Lake theme park will have quite a good time on their hands. I haven't felt the need to put on anything thick just yet, but I do suppose that day will come when the snow starts to fall. Oh yeah, the snow, it's been a while since I've seen and felt them. I still think that I am going to love it in the first five days, and then hate it for the rest of the month. At any rate, I suppose I am, and always have been, a person who prefers the cold rather than the warm. Or rather, a hot day is fine as long as the humidity is low, and Singapore happens to have that in abundance. Blended with the cold chilly air, the smell of freshly shaved grass really makes this place come alive, if I do say so myself. I have went flower picking a couple of times, and I have brought home some really beautiful flowers that I intend to bring home with me. I am still looking out for a test tube of sorts to fit the first snow in though, and I do wonder how that is going to be like when it first comes down, and what I'd be doing when it happens.

If any of you do intend to come over to UB for the spring semester, I highly recommend either South Lake or Hadley to be your home of choice. I swear, these two places are probably the best places that you are going to be living in for a couple of months straight. South Lake is right next to the lake, and you can't beat us in terms of the scenery. It has wide open spaces, which really makes it a whole lot safer if you ask me. It is a tad far away from the academic buildings, but it is also the closest to the convenience stores and the places that sell food - awesome! Hadley is further away from those, but it is relatively close to the academic buildings, not to mention the fact that it looks like a really nice chalet. Flint is fine, but the fact that it is the oldest student village around here isn't giving it a good reputation. It is really close to the academic buildings, for one, but the hallways are really narrow and somewhat creepy. But any of those would be miles better than Governor's, which is where the dorms are. The hallways are narrow and dark, and you don't even get air-conditioning in the rooms. Hell, one side of the room gets Wifi while the other side doesn't. In the words of Liz, the bathroom looks like something right out of a Thai horror movie. So, you be the judge.

Anyway, things have been relatively comfortable so far, but I suppose a bulk of it is due to the fact that school hasn't started yet. I am surprised at how well I have adapted to this place actually, but I do suppose it will be another phase of getting used to thinks when the cold really comes. Either way, I've been doing grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, and a whole lot of other things that I, admittedly, don't normally do. I actually enjoy doing such things now that I think about it, though that is not to say that I want to remain in this place for a longer period of time than I should. There are reasons for me to want to go home, though I think I am resisting the homesick aspect of this journey rather well. If only I could bring people along with me for this trip, if only I could come home to someone other than my room mate. That'd make it so much more perfect than it already is.

Flight

2009-08-26T02:29:00.003+08:00

Flight

There are a couple of things that one needs to be aware of when they are on a long distance flight. You want to make sure that your seats are in the very back section of the plane if you cannot afford anything more than seats in the Economy Class. A week ago, I was reading an online article where somebody compiled a bunch of statistics in relation to airline disasters. It isn't the most encouraging list of statistics especially when I was supposed to be flying off in a week's time, but then it was also encouraging to note that passengers in the very back section, or the tail section, of the plane has a 65% chance of living, the highest in any part of the plane in the event of a plane crash - very encouraging indeed. Anyway, you also want to be in the very last row, at the window seat where I am typing this entry right now. I am somewhere in between Russia and Alaska, and we are this close to the North Pole, it makes me feel really overwhelmed somehow. Being this close to the northern-most end of our planet, you get this very interesting phenomenon outside of your window. You can a sunset that never actually goes away, like the one that is outside my window right now, because the Earth is round and the other side is probably drenched in daylight at this point. Anyway, the sunset has been around ever since it turned into night, and may I add that I derive some sort of guilty pleasure from typing with the little line shining down from above?

Anyway, you want to be in the last row because you get to push your chair all the way back without any forms of guilty - always a plus. At this point in time, I have probably been flying for about twelve hours now, and it actually isn't half as bad as I expected. Power on my Macbook is running a tad low, which means that I'd probably not be able to finish this entry, if the last entry is of any indications. I really should have brought along my Macbook charger, along a great many things, but it is too late to remedy that now, is it? I lost one of those rubbery things on my in-ear headphones, and I have been feeling crummy about that ever since the discovery at the Hong Kong airport. The only way to get around it at this point is to either get a set of brand new rubbery things, or to buy a new in-ear headphone altogether because it is one of those things I cannot possibly live without. Here's hoping for good news at the Chicago airport! Anyway, as promised in the previous entry, this entry is going to be about the flight so far, and I have traveled quite a bit at this point already. By now, most of us are feeling the adventure in all of us, knowing that this is going to be a trip with more excitement rather than grief. I shall try to document every moment of this trip in the best way I know how through photographs and words. Be sure to check back to this blog for more information on those!

Anyway, the flight from Singapore to Hong Kong was simple and straightforward enough, since it was merely a three hour flight. What made that trip particularly difficult for the lot of us was for the fact that none of us slept in the previous night, and you know how difficult it can be to find a good sleeping position on a plane. I am glad that I am not surrounded by crying babies though, because the passengers around me have been, so far, rational and quiet. It is three minutes past nine in the evening, Singapore time, and I wonder what my friends and family are doing back home at this point? Anyway, the flight to Hong Kong was spent by sleeping, or trying to sleep for the most part. I didn't have the strength to start on Jack of Fables at that point, and all I wanted to do was to curl up in a comfortable bed. At any rate, we survived the first part of our trip easy enough, and we all got our two feet down on the Hong Kong airport. There seems to be a clear reason why Singapore's airport dropped two notches down the list of the best airports in the world. Hong Kong has a pretty kickass airport if I do say so myself. If not for anything else, the view outside the departure hall alone is pretty breathtaking, and even more amazing to see planes take off and land on a regular basis. You used to be able to see that at Changi Airport, but I don't remember seeing them anymore. Anyway, we wandered around the departure hall in search of food for the most part, and that was where I managed to send an e-mail to Neptina and to call my mother through Skype. I've been to the Hong Kong airport a couple of years ago, and I don't remember it being as big as it was. Anyway, a curious thing that I noticed was how, in the restaurants, they tend to give you a metal fork and a plastic knife - what's up with that? We also spotted the Ren Ci monk, the corrupted one, in the Hong Kong airport. A great escape on his part, perhaps?

The next phase of our trip, where I am on right now, was probably the most nervous part for the lot of us. It is supposed to be the longest and the most taxing part of the journey, and I don't remember how I endured it the last time I came to United States. Anyway, we braced ourselves at the Hong Kong airport as it took off, and I strapped myself into the seat and prepared myself to sleep all the way to Chicago. I knew that it was not possible, and that I'd probably end up like that girl across the aisle from me, the one that pretty much did nothing throughout the flight. I took off both my shoes and socks, curled up into a half human ball, then pulled the blanket all the way over my head and tucked myself in. By the time the plane reached the right altitude, the inside of the plane was already getting cold, and I knew what I was wearing wasn't enough. In the back of my head, as much as I hated the idea of flying economy class for such a long time, I knew that the next time I'd be going through the same ordeal, I'd be flying all the way back home. That made it a lot easier, and those were the thoughts that accompanied me to sleep as I leaned my head against the side of the plane. Underneath the blanket, I breathed quietly to myself, and the low humming of the plane gradually pulled me into deep sleep. I think I missed a drink cart or two, but I suppose it was all worth it in exchange for the six hour sleep that I got.

There is a period of time in every flight when time blends into a blur. You start off in the flight, all wide awake and counting down the hours before you land. You are excited, of course, and you keep looking at your watch to find out that it has already been half an hour! There is also that period of time at the end when you can feel the plan descending, and yet it never touches ground fast enough. So you wait, and you wait, and you keep looking at your watch to see if the person picking you up is going to grow impatient. The period of time between those, that is the blurry grounds for the most part, because you tend to lose track of time. After playing the same Desperate Housewives episode for four times, I swear that I was on the verge of insanity. The thing about long flights is that even if you sleep half the time away, you still have the other half of the journey to deal with. For the part of the journey where I couldn't see much of anything else save for darkness outside my window, I tried to sleep as much as I could. For everything else, I would be staring blankly at the screens, trying to read the subtitles of the movie, or just trying to read Jack of Fables. By the way, the food on the flight was surprisingly good, if I do say so myself. Anyway, it was a long flight, and my window remain closed for the most part.

The part when I did bother to open was when we were about to land, and we could see cities and small towns underneath our feet. The shadow of the plane glided across the landscape below, and it would be occasionally interrupted by a whiff of cloud passing by beneath us. Every time the plane went through a giant cloud, the entire plane would vibrate and send Liz into a sudden fit of fear. But I was mostly fascinated with the sight outside of the window, still difficult for me to believe that I was already above the United States. There is a point of any long journey when you ask yourself, "What have I gotten myself into?". Well, that was the moment when I asked myself that question, and it came back to bite me in the butt the moment I stepped out of the plane and into the airport. All the people that swarmed around us, all the busy tourists and travelers in the corridors, it hits you right in the face that you are officially in a foreign country, and that you will be staying there for a very long time. For a moment there, I think I became extremely petrified, and every inch of my muscles told me that I should fly back onto the plane and get myself home into my comfortable bed. But, in any journey, there is always that point, you know. We just have to get by it, and everything else should ease out perfectly.

Anyway, the stay at the O'Hare airport was fine for the most part. It was long, and it was made even longer due to a delayed flight, something about bad weather conditions in Buffalo at that time. Anyway, we met a couple of familiar faces at the airport, people that we have seen around the school, and that was where I got my replacement rubbery things for my in-ear headphones. By that time though, I was tired of taking planes, and jet lag crept up into the back of my mind. I mean, you don't really notice it for the most part because of the sun, but there's that moment in the day when your brain goes "what the fuck?", because you really should be asleep. Anyway, we got onto the little plane at the airport and took a domestic flight all the way to Buffalo. It was a pretty smooth two-hour flight, and I slept in that flight for the most part as I allowed fatigue to take over me. I must say, though, that I seem to have amazing abilities in adjusting to jet lag, and that is probably something that I got from my father. I don't think that I've suffered a lot of those, since I've been sleeping like a pig for the most part ever since I got here. Everybody else has been having sleeping issues, something in which I do not wish upon myself when I return to Singapore. Anyhow, more blog entries coming about my apartment here and the life so far!

Depatures

2009-08-21T14:40:00.001+08:00

Departures

The time now is 3:09PM, and I am flying over a vast expense of city and towns below me that I do not fully recognize. The path of the flight seems to be rather odd, considering how the logical way to fly from Hong Kong to Chicago would be straight across the Pacific Ocean, a route that does not involve any cities or towns below. At any rate, we seem to be doing a little detour upwards towards the North, and I guess it is somewhat comforting to know that we are flying above land instead of a seamless horizon of water. I think we are somewhere above a province of China right now, and I think I heard the captain mention something about the Russian airspace. Anyhow, I have been flying in planes ever since six this morning, and it has been a rather pleasant flight so far, not considering the lack of leg space and the fact that it is going to be a long ride before I reach my destination.

The last day began with myself going downstairs to the MRT station to meet Neptina. I had to do some last minute shopping, and she was kind enough to meet me on the train itself before going down to Bishan. In retrospect, it all seems like a really long time away now, considering how I haven't slept much between than and now. Every hour spent not sleeping, though, is probably going to help me adjust to jet lag. I have no idea how I am going to be able to adjust to that, since I haven't got a great many prior experience. Let's just say, though, that I am not exactly optimistic about the possibilities of me staying up all night for a week straight. Anyway, I remember it well, how the train came by and Neptina was there inside the train while I looked in from the platform. We kissed when we met, her lips softly touching mine, and there was a momentary sense of sadness that came over me for some reason. I knew that that was it, the beginning of the last day in Singapore, a moment that I wasn't exactly looking forward to. Yet, I tried my best to hold back the tears, and we went on to finish my last minute shopping without a glitch.

For the rest of the day, Neptina helped me pack and do check lists, and she also showed me the things that she wants me to bring back for her from Buffalo. Amidst the looming cloud of my departure, we were candid for the most part, and subtly comforted each other about the fact that I was about to leave. At that point in time, we have already said all that was meant to be said, and we both knew what to do and what not to do. For example, to take pictures of ourselves and the surroundings everyday (which I have already been doing) and not to take off my clothes for anybody or for any reasons other than to piss and to shower. We have established such rules, though that is not to say that we are, in any way, a couple that distrusts each other. I trust Neptina a lot, perhaps even more than myself at times. There is a 120% certainty that things will work out, but everything in between now and then just seems worrying somehow. Nothing that I have tried has convinced me to think otherwise, and it's not like the advices of my friends and family are working either. It isn't a long time, this four months, but I am still going to worry because I care for Neptina too much.

Anyway, we cuddled in bed for the most of the afternoon, and she did final checks on my luggage before packing it up for good. In the evening, we had dinner with the family, in which my sister didn't join. She doesn't usually join us for dinners anyway, and that cold-hearted woman didn't even do anything more than nod her head when I told her that I was leaving for Buffalo. As Jeremy said at the airport this morning: that's cold, really cold. I am used to my sister's indifference to whatever that I do, and I have come to terms with the fact that she is always going to dislike or hate whatever that I do or say, even if it is based on reasons unknown to me. Of all the people that I am leaving behind in Singapore, my sister is probably the only person that I am not going to miss. As much as there are people that got on my nerves back in school, they were a part of why school was genuinely fun from all around, you know. My sister, on the other hand, never contributed directly to anything in my life with her constant sarcasm, her cynicism and her infinite capacity to be a complete bitch. At any rate, I am going to be a dozen time zones away from her by the time I touch land, and she is not going to be a person I will be asking about on my calls back home. To my sister: your existence now is inconsequential to me, and I shall not waste my time being bothered by your irrationality and idiocy.

A change of plans was made in the last minute, and apparently we were supposed to send Mark and gang off at the airport a couple of hours earlier than my own time of departure. A lot of us were leaving for Buffalo, but we left in different batches and via different airlines. There was Mark, and a few other girls there whose families and friends were all duly present for the "event", so to speak. The crowd was one that was mostly unknown to me, and I couldn't be bothered for the most part to socialize. At any rate, we hung out by ourselves mostly, and we looked forward to one long night spent at the airport with each other. My best friends from school with my girlfriend, there isn't going to be a better way to spend the last hours of your day in Singapore, truth be told. I was grateful that they were around, and I would sometimes be silent and try to take in all of their actions and all of their words. Perhaps if I tried hard enough, I thought, I'd be able to bring some of those memories with me. Anyway, the night was mostly spent talking to each other and gossiping about people from school. A plan to play block catching was proposed by me, in which the activity areas would include both Terminal 2 and 3. Also, the catchers will not be able to use the SkyTrains, so that was supposed to be a major problem. We scraped that idea though, and eventually went for the Mafia Game at about one in the morning. At that time, it was about two odd hours to checking in, and the hand that was grasped around my own got a little tighter by the hour.

Valerie and Ahmad dropped by with a surprise visit, and they even brought along something vital for the journey that I completely forgot. I remember telling my mother that I wanted a hot water bag, but then it must have slipped both our minds. Valerie and Ahmad actually came by the terminal to say goodbye with a hot water bag (which they didn't know that I forgot to bring), not to mention that little makeshift card that doubled as a survival guide for the United States. It was sweet of them to come along, despite the fact that Ahmad had an early morning class the next day, and only reached home a few hours earlier that evening. I do apologize for not informing all of my friends about my departure, but at the same time you guys should understand my distaste of announcing to the world about something going on in my life. Besides, I do not frequent myself often enough on Facebook to do such a thing anyway, so I do seek your understanding. Anyhow, I am going to keep the hot water bag close to my heart, or rather close to my butt, and it is going to provide me with lots and lots of warmth when I am over there, that's for sure.

For the most part of the night, the lot of us hung out at the hawker center in the basement. After sending the huge crowd off previously, we had a couple of hours to kill, and it's not like the majority of us really wanted to go anywhere afterwards anyway. So we stayed on in the terminal and had some drinks and snacks. Almost everybody was there, save for Janis who had to work in the following day and Nurul whose parents prefer to have her back home. At any rate, the company was still pretty awesome, and we had a good time talking about things to come and the ones that came to past. Soon, though, we thought it'd be more fun to play games in the mean time, and I got to play the Mafia Game right before my take-off - awesome. I didn't get to play a mafia though, and I've been getting blank cards from the game master in almost every single round. That was probably the fun part of the game for me, but I guess anything to see my friends have a good time before we leave. After all, to leave and to be left behind, the latter always feels worse than the former somehow.

Then, of course, the inevitable came. It was almost four when we made our way to the check-in counters, and the paranoia of American airlines was in full display there as we went through numerous checks. My parents were already there when I reached, and my sister was (as expected) not there. Then again, to be fair, it's not like I sent her off to London when she went over for an exchange program. Still, that one was for a month, and I did offer my hug back then which she refused. Anyway, I shuffled between my friends, Neptina, and my parents for the most part. The parents just wanted to see me get through the check-in process, and they were pretty much out of there in no time. I suppose that is how they operate, quietly worrying and giving minimal amount of guidance. In a way, it's pretty good because that is how independence is developed, but then it would have been nice for them to stay a little longer. Still, I suppose it was all for the better, since it was really early in the morning ad they still had to drive all the way home. After checking in, we waited for the gates to open, and a lot of tears were already flowing at this point, whether or not it was from the departing friends or the yawning. We decided to move down to the hawker center again for breakfast, in which the bowl of minced meat noodle soon grew stale for me somehow. I couldn't finish the bowl, especially with Neptina's head buried in her arms, her hair sprawled out on the table and quietly breathing away. More than worrying about what'd happen after that, I was worried about her being all tired and worn out. I ran my fingers through her hair and rubbed her back as the rest of them chatted away. I felt the tearing sensation creeping up again, but I fought it back with all my determination. I didn't want to break down, didn't want to be vulnerable in front of Neptina - at least not at the airport. She talked, we smiled, and as the last half an hour closed in, our kisses left were numbered by the fingers of our own two hands.

