The Ant Menace
There are many ants making their way to my kitchen. I've got no exposed food there and nothing sweet there even.
Can you imagine this? Even the cup I used for plain water can be filled with ants! I'd be darned - have I begun turning my water into wine?
Well, I've bought the insect chalk, the ant baits, the aerosol, and also the insect coils. I need to restore some sanity by doing in these crawlers.
Even keeping the place clean isn't enough. Hopefully the tough measures are sufficient to keep the unwanted occupants out!
Monday, February 27, 2006
Post Dinner Tim Sum at SC
Post Dinner Tim Sum at SC
Had a pretty light dinner of kuey chap at Jln Berseh Food Centre.
Was starving as I had not had proper meals since I woke up. The flu killed all my appetite and the high-strung feeling of facing my boss didn't help in stirring my desire to eat.
Anyway, friend and I decided to eat at the tim sum shop opposite the McDonald's beside the food centre after dinner.
So we went.
Ordered some food and here's the grading:
Large Bao (Meat bun) $1.40 each
Instead of white high gluten flour, they used a multipurpose flour, giving the bao skin a flat, sticky texture that sticks to the hard palatte and teeth. The fillings are bland and taken as a whole, the entire experience is worse than eating an ordinary bao bought off a coffee shop at less cost than this. Grade: D
Siew Mai (Meat dumplings in open wanton skin)
Bland minced meat wrapped in wanton skin. Anyone can make this easily. While the meat was thankfully free of the porky smell, the meat seasonings failed to come through as well. The result is a forgettable dish. Grade: C
Har Gao (Prawn dumplings in rice flour skin)
The rice flour skin was well done and it covered the fillings well. The shape kept well after steaming. Unfortunately, the prawns used were too small and thus were not sweet and flavoursome enough on their own. The shop added corn to sweeten the filling. Grade: C
Lor Mai Kai (Steamed glutinous rice with chicken)
The glutinous rice maintained its integrity and stayed whole-grained and singly. There is a light touch of flavour in the rice, which has probably seeped down from the chicken on top of it. The chicken was fresh and tasted clean. Grade: B
Dou Juan (Beancurd skin roll with crabstick, egg and ham strip)
Steamed item. No need imagination. Grade: F
The chilli failed to give the already bland stuff any more taste or kick.
Verdict: I'd never be caught there again.
And by the way, the nasi lemak stall beside this place looks promising. Maybe the next time, I'll give them a try.
Had a pretty light dinner of kuey chap at Jln Berseh Food Centre.
Was starving as I had not had proper meals since I woke up. The flu killed all my appetite and the high-strung feeling of facing my boss didn't help in stirring my desire to eat.
Anyway, friend and I decided to eat at the tim sum shop opposite the McDonald's beside the food centre after dinner.
So we went.
Ordered some food and here's the grading:
Large Bao (Meat bun) $1.40 each
Instead of white high gluten flour, they used a multipurpose flour, giving the bao skin a flat, sticky texture that sticks to the hard palatte and teeth. The fillings are bland and taken as a whole, the entire experience is worse than eating an ordinary bao bought off a coffee shop at less cost than this. Grade: D
Siew Mai (Meat dumplings in open wanton skin)
Bland minced meat wrapped in wanton skin. Anyone can make this easily. While the meat was thankfully free of the porky smell, the meat seasonings failed to come through as well. The result is a forgettable dish. Grade: C
Har Gao (Prawn dumplings in rice flour skin)
The rice flour skin was well done and it covered the fillings well. The shape kept well after steaming. Unfortunately, the prawns used were too small and thus were not sweet and flavoursome enough on their own. The shop added corn to sweeten the filling. Grade: C
Lor Mai Kai (Steamed glutinous rice with chicken)
The glutinous rice maintained its integrity and stayed whole-grained and singly. There is a light touch of flavour in the rice, which has probably seeped down from the chicken on top of it. The chicken was fresh and tasted clean. Grade: B
Dou Juan (Beancurd skin roll with crabstick, egg and ham strip)
Steamed item. No need imagination. Grade: F
The chilli failed to give the already bland stuff any more taste or kick.
Verdict: I'd never be caught there again.
And by the way, the nasi lemak stall beside this place looks promising. Maybe the next time, I'll give them a try.
Stabs In My Back
Stabs In My Back
Office politics? Far from it. My back is hurting so badly now.
I feel like being constantly stabbed on my shoulders, between my shoulder blades, my spine, my neck... The upper back feels awful. The muscles are all cramped up and the intermittent sharp stabbing pain is making me reluctant to move. Even breathing can bring about an unexpected pain episode.
Age is really catching up. Falling into pieces already.
Is this the end of Humpty Dumpty?
Maybe not. We got 3G SAF now.
Office politics? Far from it. My back is hurting so badly now.
I feel like being constantly stabbed on my shoulders, between my shoulder blades, my spine, my neck... The upper back feels awful. The muscles are all cramped up and the intermittent sharp stabbing pain is making me reluctant to move. Even breathing can bring about an unexpected pain episode.
Age is really catching up. Falling into pieces already.
Is this the end of Humpty Dumpty?
Maybe not. We got 3G SAF now.
If you ain't dead yet...
If you ain't dead yet...
Supposed to be resting at home on MC today.
Alas, my phone rang many times.
Boss wanted to see me.
Torn between getting restless rest at home and something done at work, I decided to get back to work.
Saw Boss and worked on resolving some issues.
Felt mentally better after that, but still dead tired.
I'm supposd to be on MC tomorrow too but I've got a seminar tomorrow morning and I think I'm better off getting to work.
I guess since I ain't dead yet, I'd better move my ass before I am really dead.
Supposed to be resting at home on MC today.
Alas, my phone rang many times.
Boss wanted to see me.
Torn between getting restless rest at home and something done at work, I decided to get back to work.
Saw Boss and worked on resolving some issues.
Felt mentally better after that, but still dead tired.
I'm supposd to be on MC tomorrow too but I've got a seminar tomorrow morning and I think I'm better off getting to work.
I guess since I ain't dead yet, I'd better move my ass before I am really dead.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Allergies
Allergies
Fell sick again. Upper respiratory tract infection. Went to see the doc today.
He told me that what I'm having is a typical allergic reaction arising out of my move to a new place. In fact, a few days ago, he saw a patient whose asthma had been dormant for a long period of time acted up after moving to a new place. It is something very common and I should not be too surprised.
The initial defences are lowered now that I've got into my routine. So it will be get well, fall sick, get well, fall sick.... until I'm used to the wonderful air of Mt Faber.
Fell sick again. Upper respiratory tract infection. Went to see the doc today.
He told me that what I'm having is a typical allergic reaction arising out of my move to a new place. In fact, a few days ago, he saw a patient whose asthma had been dormant for a long period of time acted up after moving to a new place. It is something very common and I should not be too surprised.
The initial defences are lowered now that I've got into my routine. So it will be get well, fall sick, get well, fall sick.... until I'm used to the wonderful air of Mt Faber.
Boobs
Boobs
On the bus just now sitting behind two young school going girls.
They were talking between themselves and giggling.
Then one asked their mum, "Ma, *unintelligible mumblings" B-R-E-S-S?"
Mum, "Yah, B-R-E-S-S."
Girl proudly, "There, B-R-E-S-S."
I nearly died!
On the bus just now sitting behind two young school going girls.
They were talking between themselves and giggling.
Then one asked their mum, "Ma, *unintelligible mumblings" B-R-E-S-S?"
Mum, "Yah, B-R-E-S-S."
Girl proudly, "There, B-R-E-S-S."
I nearly died!
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Integration
Integration
Integration seems to be a toughie for many mathematics students.
To me, integration is a wonderful topic to test many associated concepts like limits, differentiation, trigonometry, algebra, logarithms, polynomials, simple addition and subtractions, factors and multiples, and so on.
I'd like to go on about integration but it probably won't go down very well with some readers.
Let's just say that integration is an exercise in mathematical maturity.
Integration seems to be a toughie for many mathematics students.
To me, integration is a wonderful topic to test many associated concepts like limits, differentiation, trigonometry, algebra, logarithms, polynomials, simple addition and subtractions, factors and multiples, and so on.
I'd like to go on about integration but it probably won't go down very well with some readers.
Let's just say that integration is an exercise in mathematical maturity.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Worth It
Worth It
Sometimes, it just feels not worth it anymore.
I'm so tired I could just fall asleep for two days in a row.
I'm so frustrated I could just chop off the next head I see.
My head throbs so badly I wish I could just shut my eyes and drift off somewhere.
I just feel so enervated that all I want to do is to curl up in some corner and fade into the background.
Sometimes...
Sometimes, it just feels not worth it anymore.
I'm so tired I could just fall asleep for two days in a row.
I'm so frustrated I could just chop off the next head I see.
My head throbs so badly I wish I could just shut my eyes and drift off somewhere.
I just feel so enervated that all I want to do is to curl up in some corner and fade into the background.
Sometimes...
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Desisting the Cold
Desisting the Cold
There is a Chinese verse which says that a person at high altitude cannot desist the cold.
The meaning is also extended to mean that people who move up their career ladders find fewer and fewer friends around them.
I saw that for myself through a pretty high ranking person today.
There is a Chinese verse which says that a person at high altitude cannot desist the cold.
The meaning is also extended to mean that people who move up their career ladders find fewer and fewer friends around them.
I saw that for myself through a pretty high ranking person today.
21 Feb Dinner
21 Feb Dinner
Someone accused me to hoarding the secret to an excellent steamboat place for almost 2 years.
The hell I know this place is a SECRET. I must have mentioned the place a million times in numerous conversations, flashbacks, and reminiscing.
Anyway, if not for the "wonderful" and "gorgeous" experiences at Turf City and Marina South, this place may have been labelled excessively expensive, lacking in live animals, sterile, and who knows what not!
But it was the nicest dinner we had together for a long time.
PS. No, it's not Coca.
Someone accused me to hoarding the secret to an excellent steamboat place for almost 2 years.
The hell I know this place is a SECRET. I must have mentioned the place a million times in numerous conversations, flashbacks, and reminiscing.
Anyway, if not for the "wonderful" and "gorgeous" experiences at Turf City and Marina South, this place may have been labelled excessively expensive, lacking in live animals, sterile, and who knows what not!
