I'm feeling inspired after reading this acclaimed title by Paulo Coelho.
In fact, I'm on the way to becoming one. For the last few days, I've turned all my food into lao sai.
I also transformed early evening and day into night by sleeping 14 hours.
Such is The Language Of The World.
Sometimes love is hiding between the seconds of your life.
I think I have something for films overlaid with narrations. They bring me one step deeper into the film, like a friend relating his story, rather than just plain voyeurism in the dark.
Funnie kungfu guy looks like Robbie Fowler, and footballer looks like Kevin Keegan, in Newcastle look-alike kit no less.
Two thumbs up for Cashback.
I don't know why it took me this long to write about such.
Destiny, dated.
I saw two girls in a train compartment at Raffles Place. four hours later, after traveling to the west and back, I spotted them, again together in the same compartment, heading in the same direction.
Quick note before I dive into and get lost in the hundreds of photos taken in Siem Reap..
Three full days - exhausting, enriching, scorching, amazing, dusty, and ultimately, well spent. Shall try to finish writing and filtering through the photos as soon as i can, before the memories disperse like dust blown off the Cambodian roads.
- My injury tendency quickly matured. The next accident was more gruesome. I was riding pillion on my father's old Yamaha motorcycle, sometime around my 7th birthday, an age when my young legs couldn't yet reach the pedestal. As the bike was about to round a corner into my neighbourhood, my left leg dangled into the back wheel and got trapped among the spinning spokes. I frantically signaled to my father to stop. Eventually he did. A kind hearted motorist stopped to help excavate my leg from the wheel. My left ankle was all raw. I could see black, red and white. Grime from the wheel, flesh dripping with blood, and standing out from which, part of my bone gleaming bright.
I did not cry, and calmly told my father to buy handiplasts from the mamak shop across the road. Thankfully he had enough sense left in him to not listen to my brave words. Plasters can't fix multiple fractures and a gaping wound.
The pain did not come till a couple of days later at the hospital, when they poured some solution to wash my wound. It felt like acid burning through my bones, forcefully purging out my stifled screams and teary eyes.
I spent the year-end holidays on wheelchairs and crutches. It took me a few months to eventually walk again and an entanglement of blotchy red scars remain in place of my skin today. My body was never whole again.
This will be the first of many parts about me.
I have a colorful history of injuries.
- By the time I entered primary school, I had twice left Ang Mo Kio Ave 10 in a pool of blood. The first time, I was rocking myself on a chair like humpty dumpty, all limbs and head tucked under my t-shirt. I then over-rocked and tumbled over onto the floor, head-first. I think my mum screamed when she saw that humpty dumpty had a great fall, and a bloody head. I couldn't remember most of what happened after that, save for someone stitching me up with thread and needle.
- The second accident was less storybook-like. Just a simple run along my babysitter's corridor, then trip and fall, crash and bang. I once again broke my fall with my trusty head, this time against the stair at the front door. I remember I held a towel against my wound to stem the blood flow as Uncle carried me on the lift down. That made me a two-time veteran of stitching up operations, both on the right of my forehead, at almost the same location incidentally, and quite a few stitches each way.
Your feelings when you meet it, I
Am told you can't forget,
I've sought it since I was a child
But haven't found it yet;
I'm getting on for thirty-five,
And still I do not know
What kind of creature it can be
That bothers people so.
When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose,
Will it knock on my door in the morning
Or tread in the bus on my toes,
Will it come like a change in the weather,
Will its greeting be courteous or bluff,
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
An excerpt from Another Time, W H Auden.
I should starting reading him.
I'm trying to update my Friendster profile after like 2 years and it pisses me off somewhat. Uploaded a photo but it kept vanishing without any notice. retarded.
I put my degree name as 'some boring shit', and it stopped me saying, "No profanity allowed". Grow up!!
But anyhow, the profile page resembles me a bit more now.
Reading the morning news, I can't help but wonder whether the courtesy campaign had gone a bit too far when Richard Yong, the fuckin fraudster, very kindly agreed to be extradited back to Singapore to face trial after he was nabbed in HK.
Was there a need to ask permission from a criminal?
"Hi Mr Yong, we've finally caught you! Would you mind if we extradite you back to Singapore so that you can get lynched by the mob?"