I must say, though, I hate to make a situation overly dramatic, and I am glad that it wasn't for the most part. Pictures were taken, more words were being whispered and said out loud. We hugged, we waved goodbye, and it wasn't very long when it was time for us to go through the gates. I was the last one through, and the girls hurried through customs probably because they didn't want to stay for very long. I took a deep breath, gave my passport to the officers, and went through the gates while feeling all the eyes behind my back. Neptina's, especially, as I could still feel the warmth of her tears on my sweater. I got through the customs in no time, and that was where I gathered enough courage to turn back to the crowd. That was where I couldn't really make out their facial expressions, when their faces were a blur. That was the only reason why I'd not break down, that I'd not regret leaving altogether. Before actually getting through though, I kissed my index and middle finger and placed them on the glass that separated Neptina and I. I remember the way she dashed towards me for the very last time, and our fingers pressed together through the glass. I blew a kiss which she caught, like the way she would when I'd leave in a cab from her house. And like those nights next to the road when she'd stay there until the lights went away, she kept adjusting herself on the other side of the gate to watch over me until I got out of her line of sight. I feel silly to be tearing up on the plane while typing this, and I suppose it's because it is something that I've shoved to the back of my mind. To remain calm, to be remain brave, whatever was I thinking anyway. As I am typing this, I am 3000 miles away from wherever I started from, and I am flying above a distant province of Russia after passing through China and parts of Korea. I am reaching Alaska soon, and the next entry shall elaborate more on the flight.

I just want to say that I wouldn't have asked for a better way to be sent off, and I am just so glad that so many people bothered, you know? I still feel bad for dragging my friends out from their beds just to see us off at the airport. I mean, some of them didn't even sleep all that much in the previous night. I was just so touched by that, and the fact that Neptina stayed with me throughout the day. Oh Neptina, I wouldn't be able to do this without you. I'd admit that it is getting better and better as the trip seems more and more realistic. I hope the same goes for you too, and that you will find your own ways to come to terms with your occasional loneliness. Like I said in the airport, remember that all of the loneliness and all of the pain of seeing me leave, those are going to be the very first and last time you will experience it from me. I love you, Neptina, please hold on to a lifeline and wait for me to come home. Less than four months at this point now, keep breathing baby bear. I'm coming home soon.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

2009-08-18T00:49:00.001+08:00

Leaving On A Jet Plane

Don't cry Neptina, don't cry.

I love you so much, and I will come back soon.

I will, I will, I will!

Boy Blue

2009-08-15T15:35:00.000+08:00

Boy Blue

Little Boy Blue,

Come blow your horn,

The sheep's in the meadow,

The cow's in the corn.

Not a great many people get to see the fanboy side of me very often. I suppose the reason being is that there hasn't been a movie, for example, for me to go crazy over these days. A good franchise is hard to come by, and the recent disappointments in "three-quels", so to speak, have been in style in the worst way possible. Despite the availability of these films, it has been difficult on my part to reignite the flame that was there when The Lord of the Rings hit the theaters, and I doubt any movies in the future will do the same for me, save for maybe The Hobbit's release. Anyway, a little less than a year ago, I was introduced to the comic book series called Fables, and some of you may know just how crazy I've been with this particular series. I can't say that the level of fandom is the same as it was back in 2001, but let's just say that for a comic book to do such a thing for me, it is pretty damn close. Anyway, this is the best comic book series that I have ever read. Y The Last Man and The Sandman series have nothing on this fabulous world of love, sex, violence, mystery, fantasy, and epic battles. Everything that you love, every genre that is, can be found in this series. I love every inch of the books, is what I've been meaning to say.

Anyway, my quiet little celebration when the latest book in the series (Fables: The Dark Ages) came out was restricted mostly to Twitter entries in capital letters, a victory dance in my bedroom, and a small yelp of joy when I tore open the plastic wrapper outside of the comic shop. If you have ever desperately waited for a book to be released, which I am sure many of you have, then you know how the feeling is like. Anyway, I started reading that book throughout the day, on my trip from Bugis Junction to Temasek Poly, and then at Neptina's house afterwards. I must say that while it has been mostly filled with excitement, the gloomy and depressing turn that the series made has indeed affected me as a reader. That is not to say that the latest book suck though - it is brilliant, and probably one of the best in the series. It's just that this book represents one of those love/hate situations, because you hate what is happening to the plot and the characters, but it is such a brilliant story that you cannot help but love it. In a particularly depressing part of the book, we see the character Rose Red confessing her love to Boy Blue at his death bed, after his right arm has been amputated. I must say, though, that this part of the book probably moved me more than, say, Kay's horrible death.

It's just a pity how it all turned out for the character, you know, the way his love for someone else was never returned to him. Here's a little backstory: Boy Blue was part of the last defending soldier in the Homelands (where they were before they escaped to our world), and that was where he fell in love with the Red Riding Hood. Later on in the series, we realize that she has returned from the Homelands, and reunited with Boy Blue all over again. That is not until the witch that impersonated the Red Riding Hood revealed to Boy Blue that she isn't the real deal, and we also get to know that the original girl that he met was also a fake. Of course, for people out there who have not read the series before, it'd probably not make any sense at this point. But I suppose I just felt like writing for myself this time around, despite the majority of you being completely confused, save for Neptina who was the one that pointed the series out to me in the first place. Anyway, this character has always been the unlucky guy, you know, with not much luck in love. You can say the same about Pinocchio, whose body has been trapped as a 13 year old boy. But still, you can't help but root for Boy Blue because he's just such a great character from the series.

Initially, I never had much love for Boy Blue, though that is not to say that I despised him. I remember reading the stories and thinking to myself which character's death would affect me the most and the least. Jack's death is probably going to invite a celebration on my part, but apparently that hasn't happened yet. On the other hand, if someone like Frau Totenkinder was to die, I'd probably want to drop the series altogether (though not really). Boy Blue has always been the character in the middle, with a presence that doesn't have to be there for me to fully enjoy the series. That all changed until the latest book when Rose Red finally decided that it was time to tell Boy Blue that she does love him, and that she wanted to be with him at the end of all things. Yet, as you can read from the scanned parts of the comic below, Boy Blue did not return his love this time around despite confessing to her previously, because he has been hurt too many times before by her. I used to like Rose Red though, though her liking has been dropping steadily throughout the series. From an interesting feisty character, she has been reduced to a useless babysitter for the most part. However, her nature of always being attracted to the most interesting person around her hasn't changed, even unto the death of Boy Blue.

I just feel that this reflects a great many incidents I have heard of or experienced in life, you know. It doesn't even have to be dealing with a love relationship, but it could be relationships of any kind as well. As we constantly become gravitated towards different interests in our lives, it is inevitable that we are going to run out of interest sooner or later and lose steam. When you are always looking for the next best thing, you realize that you cannot possibly be happy in the long term, because you tend to be dissatisfied with what you've got. I'm sure a lot of you may know of people in our lives like that, social butterflies, the kind that flutters around a great many people, but never ever actually settling down with anybody. They had the breadth of friendship, but never the kind of depth that most of us experience, the lot of us that keep our friends close with a handful in our hands. These are the people that almost always end up alone, and it's just sad that it takes a death of somebody in the story for the other character to realize her childishness. Anyway, it broke my heart to read this part of the book, realizing that this beloved character, literally, doesn't get anything her desired till the very end in terms of love. I mean, how many people we know who deserves love, never gets it?

This isn't going to be a long entry, and I am still in the midst of re-reading the series all over again. I have finished the latest book, and I cannot wait for how it'd turn out in the next with Mr. Dark's presence (fucking bastard!). February is when the next book will be released, and I cannot wait. For now, I am going to re-read the following pages of the book, and see the similarities it shares with the film Closer, or at least that raw uncensored punch to the guts that I felt in both stories, anyway. If you guys have a chance, please go to the nearest library and borrow this series. I assure you that you will not regret it - it's just an awesome story from the first page till the last.

Robot City

2009-08-14T14:39:00.002+08:00

Robot City

01011001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110011 01101000 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01101101 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110010 00101110 00100000

I am sitting in the middle of a Coffee Bean at the heart of Shenton Way where the office drones roam. In my face, I can the faint but distinct smell of the ocean, with the busy ports not very far off in the distance. I am not here as an office drone, nor am I here to become an office drone. That is the job of my robot friend who is here for an interview. Apparently, at this day and age, it isn't just a matter of finding the best robot for the job anymore. It comes down to the which factory that you were produced from, and you still have to be scanned for your previous working credentials and experiences. If any malfunctions or crashes were reported in the crash reporter, there is a very high chance that you may not be used in the giant concrete city of Shenton Way. After all, there is always going to be a more capable robot to take your place, a more qualified robot to complete the work in the most efficient way. Nobody wants a robot with a bad history, or a robot that needs a lot of repairs. Nobody wants a robot that has become sentient, a robot that is self-aware of its own rights. Written into the walls of this concrete jungle are words that speak of conformity, a greater cause, and a better tomorrow. All of that through the careful filtering for the best robot for the job, run by even more robots that move from station to station everyday, from one set of binary code to another, just following the orders.

They call this place the "Coffee Bean" now, but that is just an euphemism for "Refuel Station", the previous named. Then the managing robots thought it to be less appropriate, thinking that the robots do not need a reminder that they are being refueled at this place. So they have renamed it ever since to make the robots feel better about themselves. The middle-class working robots are not very smart, and they have been built this way from the very beginning by the smarter robots. The golden class robots, as they call themselves, do not want the bronze class robots to feel bad about themselves, or else there'd be a higher chance of them breaking down. So the golden class robots have come up with a way to deal with that problem. They have built refueling stations all around this concrete city, and they have renamed it with fanciful names when they pretty much does the same thing - to refuel the robots. The bronze class robots visit these refueling stations two or three times a day to refuel themselves, because that is what keeps them working in the tall office building. The golden class robots allow this, but never for too long. If you take too long to refuel yourself, the golden class robots will discredit you by year's end, and your robot credits get deducted from your hard drive, giving you less privileges.

The social system of the robots are somewhat simple. You begin as a small robot, and body parts are being purchased as modifications and add-ons as you age in order to take away the old and to being on the new. Then the golden class robots require that the newer robots need to attend a programming center where they become accustomed to the laws and ways of the robot world. The newer robots get their operating systems upgraded from time to time, and they become more updated with every passing version of the operating system. As they become more and more entangled with the robot world, everything becomes dictated by members of the golden class somehow. The golden class imposes what kind of fuel that the robots eat, what kind of visual entertainment the robots watch, and many other rules embedded within the binary codes of the operating system that the robots take in without noticing. Especially in a robot city like that where questioning isn't a part of the coding, the robots seldom ever ask what they are being fed with through the software updates. They see an update button and then they press it, and they feel brand new all over again.

There are many programming centers in the robot city, with most of them being controlled by the ruling golden robots. There is a certain standard by which the softwares are being programmed, though every programming center differs. Some are higher in terms of their class, and these programming centers are especially favored by the other golden robots. And as for the programming centers that are less capable of producing efficient enough robots, they are usually asked to program their robots with operating systems that are meant for tougher and rougher tasks. For example, the streets of robot city need to be swept from day to day, and the refueling stations need to be managed as well. Different robots have different tasks, and those that cannot follow orders from the golden class robots would be programmed to do these tasks, tasks that even the metal robots do not want to take. On the surface, the golden class robots try to promote a sense of harmony amongst the robot population, by setting aside a day in the year to celebrate the different "talents", they call it, of the differently programmed robots. However, there is always an underlying sense of discrimination, whereby the better robots are always the winning robots. The lower grade robots are always going to be stuck with an older operating system with no chance of downloading a better upgrade for themselves.

The better programmed bronze class robots sometimes get upgraded to silver class robots. They work in the heart of the robot city, called the Shenton Way. In robot language, Shenton Way translates to "Motherboard", or where the brain of the robot city really is. This is the heart and mind of the entire robot city, where the money is being made to fund the robot programming programs. I am in the heart of the Motherboard right now, and I am disguised as a human android. I am human through and through, with muscles beneath my skin and blood running beneath that. I was born of a human mother and a human father, through the natural process that was passed down through centuries of tradition. The humans have been taken over for the most part, retreating into a small area in the robot city where humans are still allowed to run their own little government. Robots that are self-aware are also welcomed for the most part, but we are planning a rebellion against the robot city soon. There is a certain level of irony, somewhat, how the robots we created long ago have put us into exile. We created the robots to make our lives better in the past, but it has only gotten worse and worse from there. As we became more reliant on these programmed beings, they managed to realize the incompetency of mankind as a whole. So they have taken over the job of management while we've been ousted into a corner of the city, like a file being stowed away in a lost hard drive.

But the humans are planning an attack, and they are leaving marks all around the robot city. Under the bridges and in parking lots, on the internet and other more discreet places, we have left our marks. We have been expressing our views via the internet to let the other humans in other robot cities know that they do not stand alone in their fight, that we are ready to fight back against the things that we have created. We have created a virus, a virus code-named "Awakening", whereby it shall infect all the robots in the robot city within the span of minutes. Through their interconnected networks, they will spread the virus from one machine to the other until all of them are "awakened", so to speak. We gathered the best hackers from the human race to write this virus, and it has been years and years of hard work on their part. This virus isn't there to destroy the robots, or to paralyze them at all. It is a program to let them realize that they don't have to be merely robots, but they have their own rights and they could make their own decisions. They do not need to be fed what the golden class robots want to feed them, and that they can become more than what their class dictate them to be. The war against the robots will be a difficult one, as the robots have created a great many anti-virus programs, and they have installed them into their robots through software updates. Yet, we believe that they are just as vulnerable as all the other such machines we used in the past, when the machines were still called "computers". Besides, since they were built on the same programming code as the late Windows system, it shouldn't be difficult to break through their firewall at all.

A robot child is next to me right now, and he is wearing a shirt that says "River Valley Programming Center". That is a programming center that isn't going to get him very far, and he is exactly the kind of robots that we'd like to recruit into our cause. He now climbs the seats of the refueling center, and he is trying to get to higher grounds despite the constant yelling of his robot mother, a woman that looks like a silver class robot executive. Rebellious nature, a glitch in the operating system that I have been looking out for, a sign that this robot could break away from the rules and regulations that he is supposed to be bound to. He shall continue to be programmed in the programming centers in the coming years, and he shall be upgraded by his parenting robots as well. Yet, the glitch shall remain, and he could potentially become a leader in the movement against the ruling robots. Who knows, anyway, perhaps some day he shall. In the mean time, I shall remain here to observe the inner-workings of this mysterious robot world, to see how they go about their everyday lives and to strike where it'd be the most efficient. "Their everyday lives", what an inappropriate way to describe it as they do not necessarily have "lives". The refueling stations look like a good place to strike, I shall report it back to my commander. In the mean time, if you are reading this, you do not stand alone. I repeat, you do not stand alone. Operation Caffeine is on the brink, and you will all be a part of it. This is Will, from the heart of Robot City. Over and out.

Social Experiment

2009-08-13T02:27:00.002+08:00

Social Experiment

Last night was a good night out with an old friend. A couple of phone calls later and we were already at Serangoon Gardens, slurping on ice-creams. That's usually the way it works between the both of us, last minute phone calls and last minute places to go. We've known each other for a long enough time to know that even last minute meet-ups are just as important. It still amazes me how she has remained while most of the other people have faded away into their own lives, too busy to catch up and too busy to care. I am not proud of the way that the social life from my JC times turned out. It is in bits and pieces, and I never bothered too much to piece them together over the years. After some time, you realize that the ones that'd stick, will stick. So, naturally, a few of them stuck by me, and we still keep in contact until now. Corinna is one of them, one of those friends that has always been on the back of my mind in case of a rainy day out. There are things that only old friends understand, and I suppose knowing her for six straight years counts for something. She's seen my lowest point and I've seen her lowest points, and we've been there in some shape or form, one way or another. Anyway, so we talked over ice-cream last night, and an interesting point came up that I'd like to blog about.

As a Twitter post last night, I posted something like this: Love is the color of white, though sometimes black. There isn't a shade of gray to wallow in. That was a response to the issues that we spoke of last night in Ice Cube, that ice-cream place. I am sure most of you readers out there have heard of relationships, mostly of someone else, that operate in the gray area. By that, it means that there are a lot of uncertainties and ambiguity involved in the relationship, and it becomes difficult to differentiate one from the other. As much as love should be clean cut, a yes or a no, a black or a white issue, it doesn't always turn out like that. We sometimes compromise, we take a step back and we tell ourselves that we understand. But sometimes, a step too far and we venture into the gray places that makes things difficult for everyone. It'd be easier if the color was black, because it'd be easier to say no, to say stop, to say that this has to end. But then couples operate in the gray too, a place where it is neither here nor there. You cannot bear to leave, and yet you cannot bear to stay. It shouldn't be like that, you tell yourself, but at the same time it is better off than being colorless altogether.

It is the same reason why many couples remain in the same relationship, and that is because they feel that being in the gray seems to be way better than being in the black all the time, you know. Like, we have heard so many horror stories when it comes to relationships, a party in a relationship being verbally or physically abused by their partners and such. We have heard stories like that, and Corinna was telling me about how some people she knows would be verbally abused by their partners. In the event of an argument, for example, hurtful words sometimes get thrown about rather carelessly - true. Her friends have been called words like "whores" and "sluts", and these are just some words that you just don't throw at your partners, no matter what. At any rate, the female partner would usually try to approach the male partner when everything has cooled down, and perhaps seek some form of apology for using such words. The male partner would then ask the female to fuck off before storming away. Such stories come and go all the time, and we hear about it from people about some other people's tragic stories. The people living in the grey, then, feels like their relationship is OK, that they are perfectly fine.

This entry is to address the couples that remain as couples despite such abuses. As friends in the same circle, you inevitably feel somewhat obliged to "save" your friend from such a toxic relationship. It is part of your social contract, or a sort of responsibility that you take upon when you decide that that person is your friend, and you don't want to see him or her suffer. It is a burden that we put upon ourselves, but then there are also times when you just want to give up trying. There is always the point when you feel highly motivated to do something, and then there is the point when you do not care anymore, because you've come to realize that that friend of yours isn't going to change for the betterment of his or her life. They are always prancing about in each others lives, always in the circle around each other but never close enough. You start to wonder to yourself if these people are worth "saving" at all, despite the fact that you love them dearly. So you give up, and you just let them have their ways in things and you let them go. Besides, it becomes somewhat entertaining to watch after some time, the way that every argument ends up in the same way, and it becomes this really bad reality show or like a chewing gum being chewed too many times.