But it was the nicest dinner we had together for a long time.
PS. No, it's not Coca.
What goes around...
What goes around...
Taken to task for saying things about something and someone today.
Well, if you've said it, admit it. Which I did, in a frank fashion.
Anyhow, that's me and well, it's a matter of time.
The price of freedom of speech.
.. comes around
Taken to task for saying things about something and someone today.
Well, if you've said it, admit it. Which I did, in a frank fashion.
Anyhow, that's me and well, it's a matter of time.
The price of freedom of speech.
.. comes around
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Evolution
Evolution
In the name of human evolution, the flu pandemic is a welcome event.
From what I gather from the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, an event like this will wipe out the weakest DNA from the overall gene pool and leave the best behind.
The remaining humans will then procreate to repopulate the gene pool.
It's an interesting theory and it is scary as well.
But it is something that we need to think about for as long as there are humans.
Our efforts in genetic modifications of crops and animals have brought about much disaster to ourselves. Very soon, the banana will be extinct as there simply aren't enough genes to procreate the next generation of banana trees.
Savour every banana like it's your last. Maybe in another 50 years, you can sit back and tell your grandchildren, "You know, when gonggong was younger, we had banana splits from Swensen..." And when you talk about bananas, you actually are not referring to the third leg.
We tried to be God for many things. Perhaps it's now time to reap our bitter fruits.
In the name of human evolution, the flu pandemic is a welcome event.
From what I gather from the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, an event like this will wipe out the weakest DNA from the overall gene pool and leave the best behind.
The remaining humans will then procreate to repopulate the gene pool.
It's an interesting theory and it is scary as well.
But it is something that we need to think about for as long as there are humans.
Our efforts in genetic modifications of crops and animals have brought about much disaster to ourselves. Very soon, the banana will be extinct as there simply aren't enough genes to procreate the next generation of banana trees.
Savour every banana like it's your last. Maybe in another 50 years, you can sit back and tell your grandchildren, "You know, when gonggong was younger, we had banana splits from Swensen..." And when you talk about bananas, you actually are not referring to the third leg.
We tried to be God for many things. Perhaps it's now time to reap our bitter fruits.
Medium for Mutation
Medium for Mutation
Apparently, some animals are believed to provide the grounds for the avian flu virus to latch on and mutate into something more (or less, if fortunate) deadly.
Domesticated animals seem to be the main provider of these grounds.
Looks like the bird flu is more than just the birds.
Now we await the super-spreader, Patient 0.
Looks like the world is due for another round of cleansing!
Apparently, some animals are believed to provide the grounds for the avian flu virus to latch on and mutate into something more (or less, if fortunate) deadly.
Domesticated animals seem to be the main provider of these grounds.
Looks like the bird flu is more than just the birds.
Now we await the super-spreader, Patient 0.
Looks like the world is due for another round of cleansing!
Free Range Eggs
Free Range Eggs
Sent an SMS to a couple of friends living in Sri Lanka to ask them to do in their 4 chickens. This is critical, since bird flu has already reached India.
It's a matter of time that some infected birds fly in to Sri Lanka and begin a new round of infections.
Well, they've decided that they don't want to see the "girls" anywhere on their dining table. Just their eggs will do.
"We appreciate ... concerns but they cannot be done in, perhaps we really have to die young."
Looks like the Chinese swear "ji1 dan4 de" (Eggs!) mean something after all.
Sent an SMS to a couple of friends living in Sri Lanka to ask them to do in their 4 chickens. This is critical, since bird flu has already reached India.
It's a matter of time that some infected birds fly in to Sri Lanka and begin a new round of infections.
Well, they've decided that they don't want to see the "girls" anywhere on their dining table. Just their eggs will do.
"We appreciate ... concerns but they cannot be done in, perhaps we really have to die young."
Looks like the Chinese swear "ji1 dan4 de" (Eggs!) mean something after all.
Infuriating Day
Infuriating Day
I'm super-duper infuriated today because I witnessed yet another case where compassion is "regulated".
I won't say any more than I feel sorry for the one on the losing end. I've done my best to check and get the info for her.
However, there's not much more I can do.
I'm super-duper infuriated today because I witnessed yet another case where compassion is "regulated".
I won't say any more than I feel sorry for the one on the losing end. I've done my best to check and get the info for her.
However, there's not much more I can do.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Marriage as the result of...
Marriage as the result of...
Traditionally, we would think that marriage would be the result of true love between two people.
Now, I have a few different takes on the same issue.
Marriage could be the result of
... loving another's money rather than just love. This is very common these days as marrying a cash cow (or bull) makes for good living.
... loving another's body rather than just love. This is not uncommon too as this makes for good nights.
... free transport because the spouse owns a car. Forget it. Taxis are cheaper and you don't have to ingratiate yourself to the driver for a ride.
... loving "it". Please google "*** toys".
... loving the ownership of a HDB flat. This alleviates the problem of homelessness for two people until they are old enough to own their own flats; and possibly make some profits in the process.
... a personal debt repayable through giving of oneself to the other. Don't think that this is so so out-dated and laugh. People have been known to do less than wise things and who knows if this is still happening?
... a one-night-stand gone awry.Wouldn't abortion be easier?
... being accidentally blinded by Cupid, until full eyesight is restored.
... genuinely wanting kids. For god's sake, go adopt as a single parent.
... having a free cow/bull for the nights. Hey, think again!
... getting relatives off your back asking when you are finally getting married. Tsk tsk tsk. There are better ways, for instance, going to Bangkok every time festivities arise.
... having deeply, madly fallen in love. Please check yourself into the nearest mental institution to check degree of madness.
... wanting to experience married life. For god's sake, go to the family courts and listen to the plaintiffs and defendents of divorce cases.
... having fallen in true love. Best wishes and till death do you part. But don't let me see any one of you attempt to prematurely end the other's life!
Traditionally, we would think that marriage would be the result of true love between two people.
Now, I have a few different takes on the same issue.
Marriage could be the result of
... loving another's money rather than just love. This is very common these days as marrying a cash cow (or bull) makes for good living.
... loving another's body rather than just love. This is not uncommon too as this makes for good nights.
... free transport because the spouse owns a car. Forget it. Taxis are cheaper and you don't have to ingratiate yourself to the driver for a ride.
... loving "it". Please google "*** toys".
... loving the ownership of a HDB flat. This alleviates the problem of homelessness for two people until they are old enough to own their own flats; and possibly make some profits in the process.
... a personal debt repayable through giving of oneself to the other. Don't think that this is so so out-dated and laugh. People have been known to do less than wise things and who knows if this is still happening?
... a one-night-stand gone awry.Wouldn't abortion be easier?
... being accidentally blinded by Cupid, until full eyesight is restored.
... genuinely wanting kids. For god's sake, go adopt as a single parent.
... having a free cow/bull for the nights. Hey, think again!
... getting relatives off your back asking when you are finally getting married. Tsk tsk tsk. There are better ways, for instance, going to Bangkok every time festivities arise.
... having deeply, madly fallen in love. Please check yourself into the nearest mental institution to check degree of madness.
... wanting to experience married life. For god's sake, go to the family courts and listen to the plaintiffs and defendents of divorce cases.
... having fallen in true love. Best wishes and till death do you part. But don't let me see any one of you attempt to prematurely end the other's life!
Nouveau Pauvre
Nouveau Pauvre
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition (2002) defines nouveau riche as "A pejorative term for one who has recently become rich and who spends money conspicuously. From French, meaning 'new rich.'"
Given that people can go broke overnight or lose their jobs, shouldn't we also coin a term nouveau pauvre to describe one who has recently become poor and who has no money to spend CONSPICUOUSLY?
Somehow, I think among the population, when one is unable to find the money to spend conspicuously, they deem themselves poor.
I resent that thought - no money does not mean poor. It could mean poor financial management, laziness, or even poor financial acumen. It could be the result of a prerogatory decision to remain at the doors of poverty, an attempt at eliciting the pity of the "rich".
It would be interesting to differentiate the truly impoverished and the nouveau pauvre. Only then do we know if we are dealing with a true crisis or are we dealing with cases fake poverty.
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition (2002) defines nouveau riche as "A pejorative term for one who has recently become rich and who spends money conspicuously. From French, meaning 'new rich.'"
Given that people can go broke overnight or lose their jobs, shouldn't we also coin a term nouveau pauvre to describe one who has recently become poor and who has no money to spend CONSPICUOUSLY?
Somehow, I think among the population, when one is unable to find the money to spend conspicuously, they deem themselves poor.
I resent that thought - no money does not mean poor. It could mean poor financial management, laziness, or even poor financial acumen. It could be the result of a prerogatory decision to remain at the doors of poverty, an attempt at eliciting the pity of the "rich".
It would be interesting to differentiate the truly impoverished and the nouveau pauvre. Only then do we know if we are dealing with a true crisis or are we dealing with cases fake poverty.
Real Poverty
Real Poverty
Part of me would really like to conduct a study if real poverty in Singapore really exists!
Some assumptions to start my readers thinking:
1. If a person were poor, s/he would not be able to keep up the smoking habit.
2. If a person were poor, s/he would not be able to keep up the gambling habit (I'll admit the occasional 4D, Toto, and Singapore Sweep, but anything more than betting once a fortnight on either of these games is habitual. Betting on horses and soccer games is immediately a gambling habit, given the large betting amounts involved).
3. If a person were poor, s/he would not have luxury items like a flatscreen or better TV, a DVD player, an MP3 player, audio speakers.
4. If a person were poor, s/he would not be able to afford branded clothing, shoes, and accessories.
5. If a person were poor, s/he would not mind menial jobs as it puts food on the table.
I can think of others, but let's start with these and see how many people really fall into the true poverty gap! I'd reckon not many.
Part of me would really like to conduct a study if real poverty in Singapore really exists!
Some assumptions to start my readers thinking:
1. If a person were poor, s/he would not be able to keep up the smoking habit.
2. If a person were poor, s/he would not be able to keep up the gambling habit (I'll admit the occasional 4D, Toto, and Singapore Sweep, but anything more than betting once a fortnight on either of these games is habitual. Betting on horses and soccer games is immediately a gambling habit, given the large betting amounts involved).