"Well since you asked so courteously, sure. Where're your handcuffs? Let me do it myself."
There was no mention of the wife who was also caught. I suppose she said no. Politely of course.
Ahh, I've got photos.
Or here, if reading does't make your head spin.
 |
| National Stadium - Closing Ceremony |
I'm so hungry the stomach juices have gotten to my brain. After lunch, I'll get so sleepy I can't work either. After teabreak the physical self should be fine, but then it'd nearly be knock off time. That leaves the morning, and mornings are strictly for checking emails and warming up for the rest of the day. I think the Best Employee award may be beyond me this month.
Something irks me whenever i visit the toilet here. There's perpetually a puddle of pee or two right under the urinals. And by puddle i mean a real puddle, like water collected in a pothole after rain.
I dunno how the guy manages it. It looks as if the urinal is leaking, but I know it's not. And apparently it's not a case of misjudgement, more like the instrument of projection malfunctioned and the criminal fluid wimply dripped onto the floor instead of gushing out into the urinal. How he prevented his shoes from being splattered all over is mystifying.
Such inept performance is socially intolerable. I propose that the Moral Education subject in school includes a module on Proper Peeing Practice (PPP). The PPP practical exam would have a row of students peeing while the examiner inspects from the back. Any drop of pee on the floor renders immediate failure. Repeat failures should be banned from public toilets. That should nip the pertinent problem in the bud, before it gets out of hand, literally.
I can watch it alll dayyyyyy looonnnnngggggg
coz unlike Heroes, I know it doesn't have a crap
ending. ohh yeahhhhh
Hanging out
Down the streets
The same old thing
We did last week
Not a thing to doooo
But TALK to you
WooaaaaaaYEAHHHHHH
I was at the kitchen, examining a bunch of bananas for
ripeness.
The father steps in.
I heard his gruffy voice, "Can eat already. But not
very ripe."
I thought I heard wrong. "Huh??"
Said The Father, more loudly this time, "CAN EAT".
So I twisted one lucky yellow banana out of the bunch
and it splitted open down the side instead of
detaching from the top, a sure sign that it is... not
ripe enough.
The Father continues, "But not very ripe".
wtf..
The Intern strode in at 9.13am. The daily consistency of the slightly late arrival deserves a mention.
9.16am, the death clutch of sleepiness slips in her deadly hand.
The Intern is too drowsy and too far gone to continue writing.
A toast for my deceased grandpa. And another to the reaches of the Internet.
I'm doing the midnight shift for the fourth straight night at the funeral, currently tapping into somebody's wireless network from a pavilion among the HDB estate.
In an hour's time I'll see a pudgy woman emerging from the lift lobby behind me, with a cigerette in her mouth.
In two hour's time another better looking lady will be on her way to work, carrying two bags with her, sometimes three.
And yet another hour later, I should be waiting for the rest to wake up from deep slumber, so that I can return home to my morning bed. I usually fall asleep the moment I lie down. But not today. The crematorium awaits the body which won't wake again.
Contrary to what many may have feared, The Intern is still alive.
Days have fallen into weeks, and the weeks daisychained to the first month passed. By the end of this week, the halfway mark would be reached.
Each day of slavery has since taken on a monotonous routine of filling up the 17" monitor with my face while trying to debug some programming shit. Such braindrain is punctuated only by lunch and teabreak which is sadly losing its regularity; Fat Tham declared to embark on another of his nonsensical Slim Tham 2007 plan.
The working environment remains cold and silent. The most meaningful exchange of dialogue was over in two lines when Jenny the HR personnel handed me my first internship pay cheque. It was a fruitful conversation. Fruits are expensive these days. I now spend my daily existence looking forward to the next dialogue that I will have with her in a month's time.
The hours after work are less predictable. But I usually take the lift down. If nothing major crops up or the world doesn't need saving on that day, The Intern heads home to watch Heroes. About 4 more episodes to the finale of Season 1. At the end of that, the secret cache of 100+ carefully selected films should be able to last for a year or so.
I'm famous!
For a few milliseconds on Wednesday at least.