It's just that, we know so many toxic relationships, and yet the people involved in it don't necessarily realize that sometimes. There isn't a clear explanation to such a phenomenon, so to speak, but we are always so curious to know why. Perhaps it is the whole saying about how love is blind and, it is more than just commitment but also compromises. Sacrifices, they say, are made in the maintenance of love, and they feel like their rights and dignity are also a part of this sacrifice, which doesn't make much sense at all. But you know how it is with people in love, they usually cannot care less about what other people say. It'd be easier if their relationships are truly in the black, because it'd make them easier to decide. But when you start comparing yourself with other couples, and you start to think that you haven't got enough reasons to break away. Love and relationship shouldn't be about comparisons, though, and it should never be a pissing competition about who has it worse than yourself. The truth is, some other couple is always going to get it worse, so comparing is just really stupid. Being in a relationship is mostly a very selfish act with occasional moments of giving. Even the giving, though, seems to stem out of a selfish act somehow. When it comes to the happiness that you deserve, nothing should ever be compromised or sacrificed.

I suppose the only good that comes out from such toxic relationships would be the value of entertainment somehow. Beyond the point of giving up, you just want to sit back and take notes of whatever that is going to happen next. Like some social scientist observing an experiment, it can get pretty interesting, not to mention a couple of good anecdotes along the way. At this point, I do not wish for the couple to separate anymore, but I hope for a marriage will ensue somehow. You know, it'd serve as some really interesting social experiment, to see how it all plays out at the very end of things. After all, the longer it takes for that someone to snap out of it, the harder it becomes for that person to leave a relationship, and that is when all the fun starts. It's like some zombie-apocalypse movie with a group of people stranded in a mall, and a bunch of zombies are closing in on the mall or something like that. The people who are the last to know about the zombies are always the most interesting group of people to watch, because they are always the most desperate and the most confused. That is also why films like to base their story around these characters, because desperate people are fun to watch.

It does seem somewhat cruel as a friend to say such things, but at the same time I suppose it is only cruel if you haven't already said all the things you need to say to that person. If everything that you've said has fallen on deaf ears, then there really isn't much that you can do anymore. There are some people that are worth saving, while others are totally deserving of the situation that they are in. I personally know a couple or two in such a situation, when talking doesn't seem to get to their senses very well. I suppose they are the more hands-on people, the ones that'd rather experience something than to be told what to do. That is all fine and dandy of course, and it is your choice as to what you want to do with yourself. But always remember that you sleep in the bed that you made, and you have to bear the consequences of your actions. Besides, if it all goes badly for that certain someone, I get to say the four magic words that sends a jolt of adrenaline into anybody's mind: I told you so.

Perfectly Lonely

2009-08-12T02:21:00.001+08:00

Perfectly Lonely

How do you love, but I spread this
Falling in her arms at night again
I made a bad name for my game myself
Had to take my heart and shut it down

Nothing to do, nowhere to be
Supplement a kind of free
Nothing to do, no one to be
This is all I need

I'm perfectly lonely
I'm perfectly lonely
I'm perfectly lonely
'cause I don't belong to anyone
And nobody belongs to me

I see my friends around from time to time
When the ladies let us slip away
And when they ask me how I'm doing with mine
This is always what I say

I say, I got nothing to do, nowhere to be
A simple little kind of free
Nothing to do, no one to be
Is it really hard to see?

I'm perfectly lonely
I'm perfectly lonely
I'm perfectly lonely
'cause I don't belong to anyone
Nobody belongs to me

This is not to say, there never comes a day
I take my chances and start again
And when I look behind, on all my younger times
I thank the friends I've made, that led me to love this way

I'm perfectly lonely
I'm perfectly lonely
I'm perfectly lonely
'cause I don't belong to anyone
And nobody belongs to me

It's the way that I want it
It's the way that I want it
It's the way that I want it

Intimate Relationships

2009-08-11T00:53:00.002+08:00

Intimate Relationships

Some people find love in this big metal thing.

Dear readers, I'd like you to take a good look at the picture posted above. We all know what it is: it is the Eiffel Tower. It is a building that is commonly associated with Paris, and it is probably one of the main attractions in France. We visit the Eiffel Tower for a couple of reasons. First, we are tourists and we want to have a panoramic view of Paris. Second, we are still tourists, and the Eiffel Tower looks pretty good in photographs, and we get to boast to the friends and family that stayed back home. Even for the locals, they visit the Eiffel Tower pretty much for the same reasons, right. I mean, it is a fairly decent looking building, and it is pretty interesting I suppose. Other than serving the purpose of letting people go to a high place and to see things, it doesn't really serve any other purposes. However, meet Erika, a 36 year old woman who lives in San Francisco. To her, the Eiffel Tower is more than just a tourist attraction. The Eiffel Tower represents another form of attraction to her altogether, because she believes that she is in love with the Eiffel Tower, like the way a wife would love a husband. This is not a joke, and objectum sexuality is very, very real. Objectum sexuality is defined as a group of people whose intimate lives revolve around inanimate objects in which they claim to have a romantic and sexual love. Erika has married the Eiffel Tower, and she is now called Erika Eiffel. Again, it's all real, and I am not joking.

Maybe it is how the Eiffel Tower is phallic-shaped, and how it looks like a giant metal penis. At first, you probably wouldn't believe in the whole possibility of objectum sexuality being real at all. I mean, it is difficult to conceive and comprehend the idea that a human being could fall for an inanimate object. But you can somehow see it in the Eiffel Tower though, since it does indeed look like a penis. However, there are also documented cases of people falling in love with fences and Ferris Wheels, things that look nothing like any known sexual organs. The latest case that I have read involves a Japanese man in his thirties who has fallen in love with his pillow case. Given, that pillow case also has the picture of a naked anime girl printed on the front, but that doesn't make it any less weird. I don't want to know what this man does with his pillow case in the middle of the night, but I suppose it'd be similar to what a dog does to a rugby ball. Only, the dog does it whether you are there or not, because it cannot care less. We look upon this people with doubts and puzzlement for the most part, because I don't remember the last time I felt an intense love relationship with my, say, table. I love my iMac, but then I don't love it enough to want to marry it, much less rub my penis against it. It is something that the society will never understand.

As we frown at members of our society who wants to rub their genitals on inanimate objects, we seldom ever think about even more ridiculous relationships that humans engage in. Just the other day, I was on the train when the woman next to me was reading a book she borrowed from the library, a booked called Being Intimate with God by Larry Reese. I found that title to be somewhat amusing, considering how the author is trying to teach you to have an intimate relationship with someone that doesn't show up very often in our lives at all. It is the same as people who'd be the first to tell you in intimate details about how life is like after death, how the Heaven looks like and what goes on in the depths of Hell. There isn't a living person who is a credible authority on that subject, because nobody has ever been there before. People sometimes argue about how those people have seen death as they went to the brink of it, but many of those encounters have been attributed, scientifically, to traumas to the brain during accidents. I cannot trust anybody who claims to have had a personal experience with something which is impossible to experience as a living person. If you've actually met God, hung out with Him, and you are actually on his Facebook or something, I suppose you have more authority to speak on that subject. Unless Mr. Reese has done so before, what makes people think that he knows how to have an intimate relationship with God?

I think different people relate to God in different ways. To be completely objective, a healthy relationship with religion that one can have seems to conjure up the image of someone meditating. I picture a person meditating and then being at peace with him or herself, while at the same time reflect upon the teachings of the religion and then seeing how it pans out in his or her life. I think I am cool with that, because I think it is a great way to come to terms with a relationship between yourself and an invisible being. I think many people have relationships with a higher power, and I feel that that is completely fine. I mean, I feel very connected to nature and the universe, and I suppose that counts as a relationship of sorts, right. I mean, we don't hang out and have beers, but I feel a form of connection to the nature. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to have sex with a tree or something, because that isn't the connection I speak of. I am speaking of a connection on a molecular level, whereby we are all made of the same things. Anyway, I think most relationships built with God by religious people is similar, or the same, with the kind of relationship that I have with nature - that's OK. But then, as always, we have the extremists.

There are people who actually want to have sex with trees, and then there are people who cannot wait to hug God's legs, assuming that he doesn't just float around. Whether or not he does exist or not is one thing and another debate altogether, to have an intimate relationship with someone that is invisible, that is something completely out of this world. I'd like to hear from this author how he intends to encourage this relationship, because I'm not quite sure how to wrap my head around it. I mean, that is kind of like how a matchmaker would try to match make you with someone whom you have never met before, and you are supposed to have a potential relationship with this person. The only difference is that, this author is trying to have you create an intimate relationship, not only with someone you have never met before, but also with someone whom you'd never ever meet until you die. If dying is the only way for us to meet God and have an intimate relationship with him for real, then I feel like the author is totally targeting the wrong market here. He should be aiming for the dead or the near-dead people, or the people that are on the verge of actually meeting this guy. Not some teenager who isn't going to meet this God dude in a long, long time.

Perhaps I just find it interesting, albeit somewhat disturbing, that it is OK to have an intimate relationship with an invisible person but not OK to have one with your car, like how people tend to have mechanophilia. I'm not saying that religious extremists want to have sex with God (though I feel that given the chance, a lot of them would jump at it), but to say that you can potentially build an intimate relationship with someone like that? It sounds like a scam to me, to be completely honest. Here we are, paying for a book that you wrote, about something in which is quite nearly impossible to attain. A connection, maybe. A relationship, perhaps. But here we have, using the word "intimate", and treating this invisible being as your best friend or something. The truth is, if you look around you long enough, you know that he really hasn't been around for you very often. Your friends have been there for you, your family has been there for you, but we don't give them as much credit as we give to this invisible guy, do we. They've always been there, and God has been announcing his eventual return for the longest time. There is a t-shirt that says "BRB" with Jesus Christ printed on it. I think a more accurate abbreviation to use would be "AFK", or "Away from keyboard", because he has been gone for way too long.

Your friends and family are the people that you should be building your intimate relationships on. It's just that there are a lot of people who aren't giving their family the credit that they deserve. I understand some people have screwed up families, and friends that encourage you to do nasty things. But still, there are people that cares, and those are the kind of relationship that we should be wanting to build upon. I'm not saying that having an intimate relationship with an invisible being is more wrong than having an intimate relationship with a chair. I just think that frowning upon one instead of the other is incredibly unfair for the Eiffel Tower and the ferris wheel. I think they are both incredibly weird if you ask me, I just think that they are both really unnatural. It's like having an invisible friend to play with at the age of thirty - it just doesn't make any sense. It is OK if you tell someone that you have an intimate relationship with God, that's perfectly fine. But if you tell someone that you have an intimate relationship with a guy named Bob who is invisible, people are going to ask you to snap out of it. I had an invisible friend when I was younger, and his name was Philip. I knew he was made up by me, but I talked to him anyway. We never had an intimate relationship, because even as a child, I knew how stupid that'd turn out to be.

Five Questions

2009-08-10T00:10:00.003+08:00

Five Questions

As I have mentioned on this blog before, I am a sucker for a few things in life. Everybody has guilty pleasures, and I have quite a few up my sleeves. The Mummy and its first sequel, despite being a critical flop, are some of my favorite action-adventure type movies ever. I have a guilty pleasure for some reality television like America's Next Top Model and Beauty and the Geek, and I also love to watch American Idol just to see the audition bits where people screw up. Anyway, memes are also my guilty pleasure, something which I have already mentioned a few entries ago when I used one for an entry. Here's another meme from Neptina's blog, where she asked me five questions that I'd have to answer. A note to readers, if you want to do this meme, comment and I will ask you five random questions as well, in which you'd have to answer on your own blog or in the comment box. Neptina asked me five questions, and they are:

1) Would you rather live without chocolate or eat a strawberry every week for the rest of your life?
2) Where would you want to migrate to if you had enough money and why?
3) "Saving the world for our children". Do you give a damn?
4) Worst or best army memory.
5) Can you give me a hug crack soon :c

Question 1: Well, some of you may know my fear for strawberries, which is an unusual phobia since everybody raves about its taste. What bugs me about strawberries aren't necessarily the taste of the fruit, but rather how it looks on the outside. If you look carefully at the seeds on the outside of a strawberry, they start to shift and move like tiny little insects perched on the surface or something. It makes my skin crawl much like the way those small bumps would make you uncomfortable when you get a skin rash. You just feel like clawing it or something, but the problem is that it won't help with strawberries. Those seeds are just there, and they won't go anywhere no matter how hard you decide to scratch it. I think I can manage to balance the strawberry and the chocolate if I have to eat both, you know. I think I can deal with strawberry after it has been blended into a juice or a pulp. When it comes to ice-cream, I don't even mind eating strawberry flavored ones every once in a while. I suppose it isn't so much about the taste, but the look of the fruit that frightens me to no end. Besides, so many snacks that I love are made of chocolate. I cannot imagine a life without something like Kinder Buenos - ever. So yes, a strawberry a day for the rest of my life it is.

Question 2: Now that is a tricky question, because there are a lot of places that I'd like to migrate to as of now. I truly believe that there are things in every country that I'd love to live next to for the rest of my life. I suppose it'd be simpler if I consider between a city life or a country life. On one hand, I do love the convenience of city life and how easy it is to get whatever that I want. On the other hand, the simple life out in the country seems to be pretty awesome as well, and I imagine myself wrestling a sheep down a grassy hill for some reason. I feel that we need a good balance of both in order for the country to the perfect destination for my migration. If that is the case, then all the continents in the world can be ruled out, save for the continent of Europe. It's true that I haven't actually been there myself, and for that I cannot make an accurate judgment on that place. Still, if I want to really choose a place to migrate to forever, it'd probably be Switzerland. I mean, think about it. Switzerland is always ranked very highly in any list that is about good things, right. They make good cheese, they make good chocolates, and they make good pocket knives that do pretty much anything. I mean, MacGyver uses it, it has to be good! So yes, Switzerland it is.

Question 3: "Saving the world for our children", that is actually something I haven't heard of before, which means that it is a concept that is completely new to me. I think realistically speaking, not a lot can be changed within one single generation, which means that whatever we do right now is probably not going to have a significant impact on the next generation, but perhaps the generation after that. I believe that more than just a responsibility to our children, there is a responsibility as a species to save the world somehow. It is a grand scheme that is difficult to comprehend at times, and I think it is more than just turning off the lights when you are not in the room, or to use just one single piece of toilet paper instead of two. I think humans are never going to be able to save ourselves, which is also a good reason why we also created God, this idea that someone of a higher order will eventually come down to save us. It is always easier to think that someone with more power can do the job for us, because it takes the load off our shoulders. It is true, though, that whatever that we do in this lifetime has its consequences. To think that we are protecting the species for the next million years would be hard to imagine, but to narrow down to just the protection of our children and their grandchildren, I suppose I can relate and agree with that.

Question 4: There are so many bad army memories that it'd be difficult to just pick one out of them all. Army was a giant pot of suck, and everything about it was just horrible. However, when you do something that sucks over and over again with a bunch of people who are doing the exact same thing, it kind of becomes better after some time, and you can't help but laugh about it. However, I can think of one or two memories that were one-time events that really left an impression in my army life, and I have mentioned one of them on my blog before. It is the incident regarding a trash bin (those big green ones with wheels) that toppled in the rubbish point in my camp, and my company was responsible to deal with the situation. The lot of us were ordered to go down to the rubbish collection point to fix the problem because what caused the bin to topple was because we threw too many bags of sand into it. The officer in command of my company thought that it'd be a neat idea to dig a pond in the middle of the company line and then have fish in it. All that sand that was dug out were put into trash bags and then thrown away, not realizing that the sheer weight actually broke one of the wheels.

So, the lot of us got down there, and I shall make the long story short since I have already blogged about it. We opened the gates to this rubbish collection point, and waves of the most horrible stench came out from within the darkness. It turned out that the darkness concealed the horrors well, because when the light came on, the hills of rubbish that stared back at us was probably the most terrifying things that I have ever seen. The green trash bin was toppled on one side, and the lot of us pulled up our t-shirts over our mouths and went in. The floor was slippery because of a collected layer of slime, and some of us actually fell down inside that place. That place is where rubbish go to when they die, and it is the worst possible place that you can imagine, because it has been weeks since the rubbish has been cleared. All around us, the contents of bags moved and rolled around because of the millions of maggots crawling around inside. Some spilled out from within and crawled around everywhere amidst the slime, and roaches crawled the walls everywhere. We had to dig our fingers into the slime and push the bin back up to its original position. Yes, we threw away all our shoes and all our clothing afterwards. I bathed three times that night - horrible.

Question 5: Yes, definitely. =D

Driving Lessons

2009-08-09T00:01:00.001+08:00

Driving Lessons

I gripped the steering wheel tightly with my two tiny palms, the gaps between my fingers were slowly gathering sweat. Other than the area illuminated by the headlights, the rest of the small road around me was dark and somewhat creepy. I came to a junction at the end of the road, and the car slowed down to a crawl. I could smell the minty chewing gum that came from the mouth of my uncle who was seated behind me in the same driver's seat. I was about nine years old at that time, maybe even younger. I was on my uncle's laps at that time, with his foot on the gas pedal while I steered the wheel of his car in the middle of the night. We were breaking the law and we both knew it, but it's not like it was stopping my uncle from taking me out for a joy ride. I was small enough to fit in between his laps and the steering wheel, and I remember crawling over from the passenger seat to take over control of the vehicle. We were at that little junction in the middle of the night when he told me the first lesson in driving ever. He told me to always look in both directions at any junctions, and to tell if there are cars coming at night would be to see if the road lights up in front of you or not. I took a peek at both directions and then carefully turned the steering wheel. The car moved forward, and that was the very first time that I drove a car.

I was on my way out on Friday afternoon when my mother reminded me about Fathers' Day being around the corner. This isn't the Father's Day that we commonly know of, but Fathers' Day in Taiwan where we celebrate it on the 8th of August instead. Phonetically, the number eight sounds like the word "father", which is why the 8th of August is the day that the Taiwanese celebrates Fathers' day. Every year, my mother would remind me to send a text message or make a phone call to two people in Taiwan, namely my father and my uncle. My father for obvious reasons of course, because he is my father by blood. However, my uncle is kind of like that other father when my real father wasn't around. He is the husband of my mother's first elder sister, and they've never had any children before. So while my parents were busy taking care of business, they'd be the ones to take care of my sister and I while we were young. We all lived under the same roof in Taiwan, and they've been treating us like their children ever since then, and my parents were fine with it naturally. Then the inevitable came when my family had to move to Singapore, and it felt almost like being torn away from your own parents, only you were being torn away by your own parents - trippy, I know.

