In Continuum.

Before we get to that, however, a rant. The whole career of teaching is, not just going to be based on what you know, but also on how you translate what you know to your students. What goes on in a classroom, for the most part, is about the lecturer or the teacher, strips down the knowledge that he or she already knows, and then disseminating them to the students who are supposed to receive and digest these information into a form that they can comprehend and understand. That is what is supposed to happen, of course, the whole process of communicating an idea from point A to point B. In order to do that, I feel, language plays a very crucial part to ensure the success of this transmission of knowledge. I don't suppose knowledge could have been passed down the centuries if they were written in a language that we could understand, if they were really languages at all. If they actually wrote those things down in gibberish, nobody would ever understand what he was talking about. A good command in language just seems to be an important factor to be a good teacher, I feel, and this China Man seems to have little to none of those. 

Everybody had a problem with the way that he spoke. His pronunciation was one thing, the inability to get his point across was another. Aside from all the gags about him pronouncing "election" as "erection" half the time, I usually find it difficult to understand his point. Or rather, I do understand his point, but there are times when I feel like he has a hard time proving to us that he is, in fact, a real professor. He comes to class a minute or two late all the time, but that is perfectly fine with me. His conducting of the class, however, doesn't sit right with me most of the time, and you can't help but picture all those money poured into this course go down the gutter when you see your lecturer reading word for word from the presentation slides. It wouldn't be half as bad if he actually prepared those slides - he doesn't. In fact, not only did he not make the presentation slides himself, he doesn't have the habit to set exam papers himself either. That, we guessed, because a paper set by him would have a lot more grammatical mistakes, for sure. 

Perhaps my expectations were too high (or, were they?), but the image of a mass communication lecturer in my mind would be someone who is very receptive of different opinions, different perspectives, to have an opened mind. This lecturer, however, seems to have been brought up in the kind of high context family we read about only in textbooks. He's a very traditional man, perhaps too traditional for his own good. I don't think he accepts change or new ideas very well, for some reason, always putting down new technologies and ideas that the class may propose during the lessons. There was a part of the lecture when we started talking about online piracy, and he asked the class if anybody has ever downloaded music from the internet. Of course, the majority of us have, and then he went on to say that he doesn't like the idea of downloading music from the internet because, according to him, the quality of the music isn't very good. Seriously? Shouldn't a mass communication lecturer at least know that the quality of music files on the internet has nothing to do with the medium in which it is stored? The so-called "bad quality" of the music has nothing to do with the fact that it was from the internet, but the way the files were compressed or ripped from a CD in the very first place. So, seriously?

That's trivial, so I shall let it slide. However, the topic somehow came to the one about homosexuality at one point, and he started showing his distaste for homosexuals in front of everybody. Keep in mind, of course, he wasn't half as insulting as Rosemary back in last semester, but he sure wasn't very open to the idea of two men, or two women, having sex either. He found the idea of homosexuals to be repulsive, and he said so with the presence of actual homosexuals in the lecture theater - I shall not give names, but I guess we all know who. I thought that was a little tactless, to say things like that. I suppose teachers have an obligation to not publicly proclaim their religious and political affiliations. Shouldn't the same be said about their opinions on other sensitive topics such as homosexuality? The last time a lecturer voiced her opinion about how "the chinese likes to cheat", there was an online petition against her within a matter of days. Words from a lecturer, no matter how mild, offends certain groups of people for sure, and I felt that it wasn't exactly very appropriate. And, he dislikes Ellen Degeneres simply because - she's a lesbian. Now, I'm not a soccer mom, but I love Ellen Degeneres. Who cares if she is a lesbian anyway, at least she has good taste (Portia is freakin' hot). 

We were going through the mid-terms paper the other day, and he flashed the questions on the screen in front of the class while he read out the answers. We were at question 13, I think, and apparently he was looking at the answer for question 14, and the answers were different (the answer for question 13 was A, while the answer for question 14 was B, for example). When he announced the wrong answer, everybody gasped and started arguing that the answer key must have been wrong. Now, you would expect a professor to check the question again and see if the answer key was wrong or not, right? No, he simply argued his way through as to why "B" was really the correct answer for question 13, when he was looking at the wrong question altogether. It surprised me as to how he could assume the wrong answer in a question and then argue his way through that he and the answer key were right, and that we were wrong. He noticed his mistake after some time, but at this point I was already appalled at how he could argue with us with the wrong answer. Keep in mind, that we are speaking of a supposedly "world renowned" mass communication scholar here. How did that happen?

The last straw finally came, when our presentations started rolling on Tuesday. You see, in his words, we were supposed to be given "up to fifteen minutes". In normal terms, "up to fifteen minutes" usually means that we have a maximum of fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes top, nothing more than fifteen minutes, however way you prefer to interpret it. The batch of people that went up to present on Tuesday certainly did not get the kind of timing that he supposedly gave us. All of them complained that his timing was "off", and that he only gave about twelve to thirteen minutes for each group, max. Now, two or three minutes may not seem like a lot in normal terms, but every minute is pretty crucial in a presentation context. You take two minutes off the actual timing, and you are left with a hurried and incomplete presentation that is definitely going to affect the quality at the very end. Still, my group adjusted before our own presentation today, we made changes and we compromised. I told my group that he'd probably give us about twelve minutes this time around, worst case scenario, and we'd have to play along with his game. 

So, our turn came along during the presentation, and I brought my iPod Touch along to the front of the class to give time to the rest of the group. As the presentation started, the China Man sat in the front row and gave his scheduled nods to the presentation slides, those random scribbling on a piece of paper, and whatnot. He told the class that we'd probably only get thirteen minutes for each group this time around, since we had eight groups instead of seven on Tuesday. He was rushing for time, and our timings had to be compromised - fair enough, since we already predicted the worst. By the end of Joyce's presentation, however, he held up his piece of paper with the number "2" written on it, which meant that I only had two more minutes to finish a four minute speech. Now, that was at nine minutes, and it said so on the screen of my iPod Touch. Nine minutes plus two minutes is eleven minutes, China Man, you promised two more. As a result, I had to rush through everything I had to say, and I had to skip a bunch of points which were make-or-break points of our paper. I was so frustrated by the time he flashed the paper with the number "0" on it that I wanted to tear out his throat and eat it. 

He claimed that he checked with the clock hanging on the wall in the lecture hall, but everybody knew that he had a problem with telling time. He kept referring to the class that presented on Tuesday as "yesterday" today. Wednesday comes before Thursday, sir, and we didn't have classes yesterday. I was so frustrated with the man that I left the classroom for a while to collect myself, perhaps to calm my nerves a little. It was frustrating to know that a fifteen minute presentation was forced to shrink till just eleven minutes, and I could have talked about so much more during my part. It made my part look under-developed, made me look bad. The worst part was by the time the lesson was done, we were actually half an hour before the time was supposed to end! Clearly, with eight groups, we would have made the time anyway, why the initial rush? All the groups could have took their time with fifteen minutes and finish the presentations in a comfortable pace anyway. And yes, the class ends at 1:45 PM China Man, not 1:30PM like you are always so confused with. 