3. If a person were poor, s/he would not have luxury items like a flatscreen or better TV, a DVD player, an MP3 player, audio speakers.
4. If a person were poor, s/he would not be able to afford branded clothing, shoes, and accessories.
5. If a person were poor, s/he would not mind menial jobs as it puts food on the table.
I can think of others, but let's start with these and see how many people really fall into the true poverty gap! I'd reckon not many.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Home Box Office
Home Box Office
Watched two movies on HBO today.
Ok, less than two. I watched the ending of the third instalment of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
I think the critics are right.
It should be called Brokeback Rings.
Look at the way Frodo and Sam look at each other. The intensity of their piercing gazes are way above and beyond what Ennis and Jack had mustered in Brokeback Mountain.
Every touch, every caress, every gaze, every word, every look, every action, every thought, every ... Well, it so so so suggests that there was MORE than mere platonic relationships that we are looking at.
Or have we lost it?
If the era of the kings came by and nothing has changed, then have we loved less now?
Why is love no longer as deep, as lasting, as faithful, as forgiving, as giving, as sacrificing, as accommodating, as assimilating, as borderless, as accessible as it was before?
Have we forgotten how to love? If two mere mortals could share a friendship love bond so deep that their bloods seem to flow in each other's body, then why is true love so fragile?
The elusivity of it all is puzzling.
Then the next show Wimbeldon came on.
Again, this time around, Peter Colt falls in love with Lizzy Bradbury and while Peter falls headlong in love, Lizzy never thought he was the real deal.
It represents a role reversal of sorts. Men go for sex and not love - in fact, men are able to differentiate and sex and love. Men can have sex again and again and again but not feel love. Apparently, a woman cannot have sex unless she feels something in her. Interesting swap of stereotypes.
So there is Lizzy, seducing Peter again and again, and suddenly decides that pursing Wimbeldon was more important. But Peter never forgot Lizzy and tried again and again to convince her that his love for her was true.
He event went on national TV to profess his love for her. And the rest, they say, is history and they lived happily ever after.
But is this a dose of reality or another fantasy world that we are led into?
So why is real love so difficult to find? Let's hope one day, we will know the answers.
Watched two movies on HBO today.
Ok, less than two. I watched the ending of the third instalment of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
I think the critics are right.
It should be called Brokeback Rings.
Look at the way Frodo and Sam look at each other. The intensity of their piercing gazes are way above and beyond what Ennis and Jack had mustered in Brokeback Mountain.
Every touch, every caress, every gaze, every word, every look, every action, every thought, every ... Well, it so so so suggests that there was MORE than mere platonic relationships that we are looking at.
Or have we lost it?
If the era of the kings came by and nothing has changed, then have we loved less now?
Why is love no longer as deep, as lasting, as faithful, as forgiving, as giving, as sacrificing, as accommodating, as assimilating, as borderless, as accessible as it was before?
Have we forgotten how to love? If two mere mortals could share a friendship love bond so deep that their bloods seem to flow in each other's body, then why is true love so fragile?
The elusivity of it all is puzzling.
Then the next show Wimbeldon came on.
Again, this time around, Peter Colt falls in love with Lizzy Bradbury and while Peter falls headlong in love, Lizzy never thought he was the real deal.
It represents a role reversal of sorts. Men go for sex and not love - in fact, men are able to differentiate and sex and love. Men can have sex again and again and again but not feel love. Apparently, a woman cannot have sex unless she feels something in her. Interesting swap of stereotypes.
So there is Lizzy, seducing Peter again and again, and suddenly decides that pursing Wimbeldon was more important. But Peter never forgot Lizzy and tried again and again to convince her that his love for her was true.
He event went on national TV to profess his love for her. And the rest, they say, is history and they lived happily ever after.
But is this a dose of reality or another fantasy world that we are led into?
So why is real love so difficult to find? Let's hope one day, we will know the answers.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Budget 2006
Budget 2006
Am I not gainfully employed? Have I not worked hard? Is it my fault that I am paid well because I studied hard and did well?
Why am I still deprived of my roof over my head? Have I not given enough for my country?
Did I not pay taxes for the development of this place I call home?
What is there for singles like me?
Am I not gainfully employed? Have I not worked hard? Is it my fault that I am paid well because I studied hard and did well?
Why am I still deprived of my roof over my head? Have I not given enough for my country?
Did I not pay taxes for the development of this place I call home?
What is there for singles like me?
Dinner at Chin Huat Seafood BBQ
Dinner at Chin Huat Seafood BBQ
1. You are asked to pay for your meal before you even start.
2. Each diner is given two plates, one bowl, a pair of chopsticks, and a spoon. You use these to get soup, cooked food, raw food, live seafood, and dessert.
3. The seafood are mainly unwashed. Wash your own food before eating.
4. The kitchen help chops the back of the live crab to cripple it and then you take over to chop it into as many pieces as you want and remove all the mud and dirt under the tap.
5. The soup NEVER boiled.
6. Half the hotplate was not hot.
7. The gas-fire does not even go two rings. Only the inner ring was lit.
8. Raw food was either under- or over-seasoned.
9. Cooked food was a rip-off.
10. Dessert was a washout too.
11. Singaporeans still grabbed food there as though there is no tomorrow.
12. No, thank you. No next time for me.
1. You are asked to pay for your meal before you even start.
2. Each diner is given two plates, one bowl, a pair of chopsticks, and a spoon. You use these to get soup, cooked food, raw food, live seafood, and dessert.
3. The seafood are mainly unwashed. Wash your own food before eating.
4. The kitchen help chops the back of the live crab to cripple it and then you take over to chop it into as many pieces as you want and remove all the mud and dirt under the tap.
5. The soup NEVER boiled.
6. Half the hotplate was not hot.
7. The gas-fire does not even go two rings. Only the inner ring was lit.
8. Raw food was either under- or over-seasoned.
9. Cooked food was a rip-off.
10. Dessert was a washout too.
11. Singaporeans still grabbed food there as though there is no tomorrow.
12. No, thank you. No next time for me.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Dinner - A Percussion Study
Dinner - A Percussion Study
Ate at the Chinese restaurant at the Harbourfront today.
The restaurant is infested with houseflies and another type of flies which simply loves to rest on the food that lie on the table.
My dinner partner and I had to change a table, and still the problem did not end.
All through dinner, we were busy chasing flies, slamming our palms against the table to kill those flies that have landed there, slapping them in mid air, gripping them as they fly past.
It was a noisy dinner. Almost like a percussion item entitled dinner.
In the end, I killed one fly by slamming it against the table, and drowned another in the steamed fish gravy.
The rest of the flies got away scotfree.
The restaurant manager said they came from the Circle Line worksites. I told him that if that is the case, his restaurant is NOT READY for business today as his hygiene standards are not there. He should lodge a formal complaint to NEA and LTA for the pestilence, just as I would with ENV after the dinner and MOH if I get diarrhoea.
Anyway, he claimed to be getting in the pestbusters.
Let's hope the vector control fellows don't do him in as well.
Ate at the Chinese restaurant at the Harbourfront today.
The restaurant is infested with houseflies and another type of flies which simply loves to rest on the food that lie on the table.
My dinner partner and I had to change a table, and still the problem did not end.
All through dinner, we were busy chasing flies, slamming our palms against the table to kill those flies that have landed there, slapping them in mid air, gripping them as they fly past.
It was a noisy dinner. Almost like a percussion item entitled dinner.
In the end, I killed one fly by slamming it against the table, and drowned another in the steamed fish gravy.
The rest of the flies got away scotfree.
The restaurant manager said they came from the Circle Line worksites. I told him that if that is the case, his restaurant is NOT READY for business today as his hygiene standards are not there. He should lodge a formal complaint to NEA and LTA for the pestilence, just as I would with ENV after the dinner and MOH if I get diarrhoea.
Anyway, he claimed to be getting in the pestbusters.
Let's hope the vector control fellows don't do him in as well.
Death Rights, Death Rites
Death Rights, Death Rites
1. A close friend whom I meet regularly told me that the results of her brain scans are out: the unusual patches found in her brain are small blood clots which were lodged there after micro strokes. She is fine but the clots may have affected her ability to recall images such as faces or surroundings.
2. Apparently, Taiwanese hospitals have recently contracted out undertaker services for their dead patients. The winning undertaker gets the first rights to handle post-death cases. I wonder what has happened to the family of the deceased's rights to decide who they want for the funeral.
3. Quite some years back, also in Taiwan, a lot of people bidded for places in a colobarium meant for placing the ashes of the dead. These people actually hoped that their investments would reap them profits when families who wanted to place the urns containing the ashes of their dead had to approach these owners to buy over the "plots". Isn't it a laugh if a person die and end up with so many plots unsold? Where will his or her ashes be placed?
4. When Jack (in Brokeback Mountain) died, his dying wish was to have his ashes scattered in Brokeback Mountain. His wife thought it was where he grew up and as she didn't know where it was, left his ashes as it were. Jack's family insisted that the ashes be buried in the family plot - what so special about him that he has to be scattered there (Brokeback Mountain). I wonder if Ennis did anything in the end. If I were Jack, I'd die a sad man. If I were Ennis, I would never have forgiven myself. If I were Jack's wife, I'd be just too glad to get rid of them ashes. If I were Jack's family, I'd at least respected his wishes. But I weren't any of them...
5. Someone recently asked why Chinese funeral wakes are held over so many nights. I remember they last anything from a day to seven days here. Elsewhere, rich Chinese can afford to have them last for a month even! Why? No one knows. Perhaps it was done so that family and relatives who are afar could have enough time to make it back to pay the last respects. Now, the duration is mainly to show off how much money they had to splurge on the final journey.
6. Correct me if I'm wrong. Hindus try to get their dead cremated within 24 hours of death. That is why most crematoria in Singapore keep at least one chamber for such occurrences to help them complete their rites.
7. Cremation versus burial. The Chinese who have elders who are afraid of fire would try to have their elders' bodies buried. What if I'm afraid of fire, and at the same time I hate being dirtied by mud?
8. Finally, is it better to die suddenly (i.e. without notice) or die slowly?
1. A close friend whom I meet regularly told me that the results of her brain scans are out: the unusual patches found in her brain are small blood clots which were lodged there after micro strokes. She is fine but the clots may have affected her ability to recall images such as faces or surroundings.