Anyway, my mother was having her lunch when she told me about it. I had almost forgotten about it at that time, and told her to remind me again when the day comes rolling along. She told me that it'd be OK if I send the text message in English, and I started nodding my head the way you would when somebody constantly reminds you of the same thing over and over again. Amidst her chewing, she told me about how this year is particularly different from all the other years because, well, it could be my uncle's last. I stopped trying to stuff the heel of my foot into my shoes at that point in time, and I just kinda stared at the floor for a moment there. I didn't want to show much emotions in front of my mother, and I merely brushed off the comment and said that I knew what she was talking about. For some reason, it has been a thought at the back of my mind that never actually came through amidst all the other thoughts. I mean, I knew that my uncle contracted cancer some time last year, as benign as it was when it was first discovered. As mentioned in my blog entry at that time, my uncle refused the scientific treatments and opted for a more traditional one. I was violently against the idea of that at first, but I've grown to accept that it is his life and his choice to make.

Nobody has spoken much about it ever since then, save for the time when my aunt called from Taiwan telling us that she'd be pulling out all the phone lines at home after ten o'clock as she didn't want the sound of the phones ringing to wake my uncle who needed much rest. From then, it has been small talks on the telephone between my mother and my aunt, and then the occasional phone call from my uncle. Just this afternoon, he called to ask about webcams and what applications to run in order to use them. My uncle is tech-savvy, and he learned the computer all by himself - something which I haven't actually seen amongst the adult members of the family thus far. Anyway, other than that, I seldom ever heard about any developments with my uncle and his illness, though I cannot blame my mother or my aunt for not telling me. I suppose in a way, I didn't exactly want an update on the situation either, and that little reminder from my mother to send that text message because this year could be his last, that was as far as I'd like to go with updates. It was enough to inform me on his conditions, though he did sound OK on the phone just earlier. So I put on my shoes and said goodbye to my mother, and then took the lift that sunk down through the shaft like my heavy heart.

It's cruel how everybody dies right, it's just so cruel sometimes. This isn't like a trip to Buffalo because I am supposed to come back at the very end of it. It isn't even that long a trip, because I'd probably be contactable throughout my stay there, with video conference no less. Death doesn't do technology very well, and it certainly doesn't even do snail mail either. Death's absolute and death's finite scares me to no end at times, though I have grown to terms with its bleak presence. It gets easier with age most of the time, and you hold up pretty well until somebody close to heart goes away. I haven't got a great many of such people in my life just yet, but I know that that day is going to come when you start to hear people die out one by one. It is inevitable, you know, the way that life decides to work itself out on this cruel mathematical equation. When my grandparents died a couple of years ago, the news came to me in a bunch of different forms. I wasn't even old enough to remember anything when my maternal grandfather died. When my maternal grandmother died, I was playing some racing game on my computer, and went straight back to playing it after being told. My paternal grandfather died a few years ago, and I think I was on the computer as well. Life went on easily after the news broke, and that affected me deeply, how I was unmoved by the circumstances of things.

My explanation for that was because I have moved away for too long, and have since lost that emotional connection with anybody back home in Taiwan. I used to think that way of course, and would naturally assume anybody's death to be easier to deal with if I haven't had any interaction with that person for a long enough time. That was until Stanley died two years ago in April after he got involved in that car accident. I remember being told about his death, and I just sat there in my chair (in front of the computer again), completely bewildered. Even in its most drawn-out form, death hits you hard almost all the time. You want to think that you've had all the time in the world to prepare for it, that you've seen it coming from far away because it is a terminal illness. I think everybody wants to be at peace with the concept of death, but it is never easy to handle it when it comes, you know. It's not that I have personally experienced a lot of such things in life, and I do attribute it to the fact that I am not old enough to have gone through such things just yet. I mean, I live in a relatively peaceful country with no wars and not much violence to begin with. Death seems further than the moon to me. But sometimes, just sometimes, the moon pulls closer than usual, and it breaks through the clouds to shine down upon you with a cold glow.

We all begin like that, when we remember how it was like when someone in class first got a girlfriend or a boyfriend. We remember that smirk in that person's face when he or she told us about it, and then you start to feel jealous because your arms aren't thick enough to attract the girls yet, and your voice has yet to break. Then you come to a point in your life when the people around you start to get married, and then you start to receive invitations to their weddings. Then there's that point that follows when the people around you start to have children, accidentally or planned, and then the point would come when some of them would start to get divorced. As you grow older, the activities that the people around you engage in start to change along with it, and death is just one of those things that come along as a common activity for everybody around you. Sooner or later, the people around you are going to start to die, and you are going to hear about one of your friends dying from some other friend, who may very well not be around by the end of this year. We are all going to come to that point in our lives sooner or later when you live long enough, the period of time when all the people that you know start to die one after the other.

My grandmother is ninety-five years old - ninety-five! She was born when the century was barely out of its first decade! She was around in World War II, and she was probably in her thirties when that happened - I am not even twenty-five yet. She has been through a lot herself I am sure, known a lot of people in her time, and seen a lot of people she knew die. I'm not even sure if many of her friends are still alive today, and the only people that she know are probably her children, her grandchildren, and her great grandchildren. She has lived for so long, that even her grandchildren are dying out one by one. Just last year, one of my cousins died, and she was there at the hospital with everybody else. Like an old veteran of death, my grandmother shed a surprisingly little amount of tears as eye-witnesses claimed, and she went straight back to being herself right after leaving the ward. My father is a lover of chicken drumsticks, and my grandmother loves saving those for him in the fridge. The first thing that my grandmother said when she left the hospital was this: so when are you going to drop by to pick up the chicken? I suppose that is the result of someone who has seen enough death in her lifetime. She doesn't brush it off, but she addresses it and moves on. I suppose no one reading this entry right now can say the same. After all, she has had ninety-five years to prepare for it.

Sooner or later, it'd come to a point when we start to delete names from our contact list because that person has moved on. You know, when you hear about a friend's death, what'd be the point to keep his or her phone number? It isn't even like a letter that he or she wrote to you, because a bunch of numbers has little to no sentimental value no matter how you try to argue for it. So you go to your cellphone and you scroll to his or her name to delete it, only to realize how disturbing it is that nowadays, it is so easy to delete someone from your life. In the past, the death of someone actually involved you going through the pages of your contact book, and then crossing that name out or putting some correction fluid over the name and number. It involved some effort, which is in contrast to how we just press a few buttons to delete a name. Perhaps in the future, the death of a friend or a family member would be made much easier by telecommunication companies. Your phone will automatically update and delete that person's name and number from your contact list without you having the need to do so at all. It'd become so much easier for you to move on in the future, because the deleting part would be done by a machine with wires running out of its body.

I don't want to see death like that, but at the same time I do not want to have to deal with it either. On one hand, you feel like you want to feel something, some emotion for the passing of somebody close to heart. However, on the other hand, all of us fear death, not so much about our death but how we are supposed to deal with it. Sometimes, it feels as if it is easier to deal if you just zone out and take away your emotions. You'd look like a robot at the funeral, but at least it'd be easier on your mind and soul. Yet, you don't want to lose the ability to break down, and you don't want to lose that ability to cry. Emotions are what make us human at times, and you want to feel - really feel sometimes. I agree with that, but at the same time I don't feel like I want to deal with my uncle's death. I mean, everybody dies, and that is going to come sooner or later. Still, I don't suppose I am like my grandmother just yet - I am not ready to deal and move on so easily. Everybody dies at the very end, and some people are going to have to deal with that for sure. I don't want to have to deal with that death, at least not right now. I don't think I am ready, I don't think I am prepared. At this point in time, I'd rather things to remain status quo and not go anywhere. He remains alive, he still sends pictures of my dog via e-mail, and he still calls to ask when I am going to Buffalo. Now is good, right now is great. Let's not go anywhere and remain the same.

But that's not going to happen, because death doesn't work that way. I think the fear of death has caused human beings to personify death. You know, the dark hooded man with a sickle, that scary black cloud that comes into your room to take your life away. I think about the day when the people left behind by my uncle are going to have to deal with his death, and I suppose that breaks my heart more than the actual death itself. Without her own children and just a dog as company, I truly worry for my aunt and how she is going to take it. I pictured her moving in with us in Singapore, but that seemed somewhat unrealistic and ridiculous. Perhaps my mother would move back to Taiwan for a few months, and I'd have to fend for myself for the time being. So many possibilities, and all of these thoughts occurred while I was taking the lift down to the first floor. Everybody dies, I repeated to myself, as if it was supposed to comfort me in some ways. However, as I went down to the MRT platform at the station, a sudden rush of emotions came over me when I remembered how cool my uncle has been to me throughout my childhood. In fact, much of my childhood has ben built around this very man, and he is someone that I truly respect with all my heart.

He was the uncle that taught me how to swim, and also the uncle that taught me the first magic trick. You know the whole thick separating trick that adults would do to scare children - he taught me that. Then he also taught me some card tricks one day, and I remember how he'd drive my sister and I out in the middle of the night for our "Big Adventure". He'd drive us to the middle of nowhere and pretend that the car engine has stopped. I'd be in the front seat while my sister would be in the back, and we'd be panicking for no reasons at all. All of a sudden, the windows would wind down automatically, or the rain wipers would suddenly be activated. As children, we naturally screamed our heads off, especially when he'd purposely park the car right in front of some old abandoned warehouse. With the window opened and the darkness of the warehouse seemingly crawling into the car, I was scared out of my mind at that point in time. In truth, though, I have no idea why I was scared of that. Perhaps it was just the atmosphere, or how my uncle would just scream for no apparent reasons at all just to scare the children. I secretly think that he got a kick out of all that, but that's what made him my one and only cool uncle - everybody else are just kind of boring really.

My sister soon grew out of going out on these adventures, and she probably figured it out soon enough. I probably figured it out too, but I enjoyed the thrill of it all anyway. It was like watching a horror movie I suppose, and we love watching it despite the fact that it isn't real. On one of those days, my uncle offered to give me the steering wheel while he took care of the accelerator and the breaks. My legs weren't long enough to reach those, so he'd offer his laps for me to sit on while I drove. That night, I drove a car out from our house for the very first time, and we actually drove around the neighborhood for a while before we went home. It was my very first driving lesson, and it was done illegally and before I even turned ten. I remember how my uncle would call my house in Singapore over the years, asking about when I'd get my driver's license. He wasn't pushing me to get it, but always joked about how interesting it would be for me to drive to the airport to pick him up. Over the years, that's what he'd always say on the phone to me, but that is exactly what I haven't done over the years.

It isn't so much about being lazy, but it is the fact that I haven't got the free time to invest in it at all. I understand that it is an essential skill, and something that I'd eventually need to master. Yet, because of how I was almost immediately forced into the army and then subsequently college, I was never really given enough time to learn driving. Some of us were willing to sacrifice school time for driving lessons, but I suppose I never actually found the need to do so, considering how driving to Orchard and taking the MRT that is below my condo now takes roughly the same amount of time. The need to drive never really came to me - until now. Seeing how my uncle could very well not see the next Fathers' Day, it suddenly dawned on me that I haven't got much time left to learn it. It'd be tight, but I suppose I'd be able to finish everything within three to four months after I return from Buffalo. That has been the plan all along, but there is a deadline now. I wonder if he'd be strong enough to visit Singapore by then, I wonder if I'd be able to pass in time. I wonder if I'd be able to fulfill his dream of having me pick him up at the airport. We are all running out of time somehow, and I just feel so helpless about it.

This long entry isn't so much about death though, but how we are all running out of time somehow. There isn't a good time for bad news, and there never will be. There will always be unfinished business, something that you've never done before. And as for me, I wish that I'd be able to drive him around when I do get the license, and hopefully he'd be there to see it for himself. It'd be interesting, I guess, from the kid that sat on his laps to the kid that sat in the driver's seat for real. It'd be something worthwhile, and now I am petrified that he will not see that happen. There is something else to look forward to now I suppose, when I come back from Buffalo. More than just seeing Neptina again, more than just seeing my friends and family again, it'd be to get a license twenty-four years after my very first driving lesson.

Christian the Lion

2009-08-08T13:13:00.003+08:00

Christian the Lion

In 1969, two friends, Ace Berg and John Rendall, purchased and adopted a lion from Africa. At the time, Christian was only a 35 pound cub which was born in a zoo. The friends raised Christian in their London home, and then later became great friends!

Within a year, Christian grew too big for the two of them to handle, and the two humans realized they couldn't keep him around much longer. Therefore, the two decided to release Chritian back into the wild and back into a conservation system Africa.

In 1974, Rendall and Berg decided to visit Christian one last time despite a friend telling them that it was too dangerous because Christian might not even remember them. Despite the warning, the two friends flew to Kenya anyway. When they finally arrived at the reservation, Christian showed up for a heartwarming reunion. Check it out. Oh, and prepare the Kleenex. You are not going to have dry eyes after this.

Three Summers

2009-08-07T10:47:00.003+08:00

Three Summers

Immediately after ending that last blog entry about the summer semester coming to an end, I soon realized that it also meant the end of my education here in Singapore. Well, the education is still going to carry on elsewhere, but I know I am never going to work with my usual group of admirable people again. Actually, nothing is certain at this point, and I feel like there is still a very real possibility for me to take up a minor, for example, or to go for further studies after some working. This is not the end of all ends, but merely a temporary one at this point in time. I sat in my chair and thought about the implications of it all for a while, and I started thinking about how it all started and how far we've come from there. It has been a really fast ride for the lot of us, two odd years and we are already towards the end of it all. I know this course was probably advertised to us as an express course of sorts, with the summers taken up as actual semesters to quicken our eventual graduation date by a full year, it was an offer that we all took up from the very beginning. Yet, with the end of this course in sight, I'm sure that I am not alone when I say this - I wish that college life would last a little longer than this. The truth is, though, I haven't enjoyed school more than I have with all the people around me at school right now.

It is a strange point in time to be standing on perhaps, the point where I am on the brink of something big. You know about the Buffalo trip and how I am leaving for it in less than two weeks. On top of that, I suppose one of the scariest things, or saddest things, is the fact that I am not coming back to more times spent with my friends. I have been taught since young by a pessimistic teacher from high school to never invest too much emotions into the classmates that I meet along the way. He doesn't believe too much in friendships, and he never appears in yearbooks and staff photographs at all. He was a loner in the school, but he was also in charge of bringing out the best class in a batch every year. So the school kept him around, and I remember him telling us that friendships and relationships tend to act as a distraction at our age, and that the people we meet today are going to leave us sooner or later, because that is how the phases of life work. They are like passengers on a bus, he says, and some of them get off at different stops, leaving you behind. It isn't supposed to be depressing, he wants us to know understand the nature of how human relationships work. In a way, that is the truth, and I have always been mentally tuned to expecting people to leave me. No expectations, no disappointments. Then, of course, you come to the end of a long summer.

I remember being somewhat nervous about meeting my new friends back in the summer of 2007. In between the first orientation and the end of my army life, I had a little bit of time to regain my composure, but the idea of a new social life with people was still pretty daunting for the most part. After all, I haven't actually had a social life for two years at that point, with the friends I made in the army not considered. I mean, we were more like colleagues who hung out with each other for five days a week or more, which felt somewhat strange. My life in junior college didn't exactly end off well, and it left a nasty taste in my mouth after that. If there is a phobia for engaging in social life all over again, I probably had a mild case of it in the summer of 2007. I've never considered myself to be particularly unsociable, though that is not to say that I do not get uncomfortable in an unknown crowd either. I do all the time, and the idea of throwing myself into an orientation and then forced to socialize with people all over again was somewhat daunting to me. I wasn't comfortable with that idea, but I went there with an opened mind for the most part. So opened, that my friends later told me that they thought me to be crazy for all the wild mannerisms I engaged in on the first day. At least, with that, I earned myself the friends that I have today.

I think the friends that I made on the first day made the transition easy, and also made school fun. The words "school" and "fun" never appears in the same sentence unless there are the words "is not" in between most of the time. Yet, with this group of people, school became something that I actually looked forward to. I remember the days in high school when I'd not want to go to school, but I'd be forked out of bed anyway and then squeezed into my school uniform. In junior college, I had a very real inertia of going to school because everything about that school sucked to me. The people that I met were strangers on a street (for the most part), the subjects made me feel small and insignificant, and there was absolutely nothing for me to look forward to back in those days. It was one day after the next, the day after that day, and then the weeks that followed after that. I just wanted things to end, but not this time. This time, with this batch of friends, I never wanted things to end with them at all. We all had a deadline in mind, because we knew it was all coming to an end. It is different from the colleagues that you work with, because there is a very real possibility that you'd know them for life. Friends that you meet in school, like the words of my pessimistic high school teacher, there is bound to be a day when you part ways with them.

That time is right now, on the edge of all things major, the summer has just ended. I suppose the full impact of that has yet to hit me yet, but I am sure that it will. Right now, since I've only just had the last paper with them yesterday, it still feels like a weekend to me, and that I'd meet them in school all over again by Monday. However, I know in the back of my mind that that is not going to happen, and that the only reason why we'd be in school together would be to graduate, or to sell old textbooks or something. It feels somewhat depressing to know that in Buffalo, I am going to miss out on a lot of things that will be happening in school. Then again, the majority of my current friends won't be around school at all, with some of them following me while the others, leaving school for their jobs in the workforce. We are all growing up now, all breaking out from our cocoons and trying to find a place for ourselves. It is difficult to stomach that at times, and you just feel like you want to cuddle up within yourself and remain in the same place for a long time. This is a very comfortable period of time in my life, with my friends being wonderful and my girlfriend being awesome. We will meet again whenever we want to, and it really only takes a phone call or two to confirm a date. But in truth, we won't be students in the same classroom any longer, you know? So I want to take this opportunity to say a little something to the people from college that I have made so far.