I am glad to be rid of him, for now, and I sure hope that I won't get this lecturer when I eventually head to the States next year. I cannot bring myself to respect a lecturer who cannot tell the time, one, and someone who reads from presentation slides that he never made. That is not to mention the fact that he seems to have a problem with homosexuals, movies made in this decade, music from the internet, and all those things that might be deemed to be out of tradition for him. I suppose I can tolerate a narrow-minded lecturer, but somebody who is going to deprive me of my presentation time is not going to sit with me very well. That funny accent is starting to get on my nerves even as I am typing this very line, and it doesn't matter any longer if I do badly for this module. It just seems so out of reach right now, all thanks to our friend here. Somebody should buy him a watch to tell time, a watch with a stopwatch at least. His cheap imitation of a watch probably tells two timings - day time and night time. 

Coffee black and egg white

Pull me out from inside

I am ready, I am ready, I am ready

I am taffy stuck and tongue-tied

Stutter shook and uptight.

Pull me out from inside

I am ready, I am ready, I am ready

I am fine. 

I am covered in skin

No one gets to come in

Pull me out from inside

I am folded, and unfolded, and unfolding

I am colorblind.

Coffee black and egg white.

Pull me out from inside. 

I am ready, I am ready, I am ready

I am fine. 

I am fine. 

It's strange, how the act of going to the restroom was some sort of taboo on television in the 50s and the 60s. Studios were fined for showing a toilet, even if nobody's using it. Of course, you couldn't say "shit" on television, and you couldn't say "toilet" either. In fact, you couldn't show a toilet being flushed, or the part of the restroom with a toilet, or mention the act of going to one in the first place. That is why people invented ridiculous euphemisms over the years to give an illusion that we do anything but dispose of our bodily waste in those cubicles. They called it "restrooms" and "bathrooms", as if we really go to those claustrophobic places to take a break from our work from time to time. Where did the word "lavatory" come from anyway? It just sounds like a sector in a laboratory, a section that studies lava or something like that, who knows? Public toilets are known as "portable toilets", "public lavatories" or, get this, "public conveniences". Euphemisms, they really do push the envelopes and make everything sound so pretentious at times. I wonder why people were so ashamed to speak of public toilets, since we visit them on a day to day basis. It's something that we all do, what's to be ashamed of? Of course, toilet paper also became "bathroom tissue". 

I appreciate a good, clean public toilet myself. If it is a place I have to visit every single day, I'd like the place to have some form of basic hygiene. That is also why toilet cleanliness ranks so high in my books, I suppose. Public toilets, more than any other forms of toilets, should be kept in tip top conditions at all times, since more people visit these places more than all the other toilets combined. Think about it, people of all shapes and sizes, all habits and all ages visit these "public conveniences" everyday, and it's not like all of them could care less about keeping a public toilet clean. All they want to do is to get in and get out, and they treat most public toilets like the woman they intend to sleep with during a one night stand. I'm not sure about the conditions in the female toilets - although I have heard about their horror stories - but I know of what it is like over on our side of the fence, and things aren't pretty over here either. It is difficult to find a public toilet that one can feel genuinely comfortable in, even if you are just going to be in there for a short period of time. 

Here's a public toilet which I admire, the ones at Paragon shopping center in Orchard. Look to the medical block if you want the five-star toilets, because they are probably the best in Singapore - believe me, I've checked. Completed with marble tiles and the constant stream of opera music from the speakers above, toilets at Paragon feel more like a spa than anything else. You feel completely private and safe when you are in the cubicles, segregated from the others by thick slabs of concrete and marble tiles. The whole place is constantly doused with air-refreshing scents, and the most important thing - the place isn't always waterlogged and humid. We've all been inside a bathroom where the grounds are wet and sticky for whatever reasons, but the same cannot be said about the toilets at Paragon. They are always dry, because somebody takes care of them with their hearts and their souls. It is one of the best public toilet that I have ever been to personally, and even the toilet doors are automated. How cool is that? 

Dirty toilets aren't my cup of tea, although it might be Mike Rowe's (You know, Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, on Discovery Channel? Never mind). Those are probably my number one hate, but I don't suppose I should go into details about that. I mean, nobody likes to read about dirty toilets, let alone reading about details in regards to a dirty toilet. Don't worry, because I hate to blog about those either, however interesting I foresee it to be. Next to dirty toilets, I probably hate toilets with little to no privacy at all. My father used to tell me about his horror stories in China, where there weren't partitions between toilet cubicles. If somebody wanted to use the toilet you were sitting on desperately, all he needed to do would be to peek over the door, which was really no more than a wooden board on hinges. He could see the person next to him taking a dump while he was taking a dump itself, and those things are certainly very horrifying. While we do not get that kind of intrusion in Singapore, we do have urinals that are way too exposed for normal usage. The best urinals are the ones that "cups" the private area on all sides, not the kind that looks somewhat like the palm of a person's hand and you feel exposed on either side of your crotch. 

It is especially nerve-racking when you are in one of those dark and shady public toilets, and the urinals are way too small to conceal your privates. I have heard of horror stories of perverted old men and desperate gay men in public toilets before, and some of those stories are way too close to home for comfort at times. Yishun MRT station was famed not just for the target of a terrorist attack, but also for the creepy gay old men who used to roam the area to hunt down young and muscular young boys. A friend of a friend was there once, tending to his hair and his business at the washer when an old man appeared next to him and smiled at him with the kind of look that would've already cued most women to knee him in the nuts. But you don't expect an old man to have any sort of perverted thoughts towards a young boy, at least not conventionally speaking. What the old man did next traumatized my friend's poor friend: he reached around him and patted him on his crotch, something that caused him to run out of the public toilet, screaming. 

There really should be some sort of security cameras mounted in public toilets, at least at the basins where you are going to be save from any accidental exposures. There was this one time when I was at the sink when an Indian man stepped up to the one next to me. The strange thing was, he had his penis hanging out of his pants when he came to the sink as I saw in the mirror reflection, and then he proceeded to wash his penis in the basin in front of everybody. I swear, that traumatized me so bad that I have forever sworn off the public toilets at Bishan Junction 8. Whatever was the man thinking, when he thought that putting his penis over running water at the sink would be a sensible thing to do, I wonder. Shouldn't that constitute as indecent exposure in public places, should I be compensated for such things? I don't feel harassed or violated, perhaps just a little disgusted at the thought of the next person who decides to use the same sink to rinse his mouth, or something. Oh, the thought of it. 