2. Apparently, Taiwanese hospitals have recently contracted out undertaker services for their dead patients. The winning undertaker gets the first rights to handle post-death cases. I wonder what has happened to the family of the deceased's rights to decide who they want for the funeral.
3. Quite some years back, also in Taiwan, a lot of people bidded for places in a colobarium meant for placing the ashes of the dead. These people actually hoped that their investments would reap them profits when families who wanted to place the urns containing the ashes of their dead had to approach these owners to buy over the "plots". Isn't it a laugh if a person die and end up with so many plots unsold? Where will his or her ashes be placed?
4. When Jack (in Brokeback Mountain) died, his dying wish was to have his ashes scattered in Brokeback Mountain. His wife thought it was where he grew up and as she didn't know where it was, left his ashes as it were. Jack's family insisted that the ashes be buried in the family plot - what so special about him that he has to be scattered there (Brokeback Mountain). I wonder if Ennis did anything in the end. If I were Jack, I'd die a sad man. If I were Ennis, I would never have forgiven myself. If I were Jack's wife, I'd be just too glad to get rid of them ashes. If I were Jack's family, I'd at least respected his wishes. But I weren't any of them...
5. Someone recently asked why Chinese funeral wakes are held over so many nights. I remember they last anything from a day to seven days here. Elsewhere, rich Chinese can afford to have them last for a month even! Why? No one knows. Perhaps it was done so that family and relatives who are afar could have enough time to make it back to pay the last respects. Now, the duration is mainly to show off how much money they had to splurge on the final journey.
6. Correct me if I'm wrong. Hindus try to get their dead cremated within 24 hours of death. That is why most crematoria in Singapore keep at least one chamber for such occurrences to help them complete their rites.
7. Cremation versus burial. The Chinese who have elders who are afraid of fire would try to have their elders' bodies buried. What if I'm afraid of fire, and at the same time I hate being dirtied by mud?
8. Finally, is it better to die suddenly (i.e. without notice) or die slowly?
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Something Nice Caught My Eye
Something Nice Caught My Eye
Took the lyrics from Justin's blog. I liked it the minute I heard the song and read the lyrics.
I am a sucker for good lyrics and this is pretty good. I look for layered meaning and space to allow the imagination to go wild.
Wish I knew how to attach music to my blog so I could play it for the readers. But given what a techno-idiot I am, I'll just live with the words.
James Blunt - Goodbye My Lover.
Did I disappoint you or let you down?
Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown?
'Cause I saw the end before we'd begun,
Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won.
So I took what's mine by eternal right.
Took your soul out into the night.
It may be over but it won't stop there,
I am here for you if you'd only care.
You touched my heart you touched my soul.
You changed my life and all my goals.
And love is blind and that I knew when,
My heart was blinded by you.
I've kissed your lips and held your head.
Shared your dreams and shared your bed.
I know you well, I know your smell.
I've been addicted to you.
Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.
I am a dreamer but when I wake,
You can't break my spirit - it's my dreams you take.
And as you move on, remember me,
Remember us and all we used to be
I've seen you cry, I've seen you smile.
I've watched you sleeping for a while.
I'd be the father of your child.
I'd spend a lifetime with you.
I know your fears and you know mine.
We've had our doubts but now we're fine,
And I love you, I swear that's true.
I cannot live without you.
Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.
And I still hold your hand in mine.
In mine when I'm asleep.
And I will bear my soul in time,
When I'm kneeling at your feet.
Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.
I'm so hollow, baby, I'm so hollow.
I'm so, I'm so, I'm so hollow.
Took the lyrics from Justin's blog. I liked it the minute I heard the song and read the lyrics.
I am a sucker for good lyrics and this is pretty good. I look for layered meaning and space to allow the imagination to go wild.
Wish I knew how to attach music to my blog so I could play it for the readers. But given what a techno-idiot I am, I'll just live with the words.
James Blunt - Goodbye My Lover.
Did I disappoint you or let you down?
Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown?
'Cause I saw the end before we'd begun,
Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won.
So I took what's mine by eternal right.
Took your soul out into the night.
It may be over but it won't stop there,
I am here for you if you'd only care.
You touched my heart you touched my soul.
You changed my life and all my goals.
And love is blind and that I knew when,
My heart was blinded by you.
I've kissed your lips and held your head.
Shared your dreams and shared your bed.
I know you well, I know your smell.
I've been addicted to you.
Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.
I am a dreamer but when I wake,
You can't break my spirit - it's my dreams you take.
And as you move on, remember me,
Remember us and all we used to be
I've seen you cry, I've seen you smile.
I've watched you sleeping for a while.
I'd be the father of your child.
I'd spend a lifetime with you.
I know your fears and you know mine.
We've had our doubts but now we're fine,
And I love you, I swear that's true.
I cannot live without you.
Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.
And I still hold your hand in mine.
In mine when I'm asleep.
And I will bear my soul in time,
When I'm kneeling at your feet.
Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.
I'm so hollow, baby, I'm so hollow.
I'm so, I'm so, I'm so hollow.
My Identity
My Identity
This is one biggie these days. In fact, it has been a biggie and a bugbear for the longest time.
Am I a Chinese Singaporean or a Singaporean Chinese?
Am I Singaporean first, or am I my race first?
Honestly, I won't tell you the true answer in my heart, though in an earlier post, I have mentioned that I see myself as a citizen of the world first.
Anyhow, today, the same issue was raised at the seminar.
In all honesty, if it has taken America 260 years and she is still seeking her identity, then where do you think Singapore stand after 40 years of nation building?
It is a long journey of self-discovery and the process itself is the destination.
I don't believe I would see the end of this identity crisis situation by the end of my life.
This is one biggie these days. In fact, it has been a biggie and a bugbear for the longest time.
Am I a Chinese Singaporean or a Singaporean Chinese?
Am I Singaporean first, or am I my race first?
Honestly, I won't tell you the true answer in my heart, though in an earlier post, I have mentioned that I see myself as a citizen of the world first.
Anyhow, today, the same issue was raised at the seminar.
In all honesty, if it has taken America 260 years and she is still seeking her identity, then where do you think Singapore stand after 40 years of nation building?
It is a long journey of self-discovery and the process itself is the destination.
I don't believe I would see the end of this identity crisis situation by the end of my life.
The Demise of Common Sense
The Demise of Common Sense
At a seminar where I delivered a lecture, a participant asked a question on the seeming lack of "space" in Singapore even though our former PM and now SM Mr Goh CT had told Singaporeans to be able to "laugh at ourselves".
The participant commented that even a seemingly innocent joke can be taken to be offensive. He made a few other additional comments in reference of the apparent lack of expression space. So his question to my boss and two other panellists is, "How do we know if a joke is ok, because the friends whom we are with may not be offended but how do we know it is ok, given the (political, racial, and religious) sensitivities around us?"
I VERY NEARLY DROPPED OFF MY SEAT.
Anyhow, one panellist gave him a protracted answer and my boss did not reply.
On our way back to the office, I hitched a ride from my boss. We talked about the episode and agreed.
Our answer: Use your common sense. Look at the situation you are in and observe the OB markers. If you are within friends, then don't propagate the joke beyond the circle of friends. And by all means, "laugh at ourselves" (i.e. make yourself the butt of the jokes), and not at other races', religions' sensitivities.
COMMON SENSE is REALLY NOT COMMON these days.
At a seminar where I delivered a lecture, a participant asked a question on the seeming lack of "space" in Singapore even though our former PM and now SM Mr Goh CT had told Singaporeans to be able to "laugh at ourselves".
The participant commented that even a seemingly innocent joke can be taken to be offensive. He made a few other additional comments in reference of the apparent lack of expression space. So his question to my boss and two other panellists is, "How do we know if a joke is ok, because the friends whom we are with may not be offended but how do we know it is ok, given the (political, racial, and religious) sensitivities around us?"
I VERY NEARLY DROPPED OFF MY SEAT.
Anyhow, one panellist gave him a protracted answer and my boss did not reply.
On our way back to the office, I hitched a ride from my boss. We talked about the episode and agreed.
Our answer: Use your common sense. Look at the situation you are in and observe the OB markers. If you are within friends, then don't propagate the joke beyond the circle of friends. And by all means, "laugh at ourselves" (i.e. make yourself the butt of the jokes), and not at other races', religions' sensitivities.
COMMON SENSE is REALLY NOT COMMON these days.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Good Enough
Good Enough
When I was younger and pursuing my grade studies in piano, no piano was ever good enough. The next piano up the scale would always have the more responsive touch, the better timbre, the warmer sound, the... But each successive one corresponds to a significant amount of money more.
When I first began tutoring mathematics, no answer was elegant enough, no school test score was high enough, no question for the pupils was tough enough, no... But each demand corresponds to a drop in interest.
When I bought bags, no bag was big enough, no bag was functional enough, no bag was durable enough, no... In the end, I ended up with a whole room of bags I never used.
Now that I'm older, many things have started to be good enough. A camera that takes decent pictures is good enough - it may not be the clearest of the lot but hey, nothing can be as clear (or as fuzzy) as the picture in your mind!
A computer that works and doesn't hang is good enough - it may not be the fastest of the lot and it doesn't do a lot of tricks other computers can, but it serves me well.
A handphone that works when I need it to is good enough - it may not be the organizer of my dreams or the mini-camera of my fantasy. But when I need to make a call, whether in an emergency or not, and it works, I'm happy enough.
The person that you are going to share your life with may not be the best thing on earth, but this person FOR HAVING ACCEPTED YOU is better than the best thing already.
What is this all about?
This is about contentment. This is about gratitude. This is about not desiring beyond your means.
I am not advocating that one thus accepts whatever comes along. This is about avoiding the pursuit of marginally higher excellence with unjustifiable trade-offs. PSA has done it when they withdrew from the P&O bid. That's the right thing to do!
A person who is contented with his/her lot in life will then be able to find fulfillment and happiness.
When I was younger and pursuing my grade studies in piano, no piano was ever good enough. The next piano up the scale would always have the more responsive touch, the better timbre, the warmer sound, the... But each successive one corresponds to a significant amount of money more.