My letter got published by Today in her feature on the National Stadium where readers wrote in of their memories. So I did. And my passionate letter must have moved their hearts and souls to get selected, but not before the editors tore apart the innards and churned it around, save for the start and end which thankfully remained more or less intact, else I wouldn't have recognized it at all.
Between me and the lady called Jun-lei, who edited my piece, it started out embarassingly though.
My entry started with the mention of a little tin box which holds all the ticket stubs of the football matches that I had attended at Kallang. When she called me, The masquerading Intern, I was asked to bring down that little tin box with the particular ticket stub of the match that I wrote of. Sure I thought, I'd be delighted to.
When I rushed home after work, my precious tin box was nowhere to be found. It wasn't standing at where it should be, nor was it anywhere else. After moments of digging around, I finally realised that I had somehow arrived at an unsentimental decision to dump it, tin and contents, just a couple months ago.
That was a really depressing moment.
I had carefully kept all the tickets for years, starting from the 90's. So for almost a decade, they sat in darkness as docile memories do. Then came that fateful day when I decided that I'm never ever gonna do anything with these tickets since hey, they are all in my head and heart, so I threw them away. And now when that moment arrives for me to show off that piece of paper saying Singapore vs Bahrain, dated 2001, I have nothing.
Sad.
And embarassing when I call back Today to inform the lady that I no longer possess the tin box which I wrote of with pride.
Anyway, from the result of the editing, I experienced at first hand how conforming and politically correct the paper must behave especially when it is part of the national broadsheet. The words of the eventual published piece couldn't muster a fraction of the emotions burning through Kallang that night. Mild by comparison, that's right.
Here what's I originally wrote, within the restricted 200 words:
A little Mauna Loa Honey Roasted Macadamia Nuts tin box holds all the ticket stubs of the Lions’ games that I had attended. Of them, the most memorable match was the World Cup Qualifier against Bahrain in 2001, held at Kallang.
Singapore needed a win to qualify. Our opponents were leading and we struggled to get past them, tried as we did. Despite their superiority on the pitch, the middle-eastern charlatans started time wasting with more than 20 minutes of the game to go.
The crowd was incensed, outraged.
The trickeries of time wasting that they employed made a mockery of the beautiful game, even out-doing the comical Rivaldo in World Cup '02.
Singapore fans reacted in a way I had never seen before, cheering, shouting and cursing as one. That was Team Singapore, if I may borrow the present day term, at its united best. Coins were thrown and bottles flung in a mad cacophony. Rubbish strewed the pitch, and I don’t mean the Bahrain players.
Police had to intervene, so did Nazri Nasri, the Lions captain then. The Bahrain team bus was waylaid by lions and had to be escorted out. Kallang certainly roared that eventful night.
The edited version:
I can say very surely and strongly, that i dislike japan. despise even. That's not to say I can never have a japanese friend, but the nation on the whole is screwed up in my opinion.
In fact, I used to have a half jap half korean classmate back in secondary school. And in my impressionable young teenage mind, let's just say that her behaviour appeared somewhat deranged at times.
In the recently whaling saga, and not for the first time, the japs insist on killing 1000 whales in the name of scientific research. What research, they did not say. I guess they haven't think of what excuse to research on yet. But what they do know is that once the phony cover is over, it will be followed by the macabre sale of whale meat, for food??, and maybe to make perfumes from the dead whale blubbers.
Screw you japan.
I haven't ever see a whale yet, and you're gonna kill them all off.. bitch.
And of course I have to talk about WWII. The government have never seem to be remorseful about their atrocities even till now. The forced apologies over the years were merely to placate the anger of affected countries. And will the kids in jap schools ever know about what a great bunch of mother fuckers their predecessors were in all the wars? (see wikipedia)
By no great coincidence, japanese are perverts. The number of molesters who get away with it scot free is shocking. (see wiki) Heard from a japanese tour guide that, if you get molested on the train, either whack the guy or keep quiet. the police won't or can't help. The profligacy of jap porn is another example of the perverted nature. See the vending machines dispensing used panties for olfactory pleasures. And how about porn stars eating theirs or someone else's shit.. now that's really really fucking gross and a libido turn off.
From war crimes to murdering whales to sick perversion.. just a stroll down different avenues for them isn't it?
The mind is engulfed by sleepiness.
4 hours and 35 minutes to 6pm
...
I must hold on...