So, public toilets are pretty scary places if not maintained properly, and some people have phobias about them too. A family friend of ours in Taiwan has a son who just passed out from the Taiwanese national service a year or two ago. He was somebody I grew up with while in Taiwan, a kid who was twice the size of anybody in his age group. He wasn't fat or anything, but he was just huge, or "big-boned" his parents would explain. Anyway, he was also a hygiene freak to an extreme degree, and he'd never use a public toilet, no matter the circumstances. He probably had the ability to see microscopic bacteria around the toilet seats as well as the sinks, or maybe he heard the same horror stories as I did. It is a habit that is perfectly alright if you are a civilian, but not when you spend most of your time trotting through the jungles and being on an off-shore island for most parts of the year. Still, he kept up his habit, and he held the record of not using the public bathroom for "number two" for ten days straight. 

His health deteriorated afterwards, and everybody got worried. Nobody understood why he didn't want to use public toilets, they only knew that the idea irked him to no end. So, what the parents did was to urge him to use toilets at hotels whenever he booked out from camp. That solved matters only in the short term, however, and all those months with accumulated human feces in his body took a toll on his face. Just imagine having those feces clod up your system for long periods of time, it's probably going to have some form of adverse effects on the body. Pimples sprung up like mushrooms after a storm on his face, and it remained that way for the most part of his life in the army. I find it amusing at times, how humans can be absolutely vulnerable and terrified of organisms a million times smaller than ourselves, but I guess this childhood friend of mine succumbed to that fear a long time ago. You cannot blame him though, he probably had traumatic experiences himself.  

So yes, in regards to these "public conveniences", I suppose I have my own peeves as well. It is interesting, every once in a while, to see attempts by the maintenance committee to help the male population to "increase their urinating accuracy", if you know what I mean. I suppose you can tell a lot about a place through the way it maintains its public toilets, and these public toilets are like horoscopes of major shopping malls around the world. Are you a lazy mall or are you a hardworking mall, are you a mall that likes privacy or are you too out going for your own good? All because of the five minutes I spent in my school's toilet the other day, imagine that. 

Let's begin from point one, from where I sit. I can hear the fan spinning behind me, and the sound never fails to confuse me between the swirling wind and that of rain falling outside the window. Especially those brief moments of awakening just before dawn, and you are lying in your bed with the dreams still lingering in your head, your blurry mind begins to debate with yourself if it is really raining outside, or if it is just the fan being turned to a notch too strong. It usually is the fan though, rain in the morning doesn't come very often these days any more. It's the wrong season I suppose, which is why I'd have to get used to the fan for now. Blue boxes are appearing in the bottom right of my computer screen, slowly fading into the background image which I picked out from a site on the internet I visit. The  dark clouds like blankets over a purple sea of trees, like overhanging mountains bearing down upon the canopy. I like wallpapers of nature somehow, it gives me a little something that my own bedroom window does not provide. All I see is the building opposite my own, the roads and the cars down below, the neighbors minding their own businesses in their homes, and then the occasional sight of the moon peeping at this half of the world. 

It is so crowded these days, which is why I feel immensely thankful of my school's timetable. With a three day week and Thursday being the new Friday, going to town doesn't seem as much a chore as it used to be any longer. The narrowed walkways and the stifling malls, not to mention the humid air and the bustling crowds. Every inch of Orchard Road is a reason to stay away from nowadays, and the same thing repeats itself on every vein that runs through the country at peak hours. If the island is a living and breaking human being, then he should really worry about his blood congestion problem. The expressways are like blood vessels that runs through our bodies, and these expressways literally turn into parking lots when there are too many cars lining up in front of traffic lines, desperate to go home. Cars after cars after cars, like giant electric shavers all vibrating softly to their engines. I was trapped in a similar jam this evening on my way home, after an impatient wait at the bus stop around the Raffles Town Club. A man blew smoke into the back of my head today, and the cold dead stare into his narrow eyes did little to hurt his pride. A random thought. 

I feel bad for the taxi driver today, despite collecting a handsome amount of money from me due to the surcharges. Damn the surcharges, and it would have been worse if he actually took CTE. The ERP gantries are like the neon signs that lead to hell, a hell that robs money from you if you make a wrong turn at the wrong time of the day. Peak hours in Singapore might as well be the heart of a dying man, with blood clods and what not choking up his system. Nothing moves properly at peak hours, nothing moves as they should any longer. The driver's fingers drummed on the top of the wheel like Russian ballerinas, and the giant plunger appeared in my head to clear the road before the front of the cab. I became restless and my knees were hurting again, and the bag on top of my thighs weren't helping too much to ease the pain either. All the drivers around me were leaning forward, with their chins shot beyond the edge of the wheel, as if it'd help with the clearing of the road at all. Nothing worked, not even the horning and the rude cutting of cars into different lanes. But my cab driver just watched from over the brink of his glasses, a man who has seen too many of such congested roads. The lines around his eyes and lips were like deep roads carved into his skin over the years, and I wondered how long he has been at the job. 

Probably  not very long, as I later discovered. He made a wrong turn into the bus lane, and a traffic police was waiting behind the bushes like a fox, armed with a digital camera. The only way for the cab to evade a ticket would be to run over the traffic police and then drive all the way up into Malaysia and to never been seen again. That'd be stupid, which is probably why the driver just brushed it off with a curse and then an awkward smile. I looked at him with my matching awkward look as well, because I felt really bad for being the passenger in his car while he received his, well, probably a hefty sum of fine. His finger trembled as he reached for the "K4"button on the meter, as if he was shaking with frustration over the mistake that he made. He miscalculated the price of the trip for about eight times, every time adding a few cents to the total amount. He was probably subconsciously trying to get more money from me just to cover the fine, and I felt very bad for correcting him every time he made a mistake with the calculation. Still, I got out of the cab and trotted across the road despite the zebra crossing just a few meters down the road. I escaped this time, though I can't say the same for the driver. 

I am beginning to be accustomed to the permanently dark room of mine, with the lamp by the side of the computer and the sombre atmosphere that screams of inspiration. For some reason, any music seems to fit this beautiful ambience, and I suppose this is what anyone's safe haven should look and feel like. Janice from Australia just sent me a bunch of pictures of a baby giraffe that was just given birth to a few days ago, and she didn't warn me about the pictures of the umbilical chord that followed swiftly after. The chocolate muffin in my head got stuck somewhere between my throat and the back of my tongue at that moment, and then this moment of limbo was ensued by a silent scream from the comfort of my bedroom with Natalie Walker's music coming through the speakers - the irony of the image. But baby-anything is pretty much a good thing for me, I suppose you can say that I am a sucker for those. Like I was telling somebody, babies are adorable as long as they are not my responsibility. It sounds really cold, but I know you are thinking the same. You'd rather play with your neighbor's baby than your own, right? Right? I rest my case. Oh, now she is showing me baby flying squirrels, and a close up picture of a squirrel nipples. So much for the muffin. 