When I first began tutoring mathematics, no answer was elegant enough, no school test score was high enough, no question for the pupils was tough enough, no... But each demand corresponds to a drop in interest.
When I bought bags, no bag was big enough, no bag was functional enough, no bag was durable enough, no... In the end, I ended up with a whole room of bags I never used.
Now that I'm older, many things have started to be good enough. A camera that takes decent pictures is good enough - it may not be the clearest of the lot but hey, nothing can be as clear (or as fuzzy) as the picture in your mind!
A computer that works and doesn't hang is good enough - it may not be the fastest of the lot and it doesn't do a lot of tricks other computers can, but it serves me well.
A handphone that works when I need it to is good enough - it may not be the organizer of my dreams or the mini-camera of my fantasy. But when I need to make a call, whether in an emergency or not, and it works, I'm happy enough.
The person that you are going to share your life with may not be the best thing on earth, but this person FOR HAVING ACCEPTED YOU is better than the best thing already.
What is this all about?
This is about contentment. This is about gratitude. This is about not desiring beyond your means.
I am not advocating that one thus accepts whatever comes along. This is about avoiding the pursuit of marginally higher excellence with unjustifiable trade-offs. PSA has done it when they withdrew from the P&O bid. That's the right thing to do!
A person who is contented with his/her lot in life will then be able to find fulfillment and happiness.
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day
DATING DAYS
It was Valentine's Day and Ah Beng and Ah Lian have decided to go for a date.
Ah Beng (thinking Wah, tolei Wah-lan-tenh lay er-gain ah? Siao liao loh... Dunno what the woman want from me...): Aaa...h Lian ah. Wah tolei not late ah? Heh heh... Very lare leh."
Ah Lian (purring): Lar-ling ah, tolei Ver-learn-tein Day leh... Cannot be late leh. Arlerwise hor, every hwhere you go also veli clowded. Eh, what you getting for me huh?
Ah Beng: What I getting for you? Aiyoh, so expensive lah, everything tolei. What? 12 loh-ses (roses) need like $60 leh.
Ah Lian: Eee, you so stingy one. Every time say expensive.
Ah Beng: You know then why ask?
Ah Lian: I might as well look for a leech boyfren.
Ah Beng: Yah, why donch try? Maybe sun rise from west, also not bad hor.
Ah Lian: WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Ah Beng: You guess?
Ah Lian: Guess guess guess? Guess what guess? You think you wearing the blanded stuff from guess ah?
Ah Beng: Dun guess dun guess loh. So fierce for what?
Two of them reach the bus stop and Ah Beng spots a bus approaching.
Ah Beng: Eh, quick. Bus come orredi.
Ah Lian: What? Take bus ah?
Ah Beng: Yah lah. You got so much money go take taxi meh?
Ah Lian: Have. But won't take with you.
Ah Beng: Ok, fine. Don't take don't take loh.
Both of them boarded the bus and bickered all the way to Orchard Road.
Walking into 5-star Hotel, Ah Beng decides to give Ah Lian a treat to buffet dinner but he does not want to say so.
Ah Beng (whispering to waitress): Er, tonight buffet dinner how much ah?
Waitress: Valentine's Dinner Buffet is $150 per person nett, including a glass of champagne.
Ah Beng: Don't want champagne how much ah?
Waitress (rather loudly): Don't want, don't have.
Ah Beng: Ok, ok... Table for two.
Waitress: Fully booked. No more tables.
So poor Ah Beng was shamed and then dumped aside by the ruthless waitress. Perservering he decided to try some fast food outlet. By then, Ah Lian was getting hungry.
Ah Lian: Eh, hully up can or not? I hungry leh.
Ah Beng: Can, what you want to eat? You everything can can can, but everything donch like, donch wan, donch feel like, then how? Eat air ah?
Ah Lian: You so smart, so rich, go ABC Hotel XYZ Restaurant lah.
Ah Beng: You say one ah, on you!
Both swaggered down to the restaurant. Unfortunately, XYZ Restaurant was also full.
Ah Beng: Aiyoh, cheap slut where got life to eat expensive things? Hahaha....
Ah Lian: Cheap slut call who?
Ah Beng: You guess...?
Ah Lian finally had enough and went off on her own. It was yet another one of those Valentine's Days that ended not the way they wanted.
Ah Beng took off soon after, deciding that it's better for Ah Lian to cool down before the situation got worse.
Ah Lian walked into MacDonald's and ordered a Happy Meal. Happy Meals made Ah Lian happy. For some strange reason, they do make her happy. She took out the toy from the Happy Meal and looked at it. It was Goofy holding a flower. Ah Beng would have looked like that if he were an ang moh, she thought wistfully.
On his own, Ah Beng walked into the same MacDonald's. He too ordered a Happy Meal. Happy Meals made Ah Lian happy. For some strange reason, they do make her happy. And he wants to know why and so he tried. He took out his toy from the Happy Meal and saw Birdie in her plane. How ironic, that a bird needs a plane to fly around in. Just like Ah Lian, the one who hopes that her guy is her ticket to better days. He looked up and saw Ah Lian in the opposite corner of the fast food establishment.
Ah Lian did not see Ah Beng. In fact, she counted her fries. Every time, she'll only eat 16 pieces of them. The 17th onward would make her fat - that's her theory. And Ah Beng would get to eat the rest.
By now, Ah Beng has already walked, with Happy Meal in hand, towards the other end, towards Ah Lian.
Ah Beng (in his best English): Excuse me, Miss. Can sit?
Ah Lian looked up and saw Ah Beng. Tears somehow brimmed in her eyes. This is her man. He will never be the ticket to luxury but what the heck.
Ah Lian (choking back tears): Got backside, can loh.
Still as quarrelsome as ever.
MARRIED DAYS
Ah Lian (over the phone): Eh, Where-learn-tine day got come home or not? I tell you, you better come home or I'll break your legs! You TRRRRRAAAAAAAAIIIII me lah!
Ah Beng: Orh.
Ah Beng came home promptly at 6 pm and sat down at the dinner table with his 5 children. Ah Lian took out the dishes.
Ah Beng: Eh, same food again?
Ah Lian: Got food can laugh liao loh. As though you earn tonnes and tonnes of money.
Ah Beng: Er...
Ah Lian: Er what er? Leftover from Chinese New Year. You better eat (turning to kids) and you all also. Or I'll break your legs...
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!
DATING DAYS
It was Valentine's Day and Ah Beng and Ah Lian have decided to go for a date.
Ah Beng (thinking Wah, tolei Wah-lan-tenh lay er-gain ah? Siao liao loh... Dunno what the woman want from me...): Aaa...h Lian ah. Wah tolei not late ah? Heh heh... Very lare leh."
Ah Lian (purring): Lar-ling ah, tolei Ver-learn-tein Day leh... Cannot be late leh. Arlerwise hor, every hwhere you go also veli clowded. Eh, what you getting for me huh?
Ah Beng: What I getting for you? Aiyoh, so expensive lah, everything tolei. What? 12 loh-ses (roses) need like $60 leh.
Ah Lian: Eee, you so stingy one. Every time say expensive.
Ah Beng: You know then why ask?
Ah Lian: I might as well look for a leech boyfren.
Ah Beng: Yah, why donch try? Maybe sun rise from west, also not bad hor.
Ah Lian: WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Ah Beng: You guess?
Ah Lian: Guess guess guess? Guess what guess? You think you wearing the blanded stuff from guess ah?
Ah Beng: Dun guess dun guess loh. So fierce for what?
Two of them reach the bus stop and Ah Beng spots a bus approaching.
Ah Beng: Eh, quick. Bus come orredi.
Ah Lian: What? Take bus ah?
Ah Beng: Yah lah. You got so much money go take taxi meh?
Ah Lian: Have. But won't take with you.
Ah Beng: Ok, fine. Don't take don't take loh.
Both of them boarded the bus and bickered all the way to Orchard Road.
Walking into 5-star Hotel, Ah Beng decides to give Ah Lian a treat to buffet dinner but he does not want to say so.
Ah Beng (whispering to waitress): Er, tonight buffet dinner how much ah?
Waitress: Valentine's Dinner Buffet is $150 per person nett, including a glass of champagne.
Ah Beng: Don't want champagne how much ah?
Waitress (rather loudly): Don't want, don't have.
Ah Beng: Ok, ok... Table for two.
Waitress: Fully booked. No more tables.
So poor Ah Beng was shamed and then dumped aside by the ruthless waitress. Perservering he decided to try some fast food outlet. By then, Ah Lian was getting hungry.
Ah Lian: Eh, hully up can or not? I hungry leh.
Ah Beng: Can, what you want to eat? You everything can can can, but everything donch like, donch wan, donch feel like, then how? Eat air ah?
Ah Lian: You so smart, so rich, go ABC Hotel XYZ Restaurant lah.
Ah Beng: You say one ah, on you!
Both swaggered down to the restaurant. Unfortunately, XYZ Restaurant was also full.
Ah Beng: Aiyoh, cheap slut where got life to eat expensive things? Hahaha....
Ah Lian: Cheap slut call who?
Ah Beng: You guess...?
Ah Lian finally had enough and went off on her own. It was yet another one of those Valentine's Days that ended not the way they wanted.
Ah Beng took off soon after, deciding that it's better for Ah Lian to cool down before the situation got worse.
Ah Lian walked into MacDonald's and ordered a Happy Meal. Happy Meals made Ah Lian happy. For some strange reason, they do make her happy. She took out the toy from the Happy Meal and looked at it. It was Goofy holding a flower. Ah Beng would have looked like that if he were an ang moh, she thought wistfully.
On his own, Ah Beng walked into the same MacDonald's. He too ordered a Happy Meal. Happy Meals made Ah Lian happy. For some strange reason, they do make her happy. And he wants to know why and so he tried. He took out his toy from the Happy Meal and saw Birdie in her plane. How ironic, that a bird needs a plane to fly around in. Just like Ah Lian, the one who hopes that her guy is her ticket to better days. He looked up and saw Ah Lian in the opposite corner of the fast food establishment.
Ah Lian did not see Ah Beng. In fact, she counted her fries. Every time, she'll only eat 16 pieces of them. The 17th onward would make her fat - that's her theory. And Ah Beng would get to eat the rest.