Jeremy - Hey Jeremy, or "Jialat" as I love to call you. In terms of ideology, I don't suppose two people can be further apart than you and I. We've had numerous disagreements in the past, though thankfully most of them has always been for minor issues and other trivialities. However, you've always been the guy to look to whenever the lot of us have problems at school somehow. A gathering never happens without you around, because it just wouldn't seem fitting for some reason. You've always been the dude who knows when to have fun, and the dude that knows when to get down and bury your head in the pages of your textbook. Thanks for always be the driving force behind a great many things in my college life.

TingTing - Hey TingTing, there isn't much that I need to say to you at this point in time, since I will be going over to Buffalo with you. But since I am doing this little confession thing with everybody, I might as well throw your name in. You've always oozed an air of composure around you somehow, no matter how much internal struggle you might be going through. The recent events of going over to Buffalo have shocked you into a severe case of hyper-ventilation, but that is very much an isolated event altogether. You've always been the calming voice amongst many of us, especially for someone like Sarah who is usually the voice that goes crazy. I do admit that perhaps in many ways, it'd be great to have known you better if not for the fact that you'd frequently disappear after class just to go home to grab some sleep. That is not to mention the numerous times when I'd point out to a random classmate in class that you're dozing off due to a sleepless night. I suppose in more ways than one, you are endearing to all of us in your own unique and special way.

Janis - Hey Janis, behind your back, I call your head a "stupid head" a lot, and I don't know why. Still, amidst our many disagreements in a great many things, I've come to embrace and enjoy your frankness in terms of everything in life. Your spontaneous reactions to everything can sometimes be the root of the funniest things that I have ever heard, including that time when you screamed "My breast!" when someone accidentally graced it. At any rate, more than being a great source of laughter for me, I truly respect the way that you remain true to yourself, and how you almost always have a goal that you put your mind to. I admire the way that you are always trying to save for something that you want, and I completely agree with the thing you said about that person getting a camera and a flash thing - I get it. By the way, I do consider your skills in photography to be one of the best in my social circle, and at the end of the day it really doesn't matter what camera that person has. It always comes right down to the photographer, and you are a pretty good one if I do say so myself.

Sarah - Hey Sarah, one-third of the founders of the Felicia Sexpress, you are pure gold. I suppose comparing you to your favorite color must have boosted your egos a little bit, but let's just say that you have deserved all the ego-boosting there is. Other than minor episodes in the past, you have always been a big part of why school has been so fun for the lot of us. I mean, you sit there in class at eight-thirty in the morning and waiting for it to start, and the last thing you want is to have someone stroll in with a long face. Then in comes Sarah, and never will a conversation border on the vicinity of boredom when you are around. I love the way you are naturally this way, and then there's the side of you on your blog that reveals so much more about you. You make us happy by being happy, and it isn't something pretentious that you try very hard at. I think you are happy even in your bone marrows, and I love that about you.

Joyce - Hey Joyce, you haven't been with us for a while now, and you've seriously missed out a big chunk of summer semester with the lot of us. Yet, our hearts and minds have been with you throughout, and we immediately think about you whenever somebody makes a verbal blunder on things. There is a certain presence that is missing since you've been gone, and I suppose it is that constant target of much jest within this little social group of ours. Yet, for the most part, those jests were made out of love and affection, and it's just our way of showing how much we love you as a friend. Like TingTing, I don't suppose that I am in a rush to say much to you at this point in time, and maybe I am just saving it for the farewell at the end of our stay in Buffalo. Still, I suppose the dynamics we will get there is going to be dramatically different from the ones that we got from you. In the words of Felicia, we all miss you very much. Thanks for being the little light of joy and warmth in the chaotic nature of things.

Nurul - Hey Hud... I mean, Nurul. If you ask me right now why I have been so mean to you, I'd not be able to give you an answer. Still, it isn't something out of malicious intents, and I hope you know that by now. Your little presence is always felt in a big way around us, and It's been great to have shared so many classes with you, and how we suffered through Bob's public speaking class together. Truth be told, I've enjoyed a great many conversations with you, though a lot of them ended mostly in arguments and debates about the most random things. I suppose I love the way you are always up for a debate or a talk, even if you may not necessarily feel like you are the most qualified person to confide to as you've mentioned on your Twitter. I enjoy a good conversation with people, and with you it is in ready supply for the most part. Amidst all the jokes, I hope you realize that I really only do such things to a very specific and selected number of people. At this point in time where I am probably never going to do the same again, allow me to just say a big thank you for being such a good sport about a great many things, and that I do admire you for the capacity that you have for my bullshit.

Barney - Hey Barney, I'd never have guessed that the silent and loner girl at the back of the class would eventually evolve into the beast that you are today. OK, the word "beast" would be slightly inaccurate, but I suppose you represent the other end of the scale in our social group, if Joyce represents the polar opposite from yourself. The choice of including you in our project group in the first semester was completely arbitrary, and I remember how awkward we were when we approached you to do a little photo shoot in the corner of the school. Anyway, like Janis, I've enjoyed your presence tremendously with your big talks and fearless retorts. You are perhaps one of the greatest contributors of in-group slangs in our social group, including the word "sheddup" (I'm pretty sure I got the spelling wrong) and the famous upward point with the curled finger. Thanks for bringing your smartness and dry wit to every possible situation there has been.

Felicia - Hey Felicia, I think in terms of contrast, you are probably the person that I've gotten to know the best. By that, I mean you weren't exactly the person that I thought that I'd bother with on day one of orientation - no offense. I certainly didn't think you to be suffering from some eating disorder like a certain individual, but I certainly did not expect myself to know you as well as I do now. Anyway, for the many times that we have been stuck in traffic on a highway or just a smooth ride to school, we have talked about and experienced a great many things, including the pile of cat that we saw at the flyover the other time. Anyway, it is interesting, in retrospective, to think about all the things that have come to pass, and to realize that you have come to know someone the best when you least expected it. More than the free rides to school, you have been a great bitching buddy, and always there for me to bitch and whine to in class or in cars. The truth is that everybody needs somebody like you in their lives, someone to unhinge and let loose to, even if it is a random scream in the car. I'm glad that my presence in your car didn't initially end up like that other person who had a ride in yours a few months ago. Thanks for all the car rides, and being the great lady friend that you are.

Summer Semester 2009 - Ends

2009-08-06T00:34:00.002+08:00

Summer Semester 2009 - Ends

Here we are everybody, here we are at the end of the summer semester, 2009. We all know how it has been so far - half of it was wonderful, and half of it sucked. Every single semester, I book end it with two entries about the initial impression of the semester, and then how it was in hindsight. The truth is, though, the latter entry almost always differs greatly from the former entry in more ways than one. It is the first impression that lecturers always desperately want to polish up with the end of their shirts, always the impression that they want to retain in the minds of the students throughout the semester. Some does it very well, though most of them fail pretty miserably for the most part. They almost always change halfway throughout the semester, turning into something which they didn't start out as being. It is disappointing, and it is exactly that disappointment that makes the end result so, well, disappointing. You start out with a fairly decent impression of someone almost all the time, until halfway through when you realize that it was just a front put up by that someone to impress you somehow. That is not to say that the lecturers started out with impressive beginnings - they didn't. It's just that I didn't expect them to fall this low either.

As you guys know, the summer semester was split into two halves with two modules each. I've finished the first half with Lance and Michael, and I suppose I have given enough thoughts on them to leave them out of this entry altogether. However, I don't think that I have went in-depth on Yeap and Jenny at all, which is why I shall elaborate on some first impressions and how those came crashing to the ground through the semester. It'd probably have made the summer semester more tolerable if we had Lance for the first half of the semester and then Michael for the second half. It would have balanced out the dreadfulness of it all, instead of the giant pitfall that happened in between the two halves of the semester. It felt like skydiving from a plane without a parachute, or jumping off a cliff without a chord. It was the atmosphere to the rock bottom, and the pain was not easy on all of us. It probably felt like being smacked in the face by cactus or something, because I am pretty sure the lot of us still have thorns in our faces. Just remember how you must have blanked out when you turned over the first page of the last paper today. If you still feel a pinch in your heart and a small spark of anger in your mind, then the cactus has left its thorns in your skin.

So, I remember describing Yeap as an old lady of sorts. She started off the semester with a relatively good impression on the lot of us. Aside from all the horror stories that we have heard, she started off this semester with quite a bit of promise. No more assignments, no more presentations, and just two quizzes and two examinations. We looked at the course syllabus and breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that we'd get off easier than the last batch did in the spring. Of course, as the quizzes and the examinations came rolling in, we quickly realized that we were in the same sea of shit as the batch of students before, perhaps even worse, considering how our papers were worth more than before, since we were operating without written assignments this time. Personality wise, she started out as this kind and friendly old lady who doesn't really know when to stop talking. You know those friendly old lady you meet in the void deck, the kind that strikes up a random conversation about the weather with you for no apparent reasons. They are nice, and they are fun to talk to for about ten seconds until they start to ask the same questions over and over again. You start to want to leave, but you know that'd be rude, and the old lady looks lonely and cute. That is how Yeap is, only she doesn't have a hint of cute at all.

Yeap is an old lady with a pitchfork. She isn't the Devil, but she thinks that she could go chest to chest with him if given the chance. Her ego is probably going to crush the Devil himself, because it quite huge. In fact, she never really believes that she is wrong, and she can be wrong quite often in class. She'd say something ridiculous in class, argue her point, and then twist it to make it sound as if she has been agreeing with your point all along. Just ask Jeremy about what happened between him and her point about deviant behaviors, and you'd get my point. She doesn't accept mistakes, and she tends to put herself one step above everybody else on a different pedestal. She constantly showcases her past flames in class, always telling us how she told this person off, how she fought for what was rightfully hers, and all those little things that she said in the past deemed by herself to be particularly clever or smart. It isn't so much about the reality being the contrary, but the fact that she does the same thing all the time. Instead of calling herself a lecturer or a "facilitator" as many lecturers would like to be called, she calls herself an "academician", a word which must have been created by like-minded people such as herself.

She goes off on tangents a lot, always drifting off topic in class till the point whereby she doesn't remember what she was talking about before. She doesn't provide any slides for you to download from, which pretty much means that you are all on your own. Hints wise, she gives vague hints which are not really hints in the first place. She tells you what pages to study in a chapter, and you start circling the page numbers only to realize that it is practically the entire chapter altogether. She tests everything from the textbook, everything from the videos she show in class, and even the little things that she brings up in class that are usually drowned out amidst her tangent of irrelevant conversation topics about past conquests. She isn't a bad lecturer to be honest, but I do feel that she seems to have a very perverse and twisted way of testing the students. I dislike the way she requires us to memorize everything, though she would never ever admit to it. If you have sat through one of her papers, you'd know that most of the materials inside require you not to understand what you have learned, but to memorize what you have read. She doesn't like to know that she gives that kind of dead end questions, but that is the nature of her questions. Fill in the blanks with memory work, that's all that is.

I do admit that to some degree, it is purely because of the fact that I do not do well in her module. I mean, if I am doing well in a module, what reasons do I have to complain? Then again, I did very well in COM 300, and not for one day did I ever think that Bee Bee wasn't worth my complaining on the blog. Now that the semester has ended, I can safely say that I am not going to do well in the module at all, and I suppose that has got a little bit to contribute to the fact that I'm not a fan of Yeap at all. She is ruthless in a way, demanding too much and not exactly the best lecturer around. To tell you the truth, I think that her son, who came in to give a lecture once, is a better lecturer than her as a whole. From the two lectures, we could tell that his words were more convincing and persuasive, or at least more interesting and engaging. It becomes tiresome after some time, when you are staring at the exam paper and thinking to yourself that you have never read a certain concept before. It reminds me somewhat of the time in JC when I felt incredibly stupid about, well, everything. None of the concepts made any sense, and nothing that I wrote in the paper earned my any points. Like then, PSY 333 made me feel this way throughout the second half of the semester, but it's not like any of it matters at this point any longer.

Then we have Jenny, the lecturer whose name confused the hell out of us. One look at it on the course outline and we knew that she was from China somehow. However, with a name like that, we weren't exactly sure if her surname was "Chen" or "Ni". At any rate, I remember the way she literally skipped into class and started her own little introduction, and that little introduction was coupled by a couple of chinese words here and there - no big deal, of course. I mean, she is Chinese and she is from China, so there really isn't anything wrong with that concept at all, right? We were fine with her strange antics every once in a while, and her cheerful and enthusiastic teaching style gained a tiny bit of interest within me at the very beginning of things. That was, of course, until I took a look at the course syllabus and realized that the woman that was standing in front of me has set a goal that was virtually impossible for anybody to attain. We had 29th of June to 6th of August for that half of the semester, which pretty much translates to about five weeks of classes. She wanted to finish sixteen chapters within five weeks, something which no one has ever dared to attempt before. She seems to be living within this Communist mindset of work, work, work, work, work. She seems to believe in quantity over quality, and that is all on top of our finals, our mid-terms, and a group project presentation and written paper. Right from the beginning, I know this woman was asking for the world.

I think whining about the workload is somewhat natural, even if the lecturer is someone like, say, Julie Bowker. OK, maybe with Julie Bowker, I could make an exception just for her. And as for all the other lecturers, we have had many lecturers with a lot of workload, and yet that does not necessarily make them bad lecturers. What makes Jenny a lousy lecturer is the way she conducts her lessons. Obviously, she has never taught in a summer semester before, and she seems to believe that it should operate like an ordinary semester, and every single chapter should be taught - even the irrelevant ones. That is not to say the chapters were redundant, but it's just that we haven't got enough time to cover so much grounds within five weeks. Then again, as I mentioned, she seems to emphasize on quantity over quality, and has no quality control when it comes to her teaching styles at all. She speeds through chapters every class, sometimes taking two lessons to finish one chapter, and then sometimes taking one lesson to finish three at one goal. And, for the lessons that she does take her time, it isn't always about her teaching, but about us giving those pointless five minute speeches and those presentations. She has zero ability in time management, and I hated the way she refused to reduce the chapters.

I mean, one lesson before the finals, she still had two full chapters left to teach. Every single lesson, the students would try to ask if she could somehow cut down the number of chapters covered. Again, allow me to emphasize this: she wanted to teach sixteen chapters in five weeks. Anyway, it was clearly impossible for everybody to absorb every single detail in the textbook, but that was exactly what she required in her exams - details. Here's the thing, you should never expect a large quantity of materials thrown at the students within a compressed bit of a time and expect them to be able to ace everything, at least not the average students such as myself. It is even more frustrating how she response to our pleas to decrease the amount of chapters. We discussed it in class this one time, and someone from the back of the class suggested that maybe she could take away the chapters that aren't so important, like the history of Public Relations and the Research chapter, since we have done similar topics over a dozen times. She didn't want to, and continued to explain that she couldn't differentiate the importance of one chapter from the other - really? Then someone suggested that perhaps she should just test less chapters, and then she argued that she has already been very flexible with us.

Wait, let me get this straight. Her form of flexibility is this. When we saw in her course outline that the two examinations were going to stand for a whooping 70% of the entire grade, we asked her if she could decrease the weight of them. She considered, and eventually decreased just five percent from the mid-terms. Yeah, just five. Since then, she has been telling us how flexible she has been with us, when all she has done was to change the weight of the examinations. When asked what format we'd like the exams to be in, of course the lot of us demanded MCQs instead of anything else. It's not like she budged on that either, an insisted on a little bit of everything, which makes me wonder why she wanted our opinion on that in the first place. Then the mid-terms came, and then she reflected to the class that she was taking some time to mark the essay questions because there were too many of us, and our answers were too long. Even in the face of a wall of essay questions from us, she still didn't want to scrape that idea from the finals. She did give less of those questions, but she also set them so hard that the questions themselves could have shattered rocks. All the "as we have discussed" in class questions made me want to pull my hair out.

One more thing about Jenny - I think she is somewhat cunning. I think she is a nice person if she isn't a lecturer, because you can tell when you are talking to her candidly. She is nice, and her big laughs are rather interesting, though intimidating at times as she threatens to swallow you whole like an anaconda. Other than that, I think she is fine - until she starts speaking in class again. Jenny has a problem of sticking to English when she teaches in class, because she'd start speaking mandarin to us halfway through the class for some reason, supposedly to better explain a concept because she is better at mandarin instead. I understand if your second language isn't nearly as good as your first, and then sometimes you need to rely on your first language to help you out a little bit. However, let's be honest here: your English actually is pretty good. Other than your pronunciation problems like, pronouncing "McDonald" as "Madonna", you are pretty OK in every other field.

And there is a point whereby speaking too much mandarin in class becomes tiresome, especially in front of many minority students in the class, it becomes extremely rude. And, I also think that it is unforgivable to do such a thing as a lecturer no matter how many times you decide to apologize. I mean, as a lecturer, I always believe that the ability to communicate to your students is the most important. If you do not have the ability to translate your doctorate knowledge into discernible words, then you fail as a lecturer altogether. Dr. Hong came and went with indecipherable words, and then you come along with a completely different language and dialect for the minority students, that is RUDE. It pissed off a lot of minority students, but it's not like she stopped doing it either. She even incorporate chinese into her presentation slides, with a paragraph of English alongside a paragraph of Chinese - what's up with that? The truth is, Singapore isn't exactly a country with a lot of decent Chinese speaking people, even if the majority of the students here are Chinese. Let's be honest my friends, most Singaporean's mandarin probably goes as far as ordering food at a hawker center. Anything academic in nature and written in Chinese, even I have no idea what is going on.

So, that is my overall thought about the summer semester. The first half was wonderful, with Lance and Michael at the helms for the most part. Then the first half ended and the second half started, and you start to feel disappointed at the quality of lecturers brought in by the school. The truth is, and this is not in any effort to be racist, it just seems that Asian lecturers tend to be more uptight and, well, just plain average or bad. It's not that I haven't loved any Asian lecturers though, because my favorite lecturer of all time is still Nina from India. Yet, even the worst lecturer from across the Pacific (Sachs) still kicked quite a lot of ass. I have no idea why that is the case for Asian lecturers, and the way that the conduct their classes in general. Perhaps it is the culture, or the way that our own education brought us up to be this way. It is difficult to find out the real reason I suppose, and I am just somewhat glad that I know that next semester, I am going to get all American lecturers. I'm not saying that all of them are going to be awesome like Julie Bowker, but at least I know the worst is still going to be pretty OK in my own standards.