I cannot wait for the holiday to come, by the way. Two weeks of bliss, absolute nothingness. I'm probably going to fly to Taiwan for no good reasons at all, just to get away from this place for some time. It has been delayed for way too long, and I miss Taiwan in late summer and early autumn, when the air would smell like a handful of damp sand at the beach outside the airport. I'd like to take the bullet train down south this time, maybe visit a friend or two whom I have promised to meet, and maybe eat myself silly during the trip. Speaking of which, I still have a bunch of movies I have yet to watch (Dr. Strangelove and The Lives of Others) and re-watch (The Hours and Waking Life). This week has to end, and it has to end soon. In fact, everything has to end soon, like this random, impulsive, unplanned, non-systematic, erratic, unmethodical, rubbish of a blog entry. And so, it shall end on that note, and I shall finish the half-eaten muffin that I left over just now after seeing the umbilical chord. 

The idea of obituaries is strange to me, I wonder who came up with it in the first place. I bet it was a very rich businessman, or some politician, someone who wanted the world to know that he was dead. More than that, however, he probably wanted people to know just how great he was a person in life, and was probably aiming at making the readers feel a sense of loss and perhaps sympathy too. I can imagine him on his death bed, telling his son to put his picture in tomorrow's morning newspaper, and make sure they use fanciful languages to describe his efforts in life and the moments before his death. Everybody wants to be remembered in a positive manner, nobody wants to be remembered as the "tyrant", or the "dictator", or simply "that old bastard". So the editors at the publishing house probably had a hard time coming up with variations of the word "good" just to describe this rich businessman - let's call him Ralph. Ralph probably wasn't that good a person in life, truth to be told. He probably drank too much and was a wife beater. But hey, everything can be forgiven in death, everybody becomes "honorable" and "admirable" in death. That magic of obituaries, they make the nastiest people sound like saints.

It just sounds like the product of a narcissistic man, someone who loved himself a tad bit too much. He wanted everybody to love him too, even those that never knew him in life until the morning when they flipped open the newspaper. I don't get the idea of obituaries at all, but it is not stopping people from putting their dead relatives or friends in them every morning in the newspaper. It seems like a guaranteed source of income, which is probably why the publishers are willing to spare a few pages just for black and white pictures of dead people. Of course, black and white pictures coupled with a bunch of fancy words and phrases. They are usually nice words to describe the dead people, although their pictures never look too happy to hear those words. You'd expect them to be somehow grateful, to know that people are going to remember them in such a fashion. But they always look so bored in those pictures, just tired of life. They probably couldn't wait to leave this world, and the last thing they wanted to do was to have their bored picture plastered all over the morning newspaper. So much for the fancy words, nobody in obituaries seem to appreciate them very much, anyway. 

Dead people's money are so easy to earn, don't you think? That is probably why so many businesses related to death are springing out from nowhere these days. A coffin probably costs in the vicinity of a few thousand dollars, unless you are so cheap that you'd rather go for the wooden pine box. The funeral itself would cost a lot of money, not to mention the cremation if you are into that form of burial, or the traditional way of burying your loved ones in the ground - that'd cost even more money. Supposedly, the idea of returning into nature through the decomposition of one's body and back into the soils isn't an idea welcomed by many people today. Which is why people are given the option of cremating their loved ones and then putting them into little glass urns. By the way, they call it cremation, I call it "burning of dead corpses". It's a nice word, but they really mean the same thing. Even that urn is going to cost you a whole lot of money, and there are even businesses now that make DVDs out of the funeral - how morbid can the business get?

But it is all money we are talking about, money being cashed into your pockets. Everybody likes money, even the dead likes paper money with an obscene amount of zeros in them - the underworld must be facing some heavy inflation, judging from the currency that they are trading with. I mean, ten trillion? Give me a break. Anyway, dead people's money are easy to earn, relatives are willing to do anything just to send them off in the right manner. A little bit more money isn't too much to ask for, it is the last thing the living can do for the dead after all. They work with this mentality of the family of the deceased, they like to manipulate them into buying the most expensive urn or the most pricey coffin. It is the last time anyway, why not spend a few more dollars? Your loved one would be appreciative, he'd be smiling down at you from above for sure. Well, nobody ever considers the possibility that their loved ones may be looking up from below, cursing. Everybody is looking down, because everybody is in Heaven. Everybody is a good person according to the obituaries, and we take the words in those morbid looking pages of an average newspaper as definitive. 

It must have stemmed from the fear of the definite nature of life that humans possess, the way we have created, for ourselves, the illusion of an afterlife just so that we'd be able to live forever. The same goes with those morbid looking pictures in the obituaries in a way, we just want to live in a certain way in everybody's minds. It doesn't matter what you did in life, everybody becomes so forgiving once you are six feet under. If you were a violent father in life, you'd become a strict father with firm principles in death. If you were a alcoholic in life, you'd become a hearty man in death. If you were a person who liked to gamble a lot in life, you'd become a person who took risks in death. If you were a person who died because of drug overdose in life, you'd become a person who was always filled with vibrant imageries and ideas in death. Everything is forgiven, everything is A-OK in death. It's interesting to observe how our perception of the dead changes once they are officially dead. I'd like to see somebody bad-mouth a dead person at his or her funeral, that'd be interesting to see. While that person may not end up as being very welcomed at the funeral, at least he'd be utterly and completely honest.

You read about tragic events in the newspaper from time to time, the obituaries aside. You know, somebody drowning in the swimming pool, somebody taking a plunge off the balcony, somebody being raped and stabbed in a dark alley. These people are almost always good students, good husbands, good friends, or good citizens. Well, you don't hear about bad people drowning, killing themselves, raped and killed in the newspaper, because it just doesn't seem very impacting I suppose. Whenever a student is involved in some tragic accident, the paper would always use words like "diligent student" or "respectful son", and never anything else. I'd like to see a man ran over by a car being described as "an old pervert who deserved to die", or "a man who never had a spine in life". Anything out of the ordinary, that'd be fun to see indeed. It is all Ralph's fault I reckon, Ralph probably wasn't a very good person in life. He just wanted everybody else to think that he was, and we follow suit because, well, the man is dying! Cut him some slack, right? 