By now, Ah Beng has already walked, with Happy Meal in hand, towards the other end, towards Ah Lian.
Ah Beng (in his best English): Excuse me, Miss. Can sit?
Ah Lian looked up and saw Ah Beng. Tears somehow brimmed in her eyes. This is her man. He will never be the ticket to luxury but what the heck.
Ah Lian (choking back tears): Got backside, can loh.
Still as quarrelsome as ever.
MARRIED DAYS
Ah Lian (over the phone): Eh, Where-learn-tine day got come home or not? I tell you, you better come home or I'll break your legs! You TRRRRRAAAAAAAAIIIII me lah!
Ah Beng: Orh.
Ah Beng came home promptly at 6 pm and sat down at the dinner table with his 5 children. Ah Lian took out the dishes.
Ah Beng: Eh, same food again?
Ah Lian: Got food can laugh liao loh. As though you earn tonnes and tonnes of money.
Ah Beng: Er...
Ah Lian: Er what er? Leftover from Chinese New Year. You better eat (turning to kids) and you all also. Or I'll break your legs...
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!
Monday, February 13, 2006
The Parable of the Perfect Heart
The Parable of the Perfect Heart
For my ex-student Justin
One day a young man was standing in the middle of the town proclaiming that he had the most beautiful heart in the whole valley. A large crowd gathered and they all admired his heart for it was perfect. There was not a mark or a flaw in it. Yes, they all agreed it truly was the most beautiful heart they had ever seen. The young man was very proud and boasted more loudly about his beautiful heart.
Suddenly, an old man appeared at the front of the crowd and said "Why your heart is not nearly as beautiful as mine." The crowd and the young man looked at the old man's heart. It was beating strongly, but full of scars, it had places where pieces had been removed and other pieces put in, but they didn't fit quite right and there were several jagged edges. In fact, in some places there were deep gouges where whole pieces were missing.
The people stared - how can he say his heart is more beautiful, they thought? The young man looked at the old man's heart and saw its state and laughed. "You must be joking," he said. "Compare your heart with mine, mine is perfect and yours is a mess of scars and tears."
"Yes," said the old man, "Yours is perfect looking but I would never trade with you. You see, every scar represents a person to whom I have given my love - I tear out a piece of my heart and give it to them, and often they give me a piece of their heart which fits into the empty place in my heart, but because the pieces aren't exact, I have some rough edges, which I cherish, because they remind me of the love we shared. Sometimes I have given pieces of my heart away, and the other person hasn't returned a piece of his heart to me. These are the empty gouges -- giving love is taking a chance.
Although these gouges are painful, they stay open, reminding me of the love I have for these people too, and I hope someday they may return and fill the space I have waiting. So now do you see what true beauty is?"
The young man stood silently with tears running down his cheeks. He walked up to the old man, reached into his perfect young and beautiful heart, and ripped a piece out. He offered it to the old man with trembling hands. The old man took his offering, placed it in his heart and then took a piece from his old scarred heart and placed it in the wound in the young man's heart. It fit, but not perfectly, as there were some jagged edges. The young man looked at his heart, not perfect anymore but more beautiful than ever, since love from the old man's heart flowed into his. They embraced and walked away side by side.
How sad it must be to go through life with a whole untouched heart.
For my ex-student Justin
One day a young man was standing in the middle of the town proclaiming that he had the most beautiful heart in the whole valley. A large crowd gathered and they all admired his heart for it was perfect. There was not a mark or a flaw in it. Yes, they all agreed it truly was the most beautiful heart they had ever seen. The young man was very proud and boasted more loudly about his beautiful heart.
Suddenly, an old man appeared at the front of the crowd and said "Why your heart is not nearly as beautiful as mine." The crowd and the young man looked at the old man's heart. It was beating strongly, but full of scars, it had places where pieces had been removed and other pieces put in, but they didn't fit quite right and there were several jagged edges. In fact, in some places there were deep gouges where whole pieces were missing.
The people stared - how can he say his heart is more beautiful, they thought? The young man looked at the old man's heart and saw its state and laughed. "You must be joking," he said. "Compare your heart with mine, mine is perfect and yours is a mess of scars and tears."
"Yes," said the old man, "Yours is perfect looking but I would never trade with you. You see, every scar represents a person to whom I have given my love - I tear out a piece of my heart and give it to them, and often they give me a piece of their heart which fits into the empty place in my heart, but because the pieces aren't exact, I have some rough edges, which I cherish, because they remind me of the love we shared. Sometimes I have given pieces of my heart away, and the other person hasn't returned a piece of his heart to me. These are the empty gouges -- giving love is taking a chance.
Although these gouges are painful, they stay open, reminding me of the love I have for these people too, and I hope someday they may return and fill the space I have waiting. So now do you see what true beauty is?"
The young man stood silently with tears running down his cheeks. He walked up to the old man, reached into his perfect young and beautiful heart, and ripped a piece out. He offered it to the old man with trembling hands. The old man took his offering, placed it in his heart and then took a piece from his old scarred heart and placed it in the wound in the young man's heart. It fit, but not perfectly, as there were some jagged edges. The young man looked at his heart, not perfect anymore but more beautiful than ever, since love from the old man's heart flowed into his. They embraced and walked away side by side.
How sad it must be to go through life with a whole untouched heart.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Hilarious
Hilarious!
From El Borak's Myopia
Some stuff written in the American context:
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside-down, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C. The Russians used a pencil. Your taxes are due again--enjoy paying them.
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, and it's worked for over 200 years. This makes a lot of sense since we're not using it anymore.
The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse is that you cannot post "Thou Shall Not Steal," "Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery" and "Thou Shall Not Lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.
From El Borak's Myopia
Some stuff written in the American context:
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside-down, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C. The Russians used a pencil. Your taxes are due again--enjoy paying them.
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, and it's worked for over 200 years. This makes a lot of sense since we're not using it anymore.
The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse is that you cannot post "Thou Shall Not Steal," "Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery" and "Thou Shall Not Lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.
Brokeback Mountain
Brokeback Mountain
Watched the movie yesterday, when I was entirely tired out. That the DVD hung at odd moments and disrupted the flow of the beautiful story didn't help much either.
Still, I knew I had stumbled upon something nice. I enjoyed the movie and would be watching it again. I needed to see the layers, which I often do at the first sitting. However, I know Ang Lee's style too well. There is no way to fully understand and appreciate the nuances in one sitting.
The movie is to be savoured bit by bit. It's akin to eating a multi-coated candy, each new layer a new taste and sensation.
But a few things were rather evident. I had wanted to talk more about them but the book review/movie review below had encapsulated my thoughts and crystallised them beyond my abilities, so I'll just leave it to the reader to enjoy Daniel's wonderfully written review.
For sure, this is a movie that I'm going to remember for a long time.
Watched the movie yesterday, when I was entirely tired out. That the DVD hung at odd moments and disrupted the flow of the beautiful story didn't help much either.
Still, I knew I had stumbled upon something nice. I enjoyed the movie and would be watching it again. I needed to see the layers, which I often do at the first sitting. However, I know Ang Lee's style too well. There is no way to fully understand and appreciate the nuances in one sitting.
The movie is to be savoured bit by bit. It's akin to eating a multi-coated candy, each new layer a new taste and sensation.
But a few things were rather evident. I had wanted to talk more about them but the book review/movie review below had encapsulated my thoughts and crystallised them beyond my abilities, so I'll just leave it to the reader to enjoy Daniel's wonderfully written review.
For sure, this is a movie that I'm going to remember for a long time.
Book Review: Brokeback Mountain
An Affair to Remember
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Brokeback Mountain
a film directed by Ang Lee, based on the story by E. Annie Proulx
Brokeback Mountain - the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based - is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words "two homosexual men" or "gay," the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.
Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie - in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews - has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with "universal" appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film's official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal's critic asserted that "love stories come and go, but this one stays with you - not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance." The Los Angeles Times declared the film to be a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Indeed, a month after the movie's release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy movie." "It is much more than that glib description implies," the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This is a human story." This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer's understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be seen as something for a "niche" market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words "gay" and "homosexual" are never used of the film's two main characters in the forty-nine-page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) "One movie is connecting with the heart of America," one of the current print ad campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath Ledger, without his costar, grinning in a cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each other.
The reluctance to be explicit about the film's themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards - for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as "a story of monumental conflict"; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger's character as "a cowboy caught up in a complicated love." After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, "This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story."
Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously - and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.
Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet" - about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily - and significantly - silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.
After that - because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead - misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and infrequent vacations that they are able to take together as the years pass - "fishing trips" on which, as Ennis's wife points out, still choking on her bitterness years after their marriage fails, no fish were ever caught - are haunted, increasingly, by the specter of the happier life they might have had, had they been able to live together. Their final vacation together (before Jack is beaten to death in what is clearly represented, in a flashback, as a roadside gay-bashing incident) is poisoned by mutual recriminations. "I wish I knew how to quit you," the now nearly middle-aged Jack tearfully cries out, humiliated by years of having to seek sexual solace in the arms of Mexican hustlers. "It's because of you that I'm like this - nothing, nobody," the dirt-poor Ennis sobs as he collapses in the dust. What Ennis means, of course, is that he's "nothing" because loving Jack has forced him to be aware of real passion that has no outlet, aware of a sexual nature that he cannot ignore but which neither his background nor his circumstances have equipped him to make part of his life. Again and again over the years, he rebuffs Jack's offers to try living together and running "a little cow and calf operation" somewhere, hobbled by his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness might look like.
One reason he can't bring himself to envision such a life with his lover is a grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher who'd been tortured and beaten to death - a scene that prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This explicit reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite powerful, reason why Brokeback must be seen as a specifically gay tragedy. In another review that decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a cruel simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times's critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that "their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups - any 'forbidden' love." This is well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.
But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them - beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us - represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there's something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands - "Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor has said - and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body - by being himself.
So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other, even a tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of Brokeback Mountain - the writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang Lee - seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie specifically about the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the emptiness of unrealized lives - all ending in the "nothingness" to which Ennis achingly refers - are consistently expressed in the film, appropriately enough, by the use of space; given the film's homoerotic themes, this device is particularly meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the wide, unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly, that what the men feel for each other is "natural." By contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and social lives, they look cramped and claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in various mirrors: a figure confined in a tiny frame.) There's a sequence in which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously preparing for one of their "fishing trips," and both men, as they pack for their trip - Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and increasingly unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes away with Jack - pace back and forth in their respective houses like caged animals.