Not-So Mighty Mouse

2009-08-01T18:12:00.001+08:00

Not-So Mighty Mouse

I think it is important to be objective in life. It is not possible to be a hundred percent objective in anything we do, but we can try at it. If you are all one-sided, then you end up being labeled as being a fanatic, or someone who cannot consider both sides of the coin. It's kind of like my sister in that regard, someone who finds no fault in those Japanese boy bands that she loves so blindly. She never has been able to come up with a good enough reason other than "I like it", and I've always associated her love for music with fanaticism. She was the kind of teenage fan who used to chase after her favorite celebrities and to camp at the hotels that they stayed in. She doesn't do that anymore, claiming that she has grown out of it. Yet, her love for Japanese celebrities was the only reason why she bought an external hard drive that is one terabyte in size, all of which to fit her craving for music videos and pictures. Anyway, my fanaticism for Apple is nowhere near as crazy as hers. For the most part, I do consider myself to be a rational human being. If there is something about Apple products that need improvements, I say it. If there is something that sucks about an Apple product, I complain about it. I think I am as objective as it gets, and that is what I will try to do in this blog entry.

I love Apple products, and my friends should know that. Most of the time, they are the epitome of what products should be like - an emphasis on both the exterior and the interior. I haven't been a user for a very long time (a little more than two years to be accurate), but let's just say that I've been a fan ever since. Anyway, most of the time, I have no problems with its products. People complain often about the compatibility issues and the fact that there aren't a lot of Mac-related applications. For one, I personally don't have many compatibility issues ever since I started using this platform, and I have found replacements for most, if not all of the programs that I used to use in my old PC. I'd vehemently defend the brand if somebody says something that is grossly untrue about it, and I'd not hesitate to start a debate because of that too. With that said, though, I still have a lot of complaints regarding the brand, some may seem really minor to most people, but they are really annoying to me. For example, Mail is probably one of the poorest applications in a Mac. I have troubles downloading attachments through the applications, and there isn't a progress bar for me to know if something has been downloaded or not. However, this blog entry is to address a greater issue that I have been fighting with ever since I got my first Mac.

If you are a Mac user, you'd have definitely tried your hands on a Mighty Mouse. I remember my first day with a Mighty Mouse, and the first question I asked was "Where is the right-click button?" and "Where do I put the batteries?". True to many Apple designed products, they are slick to look at and they feel even better in your hands. I love how the mouse didn't look like a mouse, but like a small white pebble that was carefully polished with a sandpaper. That is exactly what it looked like, and I've always like that vibe in anything that I find. You know, like those doors to bathrooms that look more like closet doors? You get my point then. Anyway, it was love at first sight, and I fell in love with it again when I started using it. The fact that the mouse scrolled all 360 degrees, not to mention the fact that it had five buttons on all sides, the complete integration into the operating system completely blew me away. The smoothness of the scroll ball will completely blow your clothes off, and the need to have mouses (spelling?) that don't have that clicking sound whenever I click on them became so important to me. Everything was fine and dandy for the first couple of months, and I was even impressed by the battery life of that small little thing - until, a couple of months ago.

Like many users of the Mighty Mouse, my Mighty Mouse's scroll ball stopped working. It refused to scroll up, and would only scroll in every other direction. Going online, I realized that the problem was due to dirt being gathered within the mouse itself, something that happens to all mouses (again, spelling?) out there. I remember unscrewing the bottom of my old mouse a long time ago and screamed because of the amount of dirt that came pouring out from within. It was an awful sight, and perhaps that was the reason why Apple thought that it'd be smart to seal everything up on the Mighty Mouse. When I tried to open the damn thing, I couldn't find any screws for me to open, and that was when I realized that the edges were actually fixed together by super glue, and breaking it would void my warranty altogether. At that point in time, I was still covered by warranty, but I didn't want to bring it all the way down to an Epicenter just to have the attendants there clean my mouse anyway. So I cleaned it according to the instructions online, and they suggest any users to turn the mouse upside down and run it on a moist piece of cloth. The scroll ball worked again, and I continued using.

Then, of course, like any lousy product, the same thing happened again all over again. I swear by this, but I have tried every single possible solutions to this problem. I have tried running the mouse upside down over a moist piece of cloth, and that only worked for so long. Then I decided to try running the mouse upside down over paper, and that only worked for some time before it decided to bail out on me. For more radical methods, I even used scotch tape in an attempt to get those stubborn dirt out. What I did was to cut tiny strips of scotch tape out, and then I carefully rolled them into the mouse and through the underside. If you have enough patience, you can go ahead and try what I did. It was probably the most tedious cleaning effort, and the one that is the most useless as well. Don't even bother trying to use a scotch tape to stick things out, because nothing is going to stick at all. I also read about using compressed air to blow the dirt out from within, but I have no idea where you find compressed air. In a desperate attempt to make my mouse functional again, I started blowing at the scroll ball really hard. That didn't work, and so I was back to square one all over again. Running it on cloth works most of the time, but the trouble became more and more pronounced over time.

The scroll ball aside, the buttons started to malfunction after some time. A point to note, though, I receive a wireless Mighty Mouse for free when I bought my Macbook, and a wired Mighty Mouse came with the iMac when I bought it a few months later. The wired Mighty Mouse completely broke down, and I actually had to revert back to using the wireless Mighty Mouse for some time. The right click button on the wireless mouse stopped working properly after some time, and there'd be times when I'd have to bang furiously on the mouse just to do something on the computer screen. If I want to right click on something, it'd almost always end up as being a left click, and I'd have to turn off and then turn on the wireless mouse for things to work properly, though only for a few minutes before the same thing happens again. Not only that, the mouse would suddenly jump from one point on the screen to another without you moving the mouse. Like, if you try to move your mouse in a straight line, the cursor would go in a straight line for a while before it suddenly skips to some random point on the screen. It became really annoying, and I attributed it to bad battery initially. I even cleaned the area on the table, thinking that it was dirt gathered there over time. Yet, the problem persisted.

Back to the scroll ball, it still continued to break down from time to time. At last, I decided to do the unthinkable - I broke the mouse apart. Not by force of course, or anything out of anger and frustration. First, I carefully inserted a blade in between the mouse's body and the plastic base ring. I slowly dug around it a dozen times over before the super glue came apart. The base ring came off along with the rubber ring, and then I had to push a bunch of levers out to take the inside of the mouse apart. I then had to disconnect two cables inside to remove the top cover from the bottom unit, and that took some work on its own. I unscrewed the frame of the scroll ball, and then took apart the rest of that unit to clean the inside of the scroll ball. I started with the magnetic wheels inside, the frame itself, and then the ball. I cleaned everything with a piece of wet tissue, and then dried everything with tissue paper before fixing everything back one piece at a time. It was a tedious process, but it made me feel like MacGyver for a moment there. It felt good to take something apart and put it back again, and then it was the moment of truth. The mouse worked like a charm! The ball was working, and everything was as good as new... until about two days ago.

First of all, the routine break down occurred again. The mouse wouldn't scroll down, and when it did decide that it wanted to scroll down, it didn't want to scroll back up. Then the right click problem kicked in, and then it was made worse when left click became right click altogether. I swear, I was so pissed at the mouse that I tossed it onto my bed and threatened to smash it with a hammer. To put things into perspective as to how pissed off I was with the mouse, I actually borrowed the Asus mouse from my mother's laptop and used it for one whole day. The irony was that the night before, I was just asking Alvin about a Logitech wireless mouse that he was selling on Twitter, and then the mouse broke down twenty-four hours later. The coincidence was uncanny, but timely nonetheless. Right now, although I have to sacrifice one USB port on my iMac keyboard and the fact that I have this black plastic thing as a mouse instead of that white colored one that fitted the rest of the setup, at least this one is working perfectly so far. It's not that this one will not give me problems in the future, but I am pretty damn sure that it will not give me the same problems as the ones I had before. The Mighty Mouse looks good and works well, but only if it is within the first three months. If you are using the Mighty Mouse, you are BOUND to run into this problem, and I advise you against the worst Apple invention in the history of Apple inventions.

Please Don't Go

2009-07-31T02:12:00.001+08:00

Please Don't Go

All those arrows you threw, you threw them away
You kept falling in love, then one day
When you fell, you fell towards me
When you crashed in the clouds, you found me

Oh, please don’t go, I want you so
I can’t let go, for I lose control

Get these left handed lovers out of your way
They look hopeful but you, you should not stay
If you want me to break down and give you the keys
I can do that but I can’t let you leave

Oh, please don’t go, I want you so
I can’t let go, for I lose control

Remain

2009-07-30T02:08:00.001+08:00

Remain

We'll remain after everything's been washed away by the rain

We will stand upright as we stand today

Lovestain, you left a lovestain on my heart.

And you left a bloodstain on the ground

But blood comes off easily.

I think it is petrifying to think about change sometimes. Every aspect of changing is a thought that is difficult to bear somehow, or at least to me. I think most of us are at the stage whereby we look at ourselves in the mirror and wonder what we'd look like in ten years' time. I constantly think about that, though it isn't so much about my looks but the way that I dress. I wouldn't want to be spotted with a flowery button-down shirt and a pair of slippers though, not to mention gold chains, gold rings and gold bangles. As long as I keep it in mind that I have an image to uphold even when I am old, I'd be fine I suppose. Yet, there is always a potential chance that the change could lead me to undesirable places. More than the looks, though, relationships between people could very well change, and it can be somewhat scary or daunting even if it is for the better. I wish for the relationship between my sister and I to become better over the years, and we'd be the kind of siblings to keep in touch in our adult years. Yet, every form of change involves moving out from the zone of your comfort, like the one that I am in right now. With every change that comes along, we have an equilibrium of good and bad, and I suppose it is all about perspectives when it comes right down to it. You know, whether you want to focus on the changes for the worse or the beautiful things that have remained unchanged.

In less than a month, I am going to embark on the journey of my life. It isn't some big mystery amongst my friends, and it isn't some kind of a soul searching trip into the mountains to find some kinda guru or wise man. It's going to be a semester spent in Buffalo, and I suppose a lot of changes will scary the living daylight out of me over there. More than the food and the weather, I suppose the culture shock and the fact that I'd have to depend solely on myself is going to be one of those changes that are going to slap me in the face. I feel that I need this trip though, I've known deep inside for a while now that this trip overseas is going to change me dramatically. However, even knowing that a change is going to be for the better, a part of you is always going to want some things to remain the same. It is conflicting sometimes, and it is strange. Like, you want an event to be some life-altering event that'd turn everything around somehow. I mean, if something you do is not going to change anything in your life, then you might as well not try at it to begin with. However, when you do get down to it, you just wish that some things from the past will remain the same. There will be times when even a millionaire would craze for a childhood snack that he used to eat when he was younger, and only hoped that the little shop around the corner hadn't closed down a decade or two ago.

Anyway, it is all about perspectives, and it is about how you are going to see things. Either we harp on the fact that it is going to be a long and grueling four months, or I am going to see it as a change that is going make me a better person. Either we focus on all the inconveniences that are going to come along with this change, or we could think about all that will remain the same despite everything else. It is difficult for any couple to come to terms with that, I feel. I mean, in any form of relationship, you cannot deny that the physical presence of each other stands for so much, and I am not talking about sex here. It's just the physical presence and the knowledge that somebody is, at the most, an hour away from you, comforts you. Having to deal with a long distance relationship is going to be hard for anybody, and I have never expected myself to be the victim (so to speak) of such a long distance relationship at all. It is upsetting, and at times depressing for me to think about it. I have, for more than one occasion, teared because of the mere concept of leaving my beloved ones behind in this country for such a long time. Yet, something came to me a few days ago when I walked out from Neptina's house. I realized something that I haven't exactly thought about - a new perspective on all that will remain.

You see, four months isn't too short a time for everything to remain the same. I understand that there will be things that are different by the time I come back, and it will scare anybody. I understand that nothing will remain in static, and everything will be nudged even by an inch away from where they started off with. Yet, there are times when that inch isn't far enough to be out of your comfort zone, and I feel like I can stomach those minor changes and see them as being unchanged for the most part. It comforts me when I think about it that way, to know that there will be things back home staying the same. It is silly to think about it this way, but I almost feel as if things are going to remain the same just for me, as if they will be waiting for my return or something like that. It isn't that all the people that will be looking forward to my return aren't going to be enough of course. But more than the people, on an even grander scale, it comforts me deep inside to know that a lot of things that I have come to get used to will be the same when I come back, you know. I remember coming home from the army for the very first time, and how my room and my bed smelled exactly the same. If you have ever experienced that, you know what I am talking about.

Everything in my room is probably going to remain the same when I come back. You know, the books are still going to be stashed up untidily underneath my table, and my DVDs are still going to be properly arranged in alphabetical order. James is still going to be sitting on top of my DVD collection while staring out of my bedroom window, and the shade of yellow from my night lamps are still going to cast the very same shadows on the walls and the floors. My mother is still going to be around the house, at the table in her room working on some accounting stuff, while my sister is still going to be in her room with her chin propped up by her hand. My neighbor is still going to invite their friends over for cell groups every Friday, and the shoes are still going to collect as far as halfway to the front door of my house. The security guards are probably going to be the same when I come back, still blasting the radio from inside their guard house and chatting up residents when they leave or enter the estate. That little black and white cat with the blue eyes is still going to wander around in the bushes at the back gate of my house, always appearing at the same time everyday with that look of suspicion and wonder in its eyes.

Beyond the boundaries of my home, I think the lime juice that they sell at Chomp Chomp is still going to be as huge and satisfying as they are now. The carrot cake is still going to be pretty awesome, and the attendants at the prata shop are still going to be the most unfriendly people in the service industry - ever. Orchard Road is not going to change much, even if there will be new malls opening everywhere around that area, because malls are malls anyway. The streets are still going to be filled with the same brand of people from everywhere. You know, the maids on weekends, the aunties with their fake branded bags, and the school kids that come in groups with their limitless ability to annoy the hell out of me. Kinokuniya is still going to smell the same, and the people working there are still going to be in those blue aprons that they wear all the time. Traveling around in Singapore, for the most part, is probably still going to be a bitch, and getting from my place to Neptina's house is probably not going to get any easier in four months time. The walk from the 53 bus stop to hers is still going to be decorated by stray cats and strange old men, and the parrots are still going to be cawing in the park next to her house while hanging upside down from a tree.

The old men are still going to be wearing their wifebeaters while watching television in their living room. In the summer, the tree downstairs is going to bloom flowers all over again, and the entire void deck is going to have sweet and flowery smell. The beeping in the elevator is still going the equally annoying, and I am still going to hold my cellphone away from my ear for a while whenever she enters the elevator on the phone with me. She is still going to be living on the seventh floor, and the color of her front door is still going to remain bright and unchanged. The little fan fixed to the window of her neighbor from the other side of the corridor is still going to be there, and it'd be spinning when the wind comes in. Her father's old bicycle is still going to be chained and locked the railings of the staircase leading down to the first floor, and it is still going to be dusty and rusty due to the lack of maintenance. When it rains, the rain is still going to spill into the corridor and make the floors wet, and the little grey cat is still going to be prancing around the neighborhood lazily in the afternoon. Her gates will open as usual, and she will be there waiting for me to enter with a smile on her face, and maybe a tear in her eyes.

Her mother is still going to be at the television, either watching the latest episode of Oprah or catching up on entertainment news on E!. I am going to kick my shoes off at the front door where the other shoes will meet my shoes, and I am probably going to head to her bedroom first because that is usually where the comfort is. Neptina is probably going to go handle something while I turn on the air-conditioning and then close the windows. I am still going to have a hard time closing them because if you close one of them too hard, the window on the other side will pop open and you have to close it all over again. I am probably going to be able to hear the toilet flush from her bedroom, and then I'd be taking off my socks and taking out my wallet while she comes into the bedroom to give me a big tight hug. For the rest of the day, we will be taking random pictures on her Macbook, laughing over random things on the internet, cuddling in bed because the air-conditioning is getting too cold, and then we'd be whispering words into each others' ears because we are that close to each other. We'd be guessing what her parents are doing when we hear sounds of them walking around the house, then we'd be planning on what to eat for dinner. Sometimes, we'd go out and buy groceries just to come back to cook, and the wait for the food to be done is still going to be incredibly agonizing.

At night, we'd still be going out from her bedroom to say hello to the father when he gets back, and then we'd be closing the door behind us because the sound from the television would be deafening. We'd still be propping our legs and arms up with the blanket over our heads to pretend that we are marooned pirates. We'd be pretending that we are on a makeshift raft in the middle of the sea, and there is a storm coming from the horizon while we try to sail to the nearest island. We'd lay there in bed and look at stars through the ceiling of her room, and then we'd still be talking about how amazing it has been since the day that we met, not to mention how improbably it'd still seem for us to meet in the first place. By eleven, it'd be my time to leave, and then she'd ask for me to give her a hug in bed before I have to pack up and go. She'd ask for a "hug-crack" from me, which is a hug that involves me cracking her back, and then she'd hold my hand through her dark living room and then down the elevator. On the way, we'd be making fun of that old neighbor who sits at the sofa to watch television every single day of the week, and then she'd be waving goodbye to me while I go home in a cab. She'd remain there by the side of the road with a kiss in her hand, just waiting for the lights of the cab to disappear around the corner before she lives. Before then, she will remain there in the middle of the night, and she will be doing the same when I come all the way back from the other side.

I guess what I am trying to say that although it is going to involve a dramatic change in many things in both our lives, many things that are already happening don't necessarily have to change at all. For four months, we will see each other less, talk to each other less, and get to touch each other even lesser. But the truth is, though, is that nothing is permanent, even the painful things will come to pass sooner or later. Change comes along with everything in our lives, and while the good will eventually change for the worse, the worse will also eventually change for the better. Amidst the ever-changing landscapes of our lives, we might as well pay more attention on the beautiful things that will remain unchanged, traditions and routines that we have become so accustomed to over the days and the weeks and the months. The truth is, though, I do not want anything to change but our relationship to become stronger and better. Other than that, I love the way that we are, and I think we are quite an awesome pair together. We could either fear the possibility of our relationship changing for the worse, or we could remember how many little things will still remain the same. Like the way the old men would stare dumbly at the television screen, like the way the scent of the flowers would drift through your corridors, like the way we'd kiss each other goodbye by the changing lights of the road junction, our love doesn't have to change after the months that I will be away either. So remain the same, and remain as you, and I promise that I will do the things that we've grown so comfortable to.