As if the function of obituary isn't enough, some people abuse the system by posting pictures of their dead relatives twenty years after their death, like some kind of wedding anniversary or something. "Mrs. so and so, died on July the 25th, 1988. Mother of four and the good wife of Mr. so and so, and shall be remembered today as the mother that we all love and miss dearly". There are a dozen people dying every single day, and there you are taking up half the page with a person who died twenty years ago? What is it with anniversaries that we are so obsessed over anyway, especially when it is a death anniversary. It is not like the person who died was some kind of a martyr, or somebody who made a great sacrifice in life for the betterment of everybody else. That person was probably just a rich businessman, some politician, or anybody with children rich enough to take up half a page in the morning newspaper. Sometimes, you get fourteen year anniversaries too - now what's up with that? Fourteen is an odd number, it doesn't really have authority. Since you want the great population to remember your dead mother from the past, shouldn't you pick a more authoritative number? Perhaps a ten year anniversary, or a fifteen year anniversary. Fourteen is just strange, unless it was your mother's lucky number. But death is not something to celebrate about, it's not a nation's birthday or something like that. I don't see the purpose of digging up old graves and to remind everybody about it. Let the person rest in peace, you living people should just continue living your lives as per normal. 

I find it amusing how the obituaries are almost always placed next to the classified advertisements. We have a page of people selling refrigerators, some guy trying to sell his car, some company looking for part-time employees, someone looking for his lost dog somewhere in Toa Payoh area. Then you flip the page, and you see a whole bunch of dead people on display, and you find yourself choking on your coffee and spilling it all over the morning newspaper. Great, now you have coffee stain all over the pictures of the dead people, and the superstitious you is going to feel like shit for the rest of the day because, well, you spilled coffee over the obituary page. I don't think the obituary should be a part of any newspaper, it doesn't flow with the theme of any newspaper in the world. The front page is the page that sells the paper, dedicated to the busybody and the curious. The finance page is for the businessman, the stock brokers, the money-minded people in the population. The entertainment section is for those TV-junkies, the movie buffs, the scandal lovers and whatnot. The sports section appeals to the soccer addicts, the basketball fans, or whoever that intends to place a bet on tonight's soccer game. Who is the obituary for, who reads it? Every section in the newspaper was designed to appeal to somebody, but not the obituary. Nobody ever reads the obituary, nobody likes the idea that someday, they might be the ones appearing on those pages, just waiting for somebody to spit coffee on their pictures. 

I think there should be a separate paper for the obituaries. I shall call it "The Obituary Post", just to appeal for those people who wants to know who passed away yesterday, or maybe twenty years ago. Some people need to be reminded of how precious their lives are, and these people can only be reminded by knowing about other people's death. You know, those people who'd tell you about how we should treasure our lives only when there's some kind of natural disasters overseas, or when a large number of people died in some terrorist attack. They see a bunch of people dying on the evening news, and they turn to tell you to treasure your life. Seriously, we shouldn't wait till a bunch of people are dying before we tell ourselves that we should treasure every moment. Not when you are reading the obituary, not when you are watching the evening news. Think about it, the newspaper obituary could be a great place for product placement. Need a spanking new coffin for your newly dead relative? How about an expensive urn that costs two-thirds of your salary? Maybe hire a fengshui  master who is going to tell you the best place to bury your relative, a fengshui master who is also going to take away a third of that salary of yours? Product placements, I am going to be a very, very rich man. 

Just a few days ago, I received a similar e-mail in which I almost dismissed as just any other spam. However, a curious little thing happened - I took some time off to read this spam, and I was greatly amused at the amount of entertainment value a worthless e-mail provided me. It was sent to me by a certain Mrs Esther Prakash from Kuwait, and I am supposed to have inherited 2.6 million dollars from her dying husband. So, that is supposed to make me take off my clothes and dance around my room naked like a mad man, right? Not quite, because I know the devilry at work here, and taking apart the e-mail was pretty interesting indeed. The funniest part of the e-mail was probably how she addressed me as "Dearest In Christ". I am not sure if that is how they typically address a Christian in Kuwait, or is there some glaring grammatical mistake here. Either way, for the rest of this entry, I shall address myself as "In Christ". Here's the actual e-mail I received:

Mrs Esther Prakash
P.O.Box: 20581, Safat
13066 Safat Kuwait

Dearest in Christ,

Greetings in the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I am Mrs Esther Prakash. I am married to Mr Prakash Anderson who worked with Kuwait embassy in Ivory Coast for many years before he died in the year 2006.We were married without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.

So, dear Mrs Esther Prakash, I think by now we have already established the fact that you are both a con-man (or woman) and a person who is incredibly bad at her job. I am assuming that this e-mail was sent to me to obtain my personal information which you have so kindly asked for, although that is exactly what you are not going to get. However, since you have taken some time off to write this rather moving e-mail of yours, I have to reply something back to you. It's the law of reciprocity, I don't suppose you understand the nature of such a human condition because you have obviously not gotten a hang of persuasion at all. In return, I shall point out the mistakes in your e-mail, and thus, aid you in future cons and I wish you all the best with your personal information gathering venture. Best of luck! 

Anyway, to begin, you don't make assumptions about your victims - or, someone you intend to send an e-mail to to con them. You don't assume that both our "lords" are the same, because your Jesus Christ may be the lord, but to me he's no more real than Gandalf the White from The Lord of the Rings, or the pointy ears of the Hobbits. So, rule number one in conning, you'd want your victims' sympathy I would assume, which is probably why you made up a fictional husband and killed him off after some deadly disease that wiped out his organs in a mere span of four days. Well, if you want to have us sympathize with you, I am afraid you'd have to try much harder than this. Come up with a real terminal illness or something, or fake a name for all I care. There are a dozen different terminal illnesses out there anyway, nobody is going to know everything I am sure. Maybe his allergy to pubic hair got to his brain at last, or perhaps he choked on his own vomit and died. Whatever the case may be, come up with a convincing story. Don't just say "He died after a brief illness". You can do better than that. 

When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of (($2.600.000.00) Two million six hundred thousand Dollars in a Bank in Ivory Coast. Recently, my Doctor told me that I would not last for the next Eight months due to cancer problem.
I Have decided to donate this fund to you so that you will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct you. I want you to use this fund for orphanages, school and, widows, and to endeavour that the house of God is maintained. I took this decision because I don't have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians.

I don't want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way. This is why I am taking this decision.

I wonder what position your husband used to work as at the Kuwait Embassy in the Ivory Coast, because 2.6 million dollars is a lot of money we are talking about here. So your husband's profession has already been put into doubt here, failure number two. It is tragic to hear that you are dying from a "cancer problem", although that's not how we'd usually phrase it on this side of the world. We just call it "cancer", plain and simple. The word itself is serious enough to convey numerous amount of dread and horrors, so the word "problem" is really pretty redundant I must say. You are making your illness sound like a knee problem, or a problem with your ear, or something much less trivial relatively. It's not a "cancer problem", it's just "cancer". Get that part right, so that we can start pitying you. 