The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature closets - literal closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirts - his and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain - one of which Jack has sentimentally encased in the other. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image - which is taken directly from Proulx's story - of the two shirts hidden in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping wordlessly.
In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married. "Does he love you?" the blighted father protectively demands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer, one still wearing the other, on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces - the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas beyond - efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes his sentence, as he never completed his life.
One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical, attempts to suggest that the tragic heroes of Brokeback Mountain aren't "really" gay appeared in, of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, where the critic Mick LaSalle argued that the film is about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a national election.... The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two guys - cowboys - are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other. It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight.
The statement suggests what's wrong with so much of the criticism of the film, however well-meaning it is. It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, partly because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay experience - bringing it into the familiar "heart of America." (Had this been the story of, say, the love between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there wouldn't be full-page ads in the major papers trumpeting its "universal" themes.) But the fact that this film's main characters look like cowboys doesn't make them, or their story, any less gay. Criticisms like LaSalle's, and those of the many other critics trying to persuade you that Brokeback isn't "really" gay, that Jack and Ennis's love "makes no sense" because they're Wyoming ranch hands who are likely to vote Republican, only work if you believe that being gay means having a certain look, or lifestyle (urban, say), or politics; that it's anything other than the bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to members of your own sex.
Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for years - a point that Brokeback could be making now, if so many of its vocal admirers would listen to what it's saying - is that there's no such thing as a typical gay person, a strangely different- eeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common - thankfully, you can't help feeling, in the eyes of many commentators. (It is surely significant that the film's only major departure from Proulx's story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack's and Ennis's bona fides as macho American men: one in which Jack successfully challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, and another in which Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnic - a scene that culminates with the image of Ennis standing tall against a skyscape of exploding fireworks.)
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual - that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people" - you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Brokeback Mountain
a film directed by Ang Lee, based on the story by E. Annie Proulx
Brokeback Mountain - the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based - is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words "two homosexual men" or "gay," the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.
Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie - in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews - has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with "universal" appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film's official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal's critic asserted that "love stories come and go, but this one stays with you - not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance." The Los Angeles Times declared the film to be a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Indeed, a month after the movie's release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy movie." "It is much more than that glib description implies," the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This is a human story." This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer's understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be seen as something for a "niche" market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words "gay" and "homosexual" are never used of the film's two main characters in the forty-nine-page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) "One movie is connecting with the heart of America," one of the current print ad campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath Ledger, without his costar, grinning in a cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each other.
The reluctance to be explicit about the film's themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards - for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as "a story of monumental conflict"; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger's character as "a cowboy caught up in a complicated love." After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, "This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story."
Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously - and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.
Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet" - about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily - and significantly - silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.
After that - because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead - misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and infrequent vacations that they are able to take together as the years pass - "fishing trips" on which, as Ennis's wife points out, still choking on her bitterness years after their marriage fails, no fish were ever caught - are haunted, increasingly, by the specter of the happier life they might have had, had they been able to live together. Their final vacation together (before Jack is beaten to death in what is clearly represented, in a flashback, as a roadside gay-bashing incident) is poisoned by mutual recriminations. "I wish I knew how to quit you," the now nearly middle-aged Jack tearfully cries out, humiliated by years of having to seek sexual solace in the arms of Mexican hustlers. "It's because of you that I'm like this - nothing, nobody," the dirt-poor Ennis sobs as he collapses in the dust. What Ennis means, of course, is that he's "nothing" because loving Jack has forced him to be aware of real passion that has no outlet, aware of a sexual nature that he cannot ignore but which neither his background nor his circumstances have equipped him to make part of his life. Again and again over the years, he rebuffs Jack's offers to try living together and running "a little cow and calf operation" somewhere, hobbled by his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness might look like.
One reason he can't bring himself to envision such a life with his lover is a grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher who'd been tortured and beaten to death - a scene that prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This explicit reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite powerful, reason why Brokeback must be seen as a specifically gay tragedy. In another review that decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a cruel simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times's critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that "their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups - any 'forbidden' love." This is well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.
But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them - beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us - represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there's something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands - "Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor has said - and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body - by being himself.
So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other, even a tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of Brokeback Mountain - the writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang Lee - seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie specifically about the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the emptiness of unrealized lives - all ending in the "nothingness" to which Ennis achingly refers - are consistently expressed in the film, appropriately enough, by the use of space; given the film's homoerotic themes, this device is particularly meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the wide, unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly, that what the men feel for each other is "natural." By contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and social lives, they look cramped and claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in various mirrors: a figure confined in a tiny frame.) There's a sequence in which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously preparing for one of their "fishing trips," and both men, as they pack for their trip - Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and increasingly unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes away with Jack - pace back and forth in their respective houses like caged animals.
The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature closets - literal closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirts - his and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain - one of which Jack has sentimentally encased in the other. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image - which is taken directly from Proulx's story - of the two shirts hidden in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping wordlessly.
In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married. "Does he love you?" the blighted father protectively demands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer, one still wearing the other, on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces - the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas beyond - efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes his sentence, as he never completed his life.
One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical, attempts to suggest that the tragic heroes of Brokeback Mountain aren't "really" gay appeared in, of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, where the critic Mick LaSalle argued that the film is about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a national election.... The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two guys - cowboys - are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other. It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight.
The statement suggests what's wrong with so much of the criticism of the film, however well-meaning it is. It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, partly because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay experience - bringing it into the familiar "heart of America." (Had this been the story of, say, the love between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there wouldn't be full-page ads in the major papers trumpeting its "universal" themes.) But the fact that this film's main characters look like cowboys doesn't make them, or their story, any less gay. Criticisms like LaSalle's, and those of the many other critics trying to persuade you that Brokeback isn't "really" gay, that Jack and Ennis's love "makes no sense" because they're Wyoming ranch hands who are likely to vote Republican, only work if you believe that being gay means having a certain look, or lifestyle (urban, say), or politics; that it's anything other than the bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to members of your own sex.
Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for years - a point that Brokeback could be making now, if so many of its vocal admirers would listen to what it's saying - is that there's no such thing as a typical gay person, a strangely different- eeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common - thankfully, you can't help feeling, in the eyes of many commentators. (It is surely significant that the film's only major departure from Proulx's story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack's and Ennis's bona fides as macho American men: one in which Jack successfully challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, and another in which Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnic - a scene that culminates with the image of Ennis standing tall against a skyscape of exploding fireworks.)
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual - that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people" - you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.
Friday, February 10, 2006
GCE O Level Results
GCE O Level Results
The results wre released at 1430 h today.
This year, IT HAD ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOTHING TO DO WITH ME!
No more post-results review, no more post-mortem (as though people died!), no more action plans, no more remediative action, no more sharing of success stories, no more reflection of methods used, no more insistence for closer monitoring, no more intensive sessions for laggers (as though they lag because it's my fault!), no more accusatory eyes, no more accusations (you got x% passes in 4/* but the percentage distinctions are lower; so what? If the students didn't pass, they cannot even make it to poly! So big deal!), no more questioning integrity (how come A Math didn't do that well? Like I care, cos everyone did his/her best and simply the best may not be good enough loh!), no more snide remarks (of course the good results are expected...).
Well, I guess few people actually would mind missing all these.
The results wre released at 1430 h today.
This year, IT HAD ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOTHING TO DO WITH ME!
No more post-results review, no more post-mortem (as though people died!), no more action plans, no more remediative action, no more sharing of success stories, no more reflection of methods used, no more insistence for closer monitoring, no more intensive sessions for laggers (as though they lag because it's my fault!), no more accusatory eyes, no more accusations (you got x% passes in 4/* but the percentage distinctions are lower; so what? If the students didn't pass, they cannot even make it to poly! So big deal!), no more questioning integrity (how come A Math didn't do that well? Like I care, cos everyone did his/her best and simply the best may not be good enough loh!), no more snide remarks (of course the good results are expected...).
Well, I guess few people actually would mind missing all these.
How to use 'aiyah'?
How to use 'aiyah'?
Aiyoh, goodness gracious?! This kind of article also can make it to the front page of the Straits Times ah? What has Singapore come to, man?
Dunno how to use 'aiyah'? Dun use lah. Liddat how? Everything must go online to look it up? Wah lau! The sky turn dark liao man, waiting for their reply to a remark I make or question I ask.
Singlish (ok, ok, the more authentic speech form is Singrish) is not at all difficult to understand what. Just listen to the tonal inflections and you know whether people are exasperated, questioning, exaggerating, emphasising, or what liao ma... Still need to check online dictionary? Where got time? And like your online dictionary is so dynamic to account for all the nuances associated with free speech (eh, don't be sotong, ah! Free speech is not the same as freedom of speech, ok?)
Can't believe people eat full can't shit, whole day nothing better to do, go and compile this kind of list. I tell you ah, like that huh, at the end of the day ah, by the time you try to see what each of the ah means in this article, you can go to bed tonight then come and tell me ah.
Actually ah, I'm quite evil here lah. I never indicate my tonal preferences for each of the Singlish items in italics. Really hor, liddat can be quite confusing one leh. But if I try leh, people will go siao trying to figure out how each tone sounds. If you are not brought up in the Singapore or some South East Asian context where you have a mixture of Oriental and Proto-Indo European languages, you prolly won't understand even a bit. Oh yah, and you need to know mabbe other languages even, so by the time you try to figure out this piece, you probably will go, aiyah, so blardy troublesome. I not interested liao lah. So bo liao.
[This blogger has a fellow classmate in his English Language Honours Class who scored the only First Class Honours. His thesis is entitled something to the effect of "The particle one in Singapore English", and the entire 12 000 word dissertation only discussed the article, "one" in Singlish. If anyone think they could use the online thingy and get anywhere to understanding Singlish culture, I believe they would be sadly mistaken.]
Aiyoh, goodness gracious?! This kind of article also can make it to the front page of the Straits Times ah? What has Singapore come to, man?