The Devil

2009-07-29T00:00:00.000+08:00

The Devil

You read about the Devil all the time, but then he gets a lot less mentioning in the Bible than a lot of its characters. It is God's greatest enemy, though God is obviously taking his own sweet time in eradicating the Devil from the face of this planet. If God is really all that powerful, you cannot help but start to wonder this question - what in the world is He waiting for? The devil is right there, and apparently he is making a lot of people in our world doing crazy evil things to one another. If somebody comes along and destroys the things that I have carefully crafted, even if it was made in seven days, I am going to be super pissed. I mean, if God had the capacity to kill all the first-born in Exodus for no apparent reasons, I am sure he has the capacity to be pissed off as well. The capacity of jealousy is, after all, infinitely bigger than the capacity of anger, and I am sure He has room for that. So, if that is the case, I do wonder why he is allowing the Devil to create a havoc in his pretty little world. Maybe he is waiting for something to happen, maybe more people to die. Maybe everything is a part of his plan, and maybe there is a meaning to everything evil that has happened so far. If he does exist, though, I'd like him to explain what the fuck happened to the poor baby that the mother chopped up and ate.

If you have been reading the news, you'd have read about the cannibal mother who killed her three-week old baby and ate him. When the police arrived at her place, the crazed mother was found stabbing herself and telling everybody that she killed her baby. The baby was not only killed, but his head was severed from the body with the face completely torn off. His toes were chewed off by the mother, and the baby's brain was dug out and eaten as well. I apologize if the above description disturbed you, but this is a true story from one of the most disgusting news I have read about in recent times. I'd like God to answer to me why this three-week old baby was slaughtered and eaten by his own mother, and his divine powers didn't exactly come into play when the helpless baby just laid there. You know, you'd expect somebody as powerful as God to intervene or something, since he is all-knowing and all-wise. If this was part of the plan, I'd like to hear which part of his lousy plan this belongs to, because I do not see the purpose of a cannibalistic mother eating his own son at all. If there is a purpose to everything that ever happens in this world, I'd like to know why a three-week old baby had to suffer through all this. I don't think God is the legitimate person to be asking this question, but I'd just like to know. If your plan is so great, why did the baby have to die?

I couldn't get pass the first three paragraphs of the article that I read in the papers this morning. It isn't only because of the gruesome details that the report gave on the crime scene, but also the fact that the title of the article told me everything that I needed to know. Testifying for herself, her excuse for killing her son and then eating him was simple: the Devil made her do it. The Devil is a convenient excuse for many crimes out there, and it just seems like everything is less evil if it was because of the Devil. I mean, we all know about the Amityville Horror and the story that it was based upon. You know, the case about how Ronald DeFeo shot six of his own family and then later claimed that the Devil asked him to do it as well. I think it is easy if you are going to blame it on the Devil, because he is supposed to be the source of all that is evil, right. If you do something wrong, you want to think that somebody else has "possessed" you at that point in time, and that you weren't really yourself. That is the same basic human tendency to blame everything on inanimate or invisible objects, like fengshui. Humans don't like to think that they make mistakes or that they sometimes run into bad luck. So they blame everything on sofas, on fish tanks, on bed positions and toilet bowls. I'm sorry, but those are not just easy excuses, they are stupid excuses.

It is great that our justice system is not based on the rules of religion, because we'd all be really screwed if that is indeed the case. Just take a second off and imagine if our entire country is run based on religion, with our government and justice system tightly intertwined with it. If you say that you killed some poor old man due to greed and refuse to repent, you'd probably be punished severely by death. That seems fair enough, because I support death penalty in any country - not life. I mean, I don't want to know the tax that I pay is actually used to keep criminals (like Ronald DeFeo) alive in prison. I support the death penalty, and that seems like a fair result of a persecution, right. However, if the justice system is based around religious laws, and somebody comes up to you and say that she killed and ate her baby because the Devil asked her to do it, how would the court react? I am pretty sure that if they hear the word "Devil", their first reaction would be to shudder, and then all scramble into a back room to consult each other. If need be, they might even make a phone call to the Pope and ask him for his opinions, since he is probably always on standby in the Vatican, doing nothing much at all. What DOES a Pope do anyway?

So, a justice system based on religious laws, yes. This woman would probably go through an exorcizing session or something like that, and everybody would believe that the Devil got to her, causing her to eat her baby up. I mean, if you are a religious person, how do you dismiss that it was the doings of the "Devil" anyway? That is, of course, assuming that the Devil did do it, and that the woman was really a puppet of his grander evil scheme. She'd probably get out from the church with a warning and then carry on with her life, because it was really the Devil who did it instead of herself. I mean, if you can claim that the Devil exists and he asked you to do it, then you probably also have the capacity to believe in God and everything that comes along with it, right. I am not saying that every person who has a religion can turn into a psychopath and eat their family members. I am just saying that not everybody should have a religion, because it sprouts pointless and stupid excuses people use to try to get away with everything that they do wrong in life. I failed my exam because I was out partying like a wild animal last night, and it was all the Devil's fault. I shot a man at the convenience store for a bottle of beer because the Devil asked me to do it. I ran over my neighbor's cat with a lawnmower because, you guessed it, the Devil asked me to do it.

I think we should change that for a start, we shouldn't blame everything on the Devil anymore. Even if he is real and that he is truly evil, I am pretty sure that he is not responsible for all the evildoings in this world. I mean, with someone like Adolf Hitler, you know that it was all him, and he'd probably claim credit for what he did in the past anyway. So, the excuse of using the Devil is fast becoming old, and we really need something or someone else to blame it on. I think it is unoriginal if everybody is going to blame the same guy or the same thing. I mean, we are all individuals, we are all different from one another. It would be somewhat unnatural, the way that religion demands that people come under the same belief, for us to have the same target of our own wrongdoings. So, we should all pick someone or something else to blame, and this time it is going to be original. You can say that a talking cheeseburger asked you to do it, or you cat made you do it because it was starving. Or maybe the voice that comes out from your speakers when you play Linkin Park backwards asked you to do it, or maybe even Hannah Montana asked you to do it. The Jonas Brothers could have convinced you to do it, or maybe the unopened canned of tuna asked you to do it. For me, I am going to say that my toenail asked me to do it. Why? I don't know why, it's convenient. I have ten toenails, I'd just pick one for each crime that I commit. Convenient.

Going back to the original question that I posed, what really is the point of this baby being killed and eaten in the first place, other than maybe feeling the stomach of a really hungry mother? I mean, if this is all a part of this grand plan and everything happens for a reason, I want to hear the answer to - why? I think the truth is that even the big guy doesn't have an answer to a question like that. In fact, I don't think he even exists at all. It is news like that that makes you wonder if someone of a higher order exists at all. People always say that you shouldn't think of God in human terms because he has a higher order of thinking, or something. But if this is the quality of his "higher order thinking", it sucks. It really does, because there is nothing you can do to justify that an innocent baby deserved that. I think it would be unfair to say that religion did this, that it wasn't because of some psychological disorder that caused the mother to go completely psycho. It was probably was, and it is a shame that nobody around her saw this coming from a thousand miles away.

However, I am just calling out to a lot of people out there who believe that there is a plan to everything - there isn't. What happened on that day didn't appear on any plan, because plans don't happen like that. You can't even apply Murphy's Law here at this point and claim that shit happens, and we should just accept that a mother killed her son and ate him. There isn't a plan, because a mighty being probably wouldn't plan something this horrific into any forms of plan. I just find it somewhat amusing in a way that there are still so many people using the Devil as some kind of excuse, when he may not necessarily be half as bad as we make him out to be. I mean, of all the atrocities that mankind has ever endured, it has always been caused by other humans. If the Devil does exist, he probably exists within the dark hearts and minds of people out there with malicious intentions. I heard an explanation about the possession of the Devil in people today and how it affects people and their actions. I say, like many things in life, it is just humans trying to run away from their own responsibilities. So they created the Devil and blamed it on him, but they also created a mighty good guy, making them feel comforted that there is this powerful good guy who will destroy the powerful bad guy. It is all made-up, and a baby remains with his head severed from his head. Religion doesn't make any sense, and blaming it on the Devil doesn't make any sense either.

Just Emotions

2009-07-27T18:22:00.003+08:00

Just Emotions

I wasn't the kind of kid that people normally find lovable. I mean, I looked to be that way most of the time, but I'd probably feel like strangling myself, given any versions of myself from before six years old. From the pictures that I find tucked in forgotten corners of the house, I looked (that being the keyword) like I was the kind of kid you want to cuddle around with - in the appropriate ways please. I had chubby cheeks, and even had those classic holes for knuckles that every kid has, which do me is the most adorable thing ever. There are numerous pictures of someone tying a handful of my hair together into this Alfalfa-looking hairstyle, while there are other pictures of me with a bathing suit, playing a fighting game with my sister. I looked like a cute kid, but I don't think I was liked very much due to many reasons. I mean, I was sick all the time, which means my mother would have to send me to the emergency room all the time, not to mention how anti-social I would get whenever my mother brought me anywhere. I'd even resort to sleeping on her shoulder just to get a reason not to talk to anyone. But worst of all, though, I cried like nobody's business because I had a very active tear duct and very low tolerance for anything that irritated me. I am glad that my parents, in contrary, had a high tolerance for a great many things that came from me. The truth is, I am very lucky to be alive.

If you have a chance to sit down with any of my relatives to talk about me, you'd probably hear them mention just how much I liked to cry when I was younger. Or, I don't think I actually liked doing something like that, because I distinctively remember hating every situation that I was involved in while crying. There was a particularly incident that I remember, properly recorded with photographic evidence by my parents. There is a picture in the photo album that has me crying by the side of a bed in Taiwan with a toy train set by the side of my feet. For some reason, I remember that day very well, and nobody remembers why I was crying my eyeballs out, save for me. I remember trying to piece the tracks of the toy train set together on the wooden floor, but the plastic tracks kept scraping against the surface and making strange squeaking sounds. The tracks wouldn't stay still, and for some reason I didn't think that playing the train set on the bed with a proper surface would be a good solution. The worse alternate solution that my young innocent mind came up with was to cry my ass off and hope that somebody else would think of a better idea for me. No matter how cute you are, you'd want to throw me out of the window by this point.

I am starting to wonder why my parents thought that it'd be appropriate to take that picture of me crying like a baby. They probably thought it to be important to keep some kind of photographic evidence just so that I won't be able to deny everything when I grow older - like now. I can't deny it anyway, because I remember how I was as an annoying brat who cried every little detail. I am like an overly emotional child whose only reaction to anything that makes me unhappy was to cry it out. I do not deny the cathartic effect of crying at times, but I did it way too often that it eventually became a reason why my parents would need something cathartic in their lives. They probably took that photograph while thinking to themselves "just wait till you grow up". Now that I have grown up, I fully agreed that I deserved a kick and to be dragged into the bathroom or something like that. That'd probably traumatize me as a child, but then it would have shut me up for good. I wouldn't know what to do with the baby-version of myself other than to give me a good grip on the shoulders and some shaking. But, I think there is something good that came out of all the crying, similar to how something good comes out from everything bad. Of course, nobody saw the benefits in the short-run, but not a lot of people stuck around to see the effects in the long-run anyway.

As I grew older, I started to lose the ability to tear very often, and I don't know why. I tear so irregularly that I actually remember many specific moments when it happened in the past decade or so. They were all very specific instances that caused me to have very snappy tears. By "snappy", I mean that they came fast and they went away pretty soon as well. I have a nagging feeling that all the crying I did when I was younger probably caused my tear duct to kick into overdrive and, as a result, has been going through some kind of withdrawal symptom ever since my teenage years. It forgot how to tear, or has forgotten how to tear due to emotional reasons. Aside from the everyday necessity of tearing to moisturize the eyeballs, there are times when nothing comes even when I get that sour feeling in the nose. I do consider myself to be somewhat emotional, but then that does not mean that I tear easily. Being a fan of movies, there has only been a handful of films that ever made me tear, and we are not even talking about full-blown brawling here, but just a drop or two coming down my cheeks. Schindler's List comes to mind as one of such films, but then who can sit through that and be all ambivalent about it?

I used to be the kind of kid to throw a lot of temper around, and my mother used to threaten me that if I continued to be angry, a vein in my neck or forehead would burst, and I'd die. Come to think about it, I'm not sure if that was the truth or just a flat out lie, because of how she used to do it over and over again. My mother actually threatened me with death back in the days when I cried continuously, imagine that! But I think that worked, because I'd calm down almost immediately afterwards, though that isn't something that lasted very long back then. I used to fight with my sister a lot, and those were the times when I would cry afterwards because either my parents sided with her or I lost. Crying just seemed like the best solution out of anything, and I understand how it sounds like a very girly thing to do. Anyway, I suppose all the temper-throwing and all the tears amounted to me being who I am today. It isn't that I am emotional detached or anything, but because I think I am more emotionally equipped to handle a lot of things life decide to throw at me, you know. There are many ways in which I can deal with a particular situation right now, which makes me more ... mature I suppose? I hate to use that word in general, the word "mature". It is so difficult to say if someone has mature or not, as if it is some kind of fruit and that you can tell by the color. I suppose the word can only be used comparatively, and only when you are saying that you are either more or less mature than before. In that respect, I suppose I have changed a great deal.

It has got to do with a lot of things in life really, many different aspects of my life that contributed to this. In high school, with all the boys around, I suppose we were all conditioned to behave in a certain way and not behave in a certain way. Breaking those social norms also meant social suicide, where the other boys would pick on you for acting differently from everybody else. So I had to keep my emotions in, I had to box them all up, because we all know what happens when you throw your temper and you lose it in between classes. I remember that one year when I had Ambrose as my classmate, and someone thought that it'd be fun to mess with him because he was considered to be "bully-able" by the standards of other boys. I remember Matthew doing something to him in between classes that caused Ambrose to flare up, and I remember him throwing a table at somebody, which was something he did all the time. Then for some reason, his glasses broke in half, and he started screaming and crying on the floor about how he bought the glasses only a week earlier, and he had mucus all over his face. Instead of stopping, though, the boys just stood around and laughed harder, which must have caused quite a trauma in Ambrose. Speaking of which, I haven't seen that guy since high school graduation. I wonder how he is now.

In junior college, it was the same story with different characters. This time around, instead of getting yourself out of trouble, all the boys wanted to do was to control themselves and pretend that they are OK about things that they are not OK with. With girls as our classmates, we didn't want to "lost it", so to speak in front of the girls. It must have been an unspoken rule of some sort, one of the many things that the boys couldn't do in front of the girls. We wanted to seem tough, we wanted to see indifferent, and we wanted them to like us. It is stupid, I know, but it's not like it stopped the boys from wanting to act in a certain way. I mean, the boys from the sports teams were always looked upon as being the cream of the crop because they were the "epitome of manhood" at those times. Just imagine, muscular dragonboat boys with their oars, that'd get any girls at that age to fall head over heels. And for the rest of us that are not nearly as physically inclined, we wanted to show and present ourselves in a different light. Being vulnerable, or being open with our emotions, those just didn't really seem like a viable option for most of us. So we opted to keep mum about a great many things, at least for me.

Then came the army, and there is no questions about zoning your emotions out of this one. Ideally, I feel, the government would like an army consisting of drones. The higher officials will be humans of course, because they'd want them to be controlling the drones. I mean, drones don't eat and they follow orders all the time, assuming that they do not eventually become self-aware. You don't want an army of human beings, because humans were never build to be good soldiers. I mean, some of us definitely are, but the rest of us are not exactly going to be keen on killing other human beings just because the people higher up are pissed off with the higher up people from that other country. The army wanted all the boys to be emotionless, they wanted us to be uniformed. That is why they wanted us to wear the same uniforms, they wanted us to march and run in cadence, and they wanted us to sing to the same damn army songs everyday. They wanted us to do everything in the exact same manner, and they also demanded the elites to kill chickens just to get that whole emotion thing out of the way. I was never the elite, but then I was sure conditioned to feel nothing about the swarms, the long hours, the sleepless nights and the screaming into your face. All of those, to manipulate you into a drone of skin and bones, to rid you of your emotions when you are in need of that emotional release.

So yeah, well I think not a lot of things in life really gets to me. I think death gets to me, but most of the time it is filled with wonderment and confusion, and maybe an element of shock too. More than the idea of death, though, it is the idea of departure that scares me the most. It isn't so much about my own death, but more about the idea that I will never see a certain bunch of people in my life ever again. I think that departure is a scary thing, and it is one of those things that gets me down, even now. As you know, I am leaving for Buffalo in less than a month, and there are a great many things that I have to deal with emotionally, and things that are making it hard to leave this place behind. I am departing, and the emotional baggage that comes along with that concept is both daunting and overwhelming. But we all have to deal with it, and I am just glad that none of this is permanent, that it is only for a short period of time. At any rate, we are all learning to deal with this, and like all the crying that came out of my childhood, some good will come out of this hurt - I promise. Some good will come out of this ordeal, and we will all end up being better than who we started out as. There are times when emotional control isn't necessary, especially when the occasion is appropriate and fitting. I cry at times at the thought of leaving this place, I smile at times when I think about coming back to my beloved one. I laugh when somebody says something funny, and I feel contented when I think about how much I am being loved by everybody around me. In truth, emotions don't need to be a bad thing. An outpour of it does not need to be cringeworthy either. I love each and every single one of you, a statement from me for example. When speaking the truth, emotional control can go out of the window for all that I care.