So you are going to instruct me on what to do with 2.6 million dollars that your husband passed to you? Honey, you are making yourself sound like a person who is really good with money, and that you are trying to give me some advices by instructing me. You sounded somewhat like a professional there, I give you that one. However, if you have just received 2.6 million dollars from your dead husband, wanting to transfer that money to a stranger in Singapore, like myself, is in itself the dumbest financial move you could ever make. Even the most idiotic homeless man on the street knows how to keep a free nickel to himself, and I suppose he is a lot more qualified to instruct me on what I have to do with my money, not you. Failure number three, you are running out. 

So, Mrs Esther Prakash, you want to help the orphans and the widows out there, right? Sympathy points, very nicely done. Everybody sympathizes with orphans and widows, that is sure to convince a couple of goons out there with half a brain. What I cannot figure out, however, is the reason why you cannot donate to the orphanages in your own country. Iraq attacked your country in the late 1980s and the early 1990s if I remember correctly, I am sure that alone has provided enough orphans in your own country for you to donate this amount of money to. The orphans here in Singapore are well taken care of, we really don't need your money when people from your own country probably needs it way more than us. By the way, what is wrong with being non-Christians anyway, I am sure your relatives are good people in their own rights. Not believing in the same God does not make them worse people, or is that what you have been brought up to think? Let me get this straight: you do not trust your relatives to handle this amount of money in an "ungodly" fashion because they are not Christians, and yet you are willing to send this money to a complete stranger overseas. Guess what, I am not a Christian. In fact, I am everything a religion is pretty much against, so too bad to betray your trust there, failure number four.  

I don't need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health and hence the presence of my husband's relatives is around me always. I don't want them to know about this development. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the Bank in Ivory Coast.

I await your soonest response with your full information, example.
Your full name.......................
Address......................................
Age............................................
A copy of your int'l passport or ID card.............

So, Mrs Prakash, you don't need my telephone number because, according to you, your health is failing like your persuasive power in this e-mail. By extension, that probably also means that you cannot talk in proper, which is strange how you managed to type this e-mail all by yourself. Maybe you had some kind of help, from your own relatives perhaps? Or maybe your dead husband guiding your hands over the keyboard, like that creepy scene from Ghost, if that movie ever reached your Persian shores. It is amazing that you, a sick and dying woman from a "cancer problem", has somehow gotten your hands on my e-mail out of all the billions and trillions of e-mails floating about out there, and yet you are too weak to talk to me on the phone to make a monetary transaction. Perhaps you are afraid to give yourself away on the phone, maybe you are not from Kuwait at all. Maybe a Chinese woman in China trying to con my money like your other colleague who tried to call me the other day about my fifteen million dollars. 

It is a little fishy don't you think, if someone asks for your full name and address and promises 2.6 million dollars. I'd rather you pay me ten dollars up front, instead of you promising 2.6 million dollars if I send over my personal particulars. It just doesn't seem right at all, it's way too easy. If you are going to con money from people, you don't use a biblical number like 2.6 million dollars, it's way too huge for us to take you seriously. If you ask for ten dollars from the twenty thousand e-mails you must have already sent, you might get quite a handful of money in return. In this age and time, not a lot of people are going to believe in free cash, because there isn't such a thing as a free lunch out there. If religion is so important to you, then why isn't my religion asked? Is it not important all of a sudden, or are you just assuming that we have a shared Lord, and that I am a Christian as well. What if I am your husband's relatives, are you still going to trust me? If I am a Christian stranger, does that make me more trustworthy? Not all Christians use money in godly ways, unless you haven't heard. Just look at our current Pope and the amount of branded goods he wears. Tell me that's ungodly, and I'd give you even my shoe size. 

I will use the above information to obtain an authority letter that will prove you the new beneficiary of this fund from Royal Court of Kuwait. Any delay in your reply will give me room searching another church or individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply with the above information.

Take care,
Your Sister in Christ,
Mrs Esther Prakash.

Oh, so now we have a time limit. Reply to this e-mail as soon as possible, or else you'd not be able to get the 2.6 million dollars! I should act fast now, no time for critical thinking! No time to analyze the situation now, better provide my information before it's too late! At least that is what you'd like me to be thinking right now, am I correct Mrs Prakash? You'd like me to be a stupid and mindless person from Singapore, who'd somehow act on impulse and send out all my personal particulars to you just so that you'd, I don't know, make a fake passport with my name and address? That is very smart, but not quite. I don't suppose my name is going to go very well with your Arabian face, that doesn't work very well. You see, I am a Chinese, a Taiwanese to be exact. The picture and the particulars aren't going to check out, so failure number five. 

In truth, I am not going to reply to your badly constructed e-mail, because your lack of persuasive power is simply too disappointing and amusing to me. You are not my sister in Christ, you are not my sister in anything. Hell, you might not even exist at all. As much as you are willing to trust me with your fictional cash, I am sorry to say that I cannot trust you with my personal information. Because seriously, you could have done way better just to convince me into doing something as stupid as that, perhaps a little more effort from you would have garnered a number or two - who knows, I might feel generous. You have been officially labeled as a junk mail in my mailbox, and please do not attempt to con me again. You are only going to make a fool out of yourself, and expose the obscene amount of stupidity that you possess. I hope these failures I have identified for you is going to help you in your future cons. In the mean time, however, good luck with the "cancer problem" and, better luck next time. 

It is an interesting material I feel, to be able to switch between hardness and softness so quickly. You soak it in a bucket of water, and a brick as hard as rocks would turn into something as soft as dough. And then you mold it into something, wait for it to dry, and then it will return to its original state of hardness all over again. I've never been very good with such things, I was the child that played with Play-do mostly when I was young, making fake French Fries and hamburgers for my sister and I. I used to make a mess out of those plasters though, and it can get quick dusty once it dries, and the plaster sticks to the floor if you do not clean it up fast enough. It is a messy material, which is probably why I preferred to see my sister mold them into different animals and food back then. She created a whole series of fruits with those plasters once for a school project, everything from watermelons to bananas, from grapes to papayas. Then there was that period of time when she was fascinated with Barbie dolls, and she used to make little buns and hamburgers for her Barbies, something which I thought at that time as being completely mind-blowing. With something like that, the possibilities are endless, and it seems like I can see a certain trait in the way that plasters of Paris works in the life of a friend of mine. 

People say that a person's character can be hard or soft, and it depends on the individuals. I wonder who came up with the idea of saying that someone is "hard" and the other is "soft" anyway. Perhaps it is rooted in the whole debate between masculinity and feminism, or the whole Mars and Venus issue I mentioned a few entries below. Men were brought up to be tough, to be 'hard', to be able to withstand whatever the society decides to throw upon them. Those are the common traits of rationality, of logic, characteristics that are so commonly associated with men. On the other hand, women were never meant to stand up for themselves, fence for themselves, and these characteristics are commonly associated with emotions and the pathos. But really, I do not believe in the extremities of this world, I do not believe that hardness or softness in a person's character exists solely by itself alone in the genetics or in the mind. I believe in balance, and a healthy blend of both when dealing with anything in life. In every hard, there is a soft, and vice versa. That is also why there is a saying that goes "A woman's strength is in her weakness". No other proverbs can describe this human condition better. 