Dunno how to use 'aiyah'? Dun use lah. Liddat how? Everything must go online to look it up? Wah lau! The sky turn dark liao man, waiting for their reply to a remark I make or question I ask.
Singlish (ok, ok, the more authentic speech form is Singrish) is not at all difficult to understand what. Just listen to the tonal inflections and you know whether people are exasperated, questioning, exaggerating, emphasising, or what liao ma... Still need to check online dictionary? Where got time? And like your online dictionary is so dynamic to account for all the nuances associated with free speech (eh, don't be sotong, ah! Free speech is not the same as freedom of speech, ok?)
Can't believe people eat full can't shit, whole day nothing better to do, go and compile this kind of list. I tell you ah, like that huh, at the end of the day ah, by the time you try to see what each of the ah means in this article, you can go to bed tonight then come and tell me ah.
Actually ah, I'm quite evil here lah. I never indicate my tonal preferences for each of the Singlish items in italics. Really hor, liddat can be quite confusing one leh. But if I try leh, people will go siao trying to figure out how each tone sounds. If you are not brought up in the Singapore or some South East Asian context where you have a mixture of Oriental and Proto-Indo European languages, you prolly won't understand even a bit. Oh yah, and you need to know mabbe other languages even, so by the time you try to figure out this piece, you probably will go, aiyah, so blardy troublesome. I not interested liao lah. So bo liao.
[This blogger has a fellow classmate in his English Language Honours Class who scored the only First Class Honours. His thesis is entitled something to the effect of "The particle one in Singapore English", and the entire 12 000 word dissertation only discussed the article, "one" in Singlish. If anyone think they could use the online thingy and get anywhere to understanding Singlish culture, I believe they would be sadly mistaken.]
31 Years and 2 Days
31 Years and 2 Days
Yes, the inevitable had to come. So I turned 31. Yah yah, I've fallen on the wrong side of 30. Of course the big four-oh is in the not-so-far horizon. But you know what? I don't feel a year older than 28.
Ok, I know the constant lies people tell about their ages. Pop idol Alan Tam has been 25 for the past 30 years (?) and women are 18 for too long, even when they look like 81. Ah, never mind. Physically, I'm probably 31 going on 70. Mentally, I'm 80 going on 120. Yup. I'm an old old old old man trapped in my 31 year old body. My thinking is outdated; pre-modern if you so desire.
I could be a stickler for tradition yet I hate the deadwood of tradition. Simply put, what works and still are best practices must be retained and proliferated. What is broken by now ought to be discarded.
No matter what, there are certain hypocrisies that one ought to retain. We don't live to this old if we did not know how to slither through some awkward enough situations.
I count my blessings each day and while I still bitch like there's no tomorrow, I seldom retaliate much. At least allow me the freedom to indulge in free bitch. Aiyoh, sorry, free speech.
So I am 31. Big deal. I'll look forward to another 3 rounds of being 31!
Yes, the inevitable had to come. So I turned 31. Yah yah, I've fallen on the wrong side of 30. Of course the big four-oh is in the not-so-far horizon. But you know what? I don't feel a year older than 28.
Ok, I know the constant lies people tell about their ages. Pop idol Alan Tam has been 25 for the past 30 years (?) and women are 18 for too long, even when they look like 81. Ah, never mind. Physically, I'm probably 31 going on 70. Mentally, I'm 80 going on 120. Yup. I'm an old old old old man trapped in my 31 year old body. My thinking is outdated; pre-modern if you so desire.
I could be a stickler for tradition yet I hate the deadwood of tradition. Simply put, what works and still are best practices must be retained and proliferated. What is broken by now ought to be discarded.
No matter what, there are certain hypocrisies that one ought to retain. We don't live to this old if we did not know how to slither through some awkward enough situations.
I count my blessings each day and while I still bitch like there's no tomorrow, I seldom retaliate much. At least allow me the freedom to indulge in free bitch. Aiyoh, sorry, free speech.
So I am 31. Big deal. I'll look forward to another 3 rounds of being 31!
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Malacca
Malacca
Visited Malacca and met up with my godma there. We caught up with news and had a good meeting.
I was pretty ambivalent about the trip, except that it was a welcome break from work.
Hope to go further the next time. I want to visit Cameron Highlands again.
Visited Malacca and met up with my godma there. We caught up with news and had a good meeting.
I was pretty ambivalent about the trip, except that it was a welcome break from work.
Hope to go further the next time. I want to visit Cameron Highlands again.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The Mohammed Cartoons
The Mohammed Cartoons
I have seen the cartoons on the web.
Apparently,
The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten created the furor over depictions of Mohammed by publishing a series of 12 drawings after a local author said he was unable to find any artist willing to depict Mohammed for his upcoming illustrated book. The publication of the images in Jyllands-Posten has been condemned around the Islamic world, and has led to calls for a boycott of Denmark by Muslim nations.
Yet when a delegation of Danish imams went to the Middle East to "discuss" the issue of the cartoons with senior officials and prominent Islamic scholars, the imams openly distributed a booklet that showed 15 images -- not only the original 12 cartoons, but three fraudulent anti-Mohammed depictions that were much more offensive than the ones published in Denmark. It is now thought that these three bonus images are what ignited the outrage in the Muslim world.
I have also seen 3 additional pictures which were believed to be the cause of the recent outburst. Indeed, the 3 additional pictures were totally uncalled for.
Being racially and religiously sensitive and respectful, I refrain from all comments.
In pure, honest, innocent curiosity, I seek the answer to just ONE question:
How did belligerance get so entrenched in the practice of religions of peace?
I have seen the cartoons on the web.
Apparently,
The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten created the furor over depictions of Mohammed by publishing a series of 12 drawings after a local author said he was unable to find any artist willing to depict Mohammed for his upcoming illustrated book. The publication of the images in Jyllands-Posten has been condemned around the Islamic world, and has led to calls for a boycott of Denmark by Muslim nations.
Yet when a delegation of Danish imams went to the Middle East to "discuss" the issue of the cartoons with senior officials and prominent Islamic scholars, the imams openly distributed a booklet that showed 15 images -- not only the original 12 cartoons, but three fraudulent anti-Mohammed depictions that were much more offensive than the ones published in Denmark. It is now thought that these three bonus images are what ignited the outrage in the Muslim world.
I have also seen 3 additional pictures which were believed to be the cause of the recent outburst. Indeed, the 3 additional pictures were totally uncalled for.
Being racially and religiously sensitive and respectful, I refrain from all comments.
In pure, honest, innocent curiosity, I seek the answer to just ONE question:
How did belligerance get so entrenched in the practice of religions of peace?
Losing Sight
Losing Sight
Interestingly, what seemed to be perfect vision then have mostly become soft vision now.
Often, we set out to achieve certain goals. We espouse what we believe are the clearest of vision and noblest of values. We emphasize and reiterate how critical it is to get to where we set out to do.
But the goal is the destination. The learning is in the journey or the process.
Singaporeans will remember the "Stop at 2" birth policy that was put in place soon after our independence.
If we didn't, Singapore will be overrun by our own people. We will remain poor. Our infrastructure will not be able to support the exponentially growing population...
So successful was this policy that our birth rates are now one of the lowest in the world. This is despite a policy reversal some years back when Singaporeans were encourage to go for 3 or more kids if they can afford.
Sadly, the practice for many couples now is "Why start?". For some others, "Why stop?". Yet there are some who say "One is enough!" and some swear by "Two's perfect". But the dominant trend seems to be "Why start?"
We are not alone in this misery. China's "Stop at 1" policy had been so successful and the Chinese obsession with male babies (to carry on the family line) had led to so many illegal abortions of female foetuses or infanticide of female babies that the guys of marriageable age significantly outnumber the girls.
Smaller families bring about other problems.
The caring of the old parents fall on the very few number of children at home. Population ageing becomes a critical issue. Medical and health facilities become indispensable as society grapple with the ails of an ever-greying population.
I will not go on ranting lest I sound like I'm over-flogging an deader than dead horse.
So what's my point?
Human vision and intelligence get us far ahead. But nature humbles us in ways beyond our belief.
What we believe to be panacea will in turn poison us in the due run.
Utopia only exists in your mind, and so cultivate yourself.
And stop trying to associate meaning to everything because the process of living is itself a meaningful journey, even if many things are meaningless.
Learn introspection. And then practice it again and again.
Realise that even your best intentions are erroneous, but never ever lose sight to do more bad by doing good now.
Interestingly, what seemed to be perfect vision then have mostly become soft vision now.
Often, we set out to achieve certain goals. We espouse what we believe are the clearest of vision and noblest of values. We emphasize and reiterate how critical it is to get to where we set out to do.
But the goal is the destination. The learning is in the journey or the process.
Singaporeans will remember the "Stop at 2" birth policy that was put in place soon after our independence.
If we didn't, Singapore will be overrun by our own people. We will remain poor. Our infrastructure will not be able to support the exponentially growing population...
So successful was this policy that our birth rates are now one of the lowest in the world. This is despite a policy reversal some years back when Singaporeans were encourage to go for 3 or more kids if they can afford.
Sadly, the practice for many couples now is "Why start?". For some others, "Why stop?". Yet there are some who say "One is enough!" and some swear by "Two's perfect". But the dominant trend seems to be "Why start?"
We are not alone in this misery. China's "Stop at 1" policy had been so successful and the Chinese obsession with male babies (to carry on the family line) had led to so many illegal abortions of female foetuses or infanticide of female babies that the guys of marriageable age significantly outnumber the girls.
Smaller families bring about other problems.
The caring of the old parents fall on the very few number of children at home. Population ageing becomes a critical issue. Medical and health facilities become indispensable as society grapple with the ails of an ever-greying population.
I will not go on ranting lest I sound like I'm over-flogging an deader than dead horse.
So what's my point?
Human vision and intelligence get us far ahead. But nature humbles us in ways beyond our belief.
What we believe to be panacea will in turn poison us in the due run.
Utopia only exists in your mind, and so cultivate yourself.
And stop trying to associate meaning to everything because the process of living is itself a meaningful journey, even if many things are meaningless.
Learn introspection. And then practice it again and again.
Realise that even your best intentions are erroneous, but never ever lose sight to do more bad by doing good now.
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