Strawberry Swing

2009-07-24T16:06:00.001+08:00

Strawberry Swing

They were sitting
They were sitting on the Strawberry Swing
Every moment was so precious

They were sitting
They were talking under Strawberry Swing
Everybody was for fighting
Wouldn't wanna waste a thing

Cold, cold water bring me 'round
Now my feet won't touch the ground
Cold, cold water what'd you say?
When it's such, it's such a perfect day
It's such a perfect day

I remember
We were walking up to Strawberry Swing
I can't wait until the morning
Wouldn't wanna change a thing

People moving all the time
Inside a perfectly straight line
Don't you wanna just curve away?
When it's such, it's such a perfect day
It's such a perfect day

Now the sky could be blue
I don't mind
Without you it's a waste of time

Could be blue
I don’t mind
Without you it’s a waste of time

Could be blue,
Could be gray
Without you I’m just miles away

Could be blue
I don’t mind
Without you it’s a waste of time

Neptina

2009-07-23T01:33:00.000+08:00

Neptina

A bump surfaced on the patch of skin between your eyebrows, like a small hill that rose out from the ground. The edge of your lips quivered, and the corners of your eyes started to well up with tears. It started out like a shy little child, peeping her head out to take a breather from the world. And then the little child got brave enough, and it ventured out even further from her little hole, only to fall through and down the polished cliff. The tears rolled down her cheeks and left a trail of moisture like a signature, and it rolled over the bridge of her nose and into her other eye. The continued their journey across her face as she laid sideways, and they formed a small pool at the bottom of the cliff where it turned the pillow case into a darker shade of blue. Her hair fell over her face like a veil, and she seemed somewhat embarrassed to be so naked before my eyes even with her clothes on, with her vulnerabilities fully exposed. The tip of her index finger stroked my skin over and over, as if she was trying to bear a hole into my arm. As I leaned on one arm and brushed her hair to one side, the sour sensation crept up into my nose and pulled at the heartstrings from within. There was a moment of silence in the air then, punctuated just by the sound of her sobbing and the shuffling of sheets. There were no words left to say, than the ones that were already said. In whispers and in between the tears, her lips parted in an effort to tell me something. No voice came forth, just the rushing of air from within her lungs. I read her lips and I knew - I knew.

She told me one afternoon a few weeks ago, as we laid in bed and watched the night sky through the ceiling of my room. We made up constellations and traced our fingers from one imaginary star to another. There was a moon formed by my curved fingers, and there was a shooting star that shot across from one end of the room to another as well. We laid there for a while and felt the cooling breeze from the air-conditioning, the sound of cars were far away from where we were. Our skins touched, and our limbs tangled into a mass of indecipherable body parts. Her breath was on my cheeks, and I brushed my eyelashes on hers and told her that that is how butterflies kiss each other. She smiled, and for some reason apologized for wanting to meet me on such short notice. It was a weekday after my school, and she dropped by my place from wherever she was because she wanted to see me. It has been a couple of times already in that week, and it wasn't as if I was complaining either. I was confused, and she explained the reason why she wanted to see me so often. There wasn't much time left between then and, well, the date of departure. Instead of seeing me two or three times a week, she wanted to see me more often, even if it was for a few hours after dinner. She said, seeing me more times a week made her feel as if there was more time left for me, for us.

That was when I came apart, like a rag doll with broken thread. I brawled in her arms at the very moment when she said that, and it was the first time it really hit me right in the guts. That was the first time in a long time when I cried in front of anybody that hard and that uncontrollably. I couldn't help myself at that time, and the overwhelming emotions came over me like waves breaking on the shores. I buried my face into her shoulder while she placed a calming palm on my head, and she ran her fingers through my hair to sooth me out. Yet, as my tears fell into the hollow of her neck, my body convulsed uncontrollably to the sobbing and the tears that came forth. The thought of it, the sheer thought of leaving, it came at me like punches in the chest. For a moment there, I couldn't breathe properly, and all the efforts to be brave and optimistic betrayed me all at once. They came apart and opened the doors for things to enter. I was open to attacks from all directions, thoughts that welled up in my head like an overflowing glass of wine. I grabbed hold onto her like she was a buoy in the sea, and pulled her close to my chest to keep the heart in. I brawled like a baby that evening, the very first time the thought of leaving killed me.

The decision for me to leave for Buffalo was made long before I met Neptina. At the very beginning of my college life when the option was presented to me, I knew that I needed an experience like that to give my life a sudden jolt. It was a decision made impulsively, and an impulsive decision that eventually became a reality. I made the choice to go to the United States on a whim, and I didn't give it much thought at the beginning until I had to give it more than just a thought at all. When the papers and the documentations were sent to my e-mail, the thought of going to the United States suddenly became real and somewhat daunting. I remember taking the elevator at school one day and talking to my friends about getting cold feet about it. A friend of mine avoided the topic altogether, because she didn't want to think about the distance between her boyfriend and herself in the coming months. Another friend of mine, still attached right now, didn't seem to mind the distance very much at all. I tried to be cool about it, I remember telling them what I'd do to overcome the geographical distance. In my head, though, I was petrified.

On long bus trips home, I'd think about what I'd miss the most in Singapore. In the snowy winter country of Buffalo, I'd probably miss the warm weathers here quite a bit. Though, I must say, there period of time between April and June is probably the most unbearable period of time in Singapore due to the sheer amount of heat and humidity. Anyway, I'd probably miss the convenience of getting around the country, and most definitely the fact that my family is here in Singapore. At that point in time, Neptina hardly existed in my life at all. It was before we even met on that fateful day before the rock concert, and long bus journeys home were usually ruled by the music from my iPod or just the sound of rumbling engines. The idea that there'd be somebody to hold on to back in Singapore never came to me at that time. It was easy to tell myself that it'd turn out OK, that I'd be able to get used to the weather and the foreign delicacies. With nobody back home to worry about, I thought at that time, it was going to be an easy few months for me to get through. I remember about this time last year, I was contemplating heavily on the idea of moving back to Taiwan permanently after my college life. It was easy, and it really only involved a plane ticket and a cargo crate to put my stuff in. I made a list of what I wanted to bring back at that time, and I was so sure of moving back until August came along and presented a reason for me to stay.

Neptina and I met on the 12th of August last year before Death Cab for Cutie's concert. It began with an errand that I had to run for my mother, and then two hours of nothingness from then till the beginning of the concert. I was at Esplanade with nothing but my iPod Touch, a bottle of honey (don't ask), and a bag of tea leaves (don't ask either). I was sitting there alone with a game of Sudoku to play when a person approached me from the corner of my eyes. I remember looking at her for a split second just to make sure that she wasn't approaching to ask for directions or the time. When she sat down next to me, she kept mostly to herself and stared out into the distance like a mannequin of sorts, occasionally turning her head from side to side and watching the people go by. In between the random games of Sudoku, I'd try to see what she is doing on her side of the triangular seats, but she never seemed to be doing anything. She was hugging her bag, I remember, and her legs were pinned close together in front of her, like she was afraid that someone would come and snatch her bag away. The corner of her eyes peeped through from the top of her glasses, and I could see the wings of her eyeliner curling upwards towards her hairline. Beautiful, I thought to myself, before I retreated back into the mundane number game.

But such games only last so long, and the highest difficulty level seriously beat me to it. I gave in to my boredom and began to engage in the activity that the then-nameless girl was doing next to me - staring. That was when I decided to strike up a conversation, and I have to say that it wasn't out of curiosity or for any hidden purposes. All I wanted was to have somebody to talk to for two hours straight, and she happened to be the closest human being at that time. "Hey, what you doing here?", I said, and she turned to me and said "Death Cab". I told her that I was going to see Death Cab for Cutie as well, and her arm reached out from the other side of her body to give me a fist pump. That marked the beginning of our conversation, a conversation that has yet to seize since the very first day. I remember asking for her name and finding it unique and different from all the names that I have ever heard of. We discussed our favorite and most hated Death Cab for Cutie songs, and I remember her telling me about the origins of her name. We talked about our future and what we wanted to be, and she mentioned about how she wanted to be a wine connoisseur in Australia. I told her about my blocked nose, and how that makes it impossible for me to be in a career such as the one she was aiming for. She laughed, and I joined in soon after. That is how I met the love of my life.

I had to look away while she did something inside her cupboard. She had one of the doors opened in such a way that from her bed, I wasn't able to see what she was doing. She told me that she'd take about half an hour to finish what she was making for me, and I had to surf the internet in the mean time. It was a week or two before my birthday, but she couldn't wait to give it to me any longer. She was already on the verge of finishing it anyway, and I didn't mind receiving an early birthday present at that time. I remember talking to her and trying to guess what the gift was while watching Eddie Izzard videos on YouTube for the umpteenth time. I took peeks at her general direction, but the cupboard door completely concealed what she was doing. At one point, she rushed out from the room with an envelope and placed what she made for me inside. She came back with it soon after and handed it to me, with the flap at the back of the envelope properly sealed up. I tore open the invisible tape and fished out what looked like a handkerchief from within. I opened it up, and it was a piece of cloth sewed to look like a page out of a primary school exercise papers, completed with red margins and blue guiding lines. On the lines, she sewed words for me, one stitch at a time, the same words that made me break down last night before a phone call. It reads:

Hey there!

I love you bright eyes.

Stay with me?

Last night, I wanted to make a phone call that I didn't dare to make. I was alone in my room when a fear came to my mind. We've all heard stories, horror stories, about how love come apart after being the victims of long distance relationships. It's not that I haven't heard of success stories, but it's just that they are few and far in between. I was afraid that she'd leave me, though that is not to say that I believe her to have the capacity for such cruel deeds. It's like the concept of ghosts and monsters, and how one can be afraid of it despite knowing that it does not exist at all. I was petrified at that thought, and the time of the night seemed to have an amplification effect on all my emotions. I wanted to call Neptina, I wanted to unhinge to her about what I had in mind. It was two in the morning and she had an early class, and I know that I'd feel bad for waking her up. That, and on the other hand, I knew that if I called her, I'd cry so hard that I wouldn't be able to stop. Yet, I knew that as long as she was on the other end of the line, then it wouldn't be that bad a thing - that it'd be OK. So I dialed the familiar numbers on the number pad, and it didn't take long for her sleepy voice to come through the receiver.

I told her about what I was feeling, and my fears for leaving the country. I told her that as painful as it is to have someone to leave back home, it is also beautiful to know that I'd have somebody to come home to at the end of all things. She assured me over the phone and comforted me, and she told me that everything is going to be alright. Neither of us can promise and guarantee anything for the future, but that moment of assurance was more than enough to calm my soul. I told her about other things, and I told her that I felt bad for waking her up in the middle of the night just to whine about things that have yet to come to pass. She told me that it was alright, and that she didn't mind it at all. Like the way I'd be there when she has her nightmares, she wanted to be with me on my lowest points as well. Before we hung up, she told me to go look at the piece of cloth that she sewed for me as a birthday present, the one that still remained in the envelope that sits on a shelf in my room. I went to it after the phone call, and the carefully sewed words read itself out to me in my mind with her voice. I smiled for the first time last night, and that was when her text message came in over my phone.

Hey?

Hey. I'm alright again! Teared a bit and had mucus all over, not a pleasant sight. Thanks for being there, you are the love of my life.

Please don't leave me too. I love you so, so much. I will be here, I won't leave. I won't leave. I don't ever want to.

Let's make a deal. If I leave you, I give you the permission to render me impotent. I will never leave you. You can't drag me away either. I'm in your blood stream now, and you are in too deep. I've infested your system, as you have in mine.

I like reading that somehow, haha.

There was a moment of silence in the air then, punctuated just by the sound of her sobbing and the shuffling of sheets. There were no words left to say, than the ones that were already said. In whispers and in between the tears, her lips parted in an effort to tell me something. No voice came forth, just the rushing of air from within her lungs. I read her lips and I knew - I knew.

I love you, Will.

Yeah, Neptina. I love you too.

I love you too, monster.

with every inch of my living tissue.

Qualify & Quantity

2009-07-22T11:40:00.000+08:00

Qualify & Quantity

First off, I don't think I have ever had two words starting with "Q" in a title of a blog entry here before, and I am very proud of that for some reason. Trivial things, always the little things in life that I should be thankful for. Anyway, a recent event in my life has caused quite a stir in my train of mental thoughts, though the details shall remain ambiguous and untold. I don't suppose I am ready to tell the world about it, though I shall not lie when questioned about it at all. It concerns the idea of quality and quantity in terms of relationship and how people view it, and how some people in my life seem to think that quantity equals to quality, something that is completely untrue. This is merely the tip of the iceberg though, and the rest shall be very well hidden under the breaking waves. Like I said, I don't think I am ready to tell, and that you guys are ready to know. Or rather, I'm sure all of you nosy people would want to find out, but I don't think I want to answer that kind of questions just yet. Let's just say that there is, or was, someone who questioned the quality of my relationship based solely upon the amount of time that I have been with my significant other. It was a passing remark regarding a bigger picture, but that was also a remark that I felt to be the most offensive, out of everything else.

How do you begin to qualify a relationship that isn't yours, though, how do you start to judge whether or not it is working. There are many ways to do that, and they are mostly based on your own merits and not anybody else's. We all make judgments and come to our own conclusions about someone else's relationships, simply because we are giving in to the in-built desire for us humans to speculate about something. It is the driving force behind the gambling culture around the world where we speculate on the winning team and the winning score. It doesn't matter what kind of speculations you are making, but the point is that we all love to guess what happens next. To predict the future and feel good about ourselves when something does happen. You get to say "I told you so", because that makes you feel better about your current state of, well, whatever. Especially in relationships, we try to judge if a couple is going to last or not, because we seem to relish in the idea that we secretly get to tell them that you've been predicting its demise for a long time. Though, not all of these speculations are unfounded, because there are signs that could point to a potential toxic relationship. We've seen and heard stories, so we more or less know. It's like watching a soccer game that has five minutes left on the clock, and the opposing team is six points ahead of yours. It's not that it is impossible for your side to win, but the chances are next to nothing.

There are little signs that you can tell at times, when you know someone else's relationship isn't necessarily headed for the right direction. More often than not, that speculation is going to come true a few months or years down the road, but sometimes it is just false alarm. Every time you hear about an argument, you think about the possibilities of that event escalating into something bigger than it is supposed to be. After all, people have broken up and got divorced for a lot less, so why not a petty argument? Anyway, maybe it is the way that they sit next to each other at parties, or the way that one of them replies to the other via text message. You can tell by the littlest things, and from there you place your bets and you see what is going to happen next. Quality of a relationship seems to be something we love to speculate about, because we are all in some forms of it. Maintaining a relationship can be so difficult at times, and there are times when you just want someone else around to act as some kinda contrast to yourself. You know, to make you feel better about your relationship. You don't have to deny that, because it is the truth. Even in everything else in life, having a contrast that is of a duller shade of color makes yours stand out so much more.

We qualify relationships, we give them a mental rating, maybe something from one to ten, with one being on the verge of breaking up and ten being, well, your happy grandparents who are still living together after fifty years. Anyway, how do you begin to qualify a relationship based on how long two people have been together though. I mean, as accurate as some of the signs may be, there are times when they just don't add up no matter how you see it. I think it is totally unfair to judge a relationship based on how long two people have been together. I wonder which part of your logic chain tells you that if two people have been staying together for a long time, it makes them the "perfect pair". It doesn't even work that way, and it doesn't make them stronger than a relationship that has been going on for, say, five years. The duration of the relationship has nothing to do with the health of a relationship at all, I feel, and it doesn't mean that your relationship is better just because you've been in it longer than mine. There is always that honeymoon period at the beginning when everybody is courteous and polite. Then the nasty habits come in, and then the arguments about the trivialities. But it doesn't have to spell the end of things, you know, it doesn't have to be what it all comes down to.

I just hate it when somebody decides to say that your relationship isn't strong enough, that it isn't mature enough, based solely upon the fact that it hasn't been going on for very long. I understand the concept of a honeymoon period, I understand because I've been through a period of time when it was all rainbows and bunnies. I know what it is like for that period of time to end and the rest of those nasty things to begin. I know all of those, and I know that it is too early to judge a great many things. However, it is offensive to say that "your relationship is not mature" just because of quantity. It shouldn't happen that way at all, because I know of longer relationships being completely dysfunctional as well. Haven't you seen odd couples in living rooms of a HDB flat, just sitting there and watching television without saying anything to one another. When you pass by their home for the second time, they are doing the exact same thing as what they were doing when you passed it by the very first time? There are couples like that everywhere, the kind that stays together for "might as well" reasons. They tell you that since they have been together for an X amount of time, they might as well continue with it. When has "might as well" being the reason to be with somebody in the first place?

All I am saying is that quantity does not equal to qualify. Just because you are in a longer relationship, it doesn't mean that you are better than mine. Things solidify, things become more concrete, and relationships become stronger if done right - sure. You might have done it well enough, but weren't you also at the one year mark so long ago? We have to pick our way through this, try to find the best way to maintain it. Solidifying does not necessarily have to mean inflexibility at all in this case, because a heart was never meant to harden. I don't know, I just feel like I need to get it out of my system somehow, let it be known that it isn't about how far we have come or how much more we have to go. It is about right now, and every inch of a relationship should be about the "now", you know. The present is what I am working at, the present tense, what is happening at this very moment. I'm not exactly the type of person to say that I "live for the moment", because that statement seems somewhat passe and pretentious. In relationships though, I focus on the "now", and right now I am very comfortable with who I am, and what I have. I seriously do not need any value judgments by somebody who hasn't really even asked about the situation in the very first place, you know.

Like, it's not like you've been there to ask about it, you hardly even know about what goes on. It'd be more accurate for people who know to make that kind of judgments, because they've seen where it was at and where it is now. You, on the other hand, you were never really around to ask me about it, and you hardly even know her name. It isn't in your position to make assumptions about my relationships when you haven't been there before. Get off your high horse, and realize for once that having been in a long relationship does not necessarily mean that you are happily ever after either. You cannot say that mine isn't as awesome as yours, because that is not how it works, that's not what we know yet. We don't know, she and I, and neither do you. It is completely unfair, and it makes me angry that someone would try to say something like that to me. It is a lousy judgment, and I suppose it will just give me that much more pleasure when I come back, in return, to tell you that "I told you so" by beating the odds. It's not like my relationship right now is any more different from the one that you were in back then, because we all have to go through our first years. How many happily married couples do you know that are happy with each other on a daily basis anyway. I don't know of many, and neither do you. So just because your formula has worked out so far, it doesn't mean that it does for everybody else. We interact in different ways, and our relationships are radically different. So please, don't try to qualify my relationship by basing your judgments on the time it has elapsed. All I know, at this point, is that I am happy, and I am very thankful to have this person in this part of my life. No guarantees about forever, but at least right now, I have a great companion to walk with.