This friend of mine, is the kind of person you'd expect in a drama serial to be caught in a limbo. You know, when you are passing underneath the pole with your back bent backwards and you know that you can't bend any longer? So you are kind of stuck in a balance, between moving forward and falling down to the ground - but not just yet. That's the state that she has been in for the longest time, to be unsure of her "hardness" and "softness". To say that she is confused would be inaccurate, in my opinion. After all, she has clearly seen both sides of the coin, she knows that she is a living, breathing, walking contradiction when dealing with the affairs of the heart. And yet, she allows herself to be that way in spite of contradictions, in spite of falsehood, in spite of compromises that could potentially lead to regrets in her life that she cannot revert or change. She isn't alone in this syndrome of things, somewhat like the properties of the plaster of Paris. You only need that something to turn her hard attitude soft, and that soft attitude hard again. Never ever remains constant, everything changes. When your heart trumps your mind in everything that you do, nothing ever gets done. Nothing. 

Perhaps it is the stubbornness that makes her a "hardy" person. A stubbornness to prove to her parents, her friends, but mostly herself, that she is capable of maintaining a relationship. It was a promise that she made to herself, but aren't those promises the easiest to falter most of the time? You never stick to your new year resolutions, nobody ever does. Which is why her promise to herself comes as a confusion and contradiction to my own beliefs for the most part, and I wonder to myself very often how somebody has the ability to put up with the kind of nonsense that she gets from her partner. After all, someone with such a "hardy" personality should also have the ability to put her foot down in an argument, to fight for her own rights in a relationship, to fend for herself, right? Well, that is true only if you keep the water out of the equation. You see, it doesn't take a lot for her to falter from her stubbornness - you only need to add water. She softens into a mold, and you can shape her into whoever you want, whatever you want. Which is why, I feel, the contradiction in her personality is pretty interesting, but then again I guess a lot of people I know already suffers from this sort of personality disorder, for the lack of a better word. 

To his employees, my father is a no-nonsense type of boss whose presence in the office commands respect and, admittedly, a certain amount of fear. His bushy eyebrows would stick upwards into the air like those of an ancient Chinese emperor, and his laconic nature in the office creates an aura of mystery and respect for the most part. People see him as being a "hard" person, a person who is dead set on his goals and never falters from them under any circumstances. People who knows him, however, would beg to differ. My father is actually a soft person at heart, you cannot possibly force him into anything. What you need to do is to ease your way into his heart, which is why he is a sucker to women like my mother and sister. He can never take their softer side, always the one giving in and willingly so most of the time. He's like those M&M chocolates, the ones that are hard on the outside and melts on the inside. Well, if my father is a M&M chocolate, he'd be a giant one at that considering his weight. Still, I guess this character trait in all plasters of Paris isn't something that is exclusive to this friend of mine, but also someone important in my life too - my father. 

It's difficult to draw the lines I suppose, as to when you need to be this person and when you need to be the other. That is the tricky and complicated part about any relationships, you can never get a hang of it. What I do know, however, is that I'd never allow myself to be compromised in any relationship, to always be the one bending over backwards for somebody else. I just don't feel that it is something that a relationship should be about, especially one that involves a love partner. It isn't what it should be about, although love is about compromises at times. There are, however, compromises that no one should ever be allowed to swallow, at least that is how I see it. Nobody should be allowed to be manipulated into the will of somebody else, doesn't that make it less of a boy-girl relationship but more like a master-slave one? If the victims remain silent, does that make the crime right? Of course, there are no crimes, and there are no murders here. But there are a lot of silence on her part, simply because she is more afraid of the silence in between the two parties rather than the ones she has to force down her throat. 

But, like any piece of plaster, we see so much opportunities. A piece of plaster could end up as a pile of nothingness, like how it'd probably end up in my hands. Or, it could turn out to be the best Fathers' Day gift like the one my sister made for my father. The point is, that this friend of mine deserves, I feel, a better pair of hands to be molded into something better, someone greater. If you are going to allow yourself to be manipulated by others, why not be manipulated by somebody who's going to make you into a better person. Love is not about sweeping issues under the carpet just to avoid long drawn out silences, and love certainly isn't about making compromises just so that the other party could exploit and take advantage of you. You may not feel it of course, because you are a fool in love - lovers are fools, aren't they? Objectivity is what people around you sees, and the word "ungrateful" comes to mind for me, for some reason. I see a lot of possibilities in this person, but yet these possibilities have been stifled because there hasn't been a single drop of water in her life to make the brick soften, to let the seeds grow. 

It is depressing to know that, not just her, there are so many people in our society today living like a brick of plaster without water. You know, the mother of three at the age of forty realizing that she never actually loved her husband, or the father sleeping with his back to his stranger of a wife, realizing that he's staying in the same bed as the woman next to him because he wanted to prove something to himself and everybody else. Prove what, and what for? Prove that you are a consistent person and that you never break those promises to yourself? Truly enough, because in that respect you are doing very well, an A plus for that. But we have all broken promises to ourselves, I have broken promises to myself. I have once promised to love a woman for as long as my lungs drew air. I broke that promise, but it hasn't hurt a hair on my body at all. There are, at this moment, a lot of people going to sleep at night hating their partners, but mostly themselves. There are a lot of people out there staying in a relationship because of them falling slavery to commitments and consistencies. Should you end up as one of these people, or the ones who are unafraid to break the mold and turn yourself into something more than a hardened piece of plaster - the choice is up, ultimately, to you. 

Anyway, speaking of school, the book that I had to read when I was in high school was Animal Farm by George Orwell. You know, the one about the leader pig called Napoleon ruling over all the other animals in a farm and then defying the humans, only to become one of the humans by seeing himself as being "more equal" than the others? We've all read Animal Farm, and it is a brilliant literature classic of the last century, despite the fact that it featured talking animals which stood on two legs. George Orwell seems to have a deep and profound understanding of the human condition, he seems to have grasp how the mechanisms of a human work, and that insight has somehow enabled him to break away from the possible falsehoods in our society. Now, he explored similar themes of authoritarian control in his other famous book, 1984. In this book, he predicted that the world would be under one single government by the year 1984, and this government would be ruled under this father figure whom they call the Big Brother. In this futuristic world of his, humans would speak a common language and would be monitored in every way possible in order to great a homogeneous society. It was George Orwell's attempt to take a jab at Communism, an ideal that was rapidly growing in its popularity in his time. This unquestioning obedience to the authority, however, isn't something that exists merely in the pages of this classic novel. 

For those who feel that they'd rather watch the paint dry than to read a blog entry about something you are already studying in school, this is about the time when you turn back. It's just something I feel very strongly about, and it's pretty interesting just how much of what we've studied in school has reflected our society and explained some of the other events that have already occurred in my own life. Authority, the word itself looks pretty authoritative by itself. You see that word pretty much everywhere you go, even those red and white signs you see in underground MRT stations or the ones on the doors that lead to offices or storerooms filled with secret military documents (which really just mean the record of money they spent on stupid items around the camp like new taps or utility bills). "Authorized Personnel Only" the signs would declare, as if unauthorized personnel would be electrocuted, pierced by a thousand arrows and then melted by highly concentrated hydrochloric acid, or worse. Being an "Authorized Personnel" just puts you on a higher pedestal, doesn't it? You know, you just feel like you have the power over others when you are authorized, when you are allowed to do something that others are not. That's power, people. That's power - even if it is just the last cabinet in a public bathroom reserved for the janitor and his toilet cleaning equipments.

If you are authorized, that also means that you have been given a certain permission by an authority. Well, who really is this authority anyway, the leader? The boss? The manager? In some culture, age matters a lot, and the authority is just somebody who is older than you in your family. It doesn't matter if your father is an alcoholic and beats up your mother when his alcoholism kicks in, he's still older and he's supposed to have your respect, he's the authority. To me, respect and authority shouldn't be attributed, but something that is earned through time, but that is besides the point. It doesn't take a lot for people to treat you as an authority these days, you don't need to pass an IQ test to be in the senate. In the grander picture, the authority in our country would probably be the government, the few delegates we have chosen to run the country for us because, well, we have better things to do. These authorities set the rules, they are the ones that tell you what to do and what not to do. The curious thing happens here when they do something like that: most people obey these rules and regulations without questioning, even if they may seem to be completely and utterly ridiculous to begin with. 

You know these authoritative figures in our society, we all know one or two of these people. Politicians, doctors, lawyers and religious leaders, they are at the top of the food chain aren't they. If a doctor in a white robe and a stethoscope tells you that you are about to die in three weeks from prostate cancer, you believe him without questioning. Why? Well, because he is the doctor, and the doctor must be right, right? If the politicians tell you that you that the country is enjoying a 10% economical growth in the last quarter, and the projected growth for the country may increase to a whooping 14%, you believe them, right? They are the politicians, they are the ones who know these stuff better than us. We are just the civilians, what do we know about numbers and figures anyway. If the newspaper tells you that the world is going to end tomorrow, then it's about time to find an underground safe house for you to live for the next half a century, it makes sense right? I mean, it's the newspaper! If it is written in the newspaper, it is authority, it has to be right! If the religious leaders tell you that there is an invisible man living in the skies, we believe them too, we don't question the rationality in these claims even if they sound exactly like any other fairy tales we have heard ever since we were kids. Religious leaders are right, they are never wrong! They are the messengers of God, after all. It's GOD, MAN! The authority of all authorities, what could go wrong?

Well, everything could. The doctor could have mixed your record up with somebody else's in the next room, the politicians might have missed the negative signs in front of the numbers, the newspaper might have accidentally printed the title of the movie "War of the Worlds" and its poster on the front page, and as for the religious leaders - God might not exist. Everything could have gone wrong, but we don't want to consider the possibility, it is too inconvenient. We'd rather take what is given to us, be passive receivers of information, like corpses in front of a television. We don't really want the time and the ability to process certain information, to validate the truth in those numbers. We just kind of go with the flow, because that is what everybody is doing anyway. The truth, I feel, is that the authority has harnessed this weakness in the human condition, and as a result has exploited all humans to comply without question, absolute and complete obedience to the boss, the Big Brother. 

Speaking of fairy tales earlier, I remember those times as a child in school and at home. If religion wasn't sticking its foot into your life yet, there were probably two groups of authoritative figures in your life - your parents, and your form teacher from school. No questions about your parents, because they have the power to ground you or send you to your bedroom - the horrors! Your form teacher has the ability to detain you, to fail you, to cane you, or worse - tell your parents about you. Children back in my time were petrified of parents and teachers, they had the absolute control over our lives. They also had absolute power over what we learn and what we do not learn, and they also have the superpower of 'unlearning' what we have already learned. You see, they are the giver of knowledge, they are the ones who are passing on the knowledge that have been passed to them from their childhood authorities. The cycle goes on, and we are supposed to teach our children the very same things as the authorities next time. 

Imagine, if your parents actually told you that Jack and the Bean Stalk was real, and that there really was a chicken that laid golden eggs trapped in a castle up in the sky. Would you have believed it back then? Of course you would! They were your parents, of course you had to believe them! No questions asked, just do as they said. If they told you that Santa Claus actually exists, if they told you that there's actually a man who flew around in a sledge pulled by reindeers to drop presents into chimneys, you would have believed, right? Hell, they could have told you that Santa is God, and you would have believed. The truth is, we are genetically engineered to obey the authority, or at least the authority figure that we've been taught to follow, to obey, to comply. We've learned in class that the word "Because" is the most powerful word in the English language, and most of the time a proper reason isn't even needed. "Santa is God, because". That's really all the parents could have said in order to have us persuaded. 

What is so hard to believe about Santa Claus, if you think about it. Here is a man who has a list of names of all the children in the world, and he'd tick off all the bad kids just to make presents for the good ones. Then on Christmas, he'd fly around in a sledge pulled by reindeers to drop these presents through chimneys around the world for the good kids, never the bad kids. Oh, and he loves cookies and milk, do leave some by the Christmas tree and ignore the soft moaning sounds coming from your parents' bedroom at night because Santa might be screwing your mother. It does sound very ridiculous, who in the right mind would believe Santa Claus these days. "We are rational people," you would say. "We don't think that makes any sense". What is so different between the story of Santa, and the story of Jesus Christ? The latter story just seems a little more believable because, well, our parents told us the story, our teachers told us the story, the priests told us the story, it has to be right. Of course, you can believe in your God and I can believe in my no-God. Keep thy religion to thyself, I live by that very much. I am not trying to force this down the throat of anybody here. However, have you ever considered the possibility that what you believe is merely what the Big Brother wants you to believe? That religion is merely the result of social proof, of reciprocation, of consistency, of authority, or all of the above? Pick one, choose an option. Either way, you are right. Congratulations. 

That is just my humble opinion of course, that is what I believe. I believe the majority of the people in this world do some of the craziest and dumbest things because some "authority" said so, because they used the magic word - "Because". Think about how many people died in World War II alone because an "authority" said that the Jews were bad, that the Jews should be exterminated and wiped out from the face of this planet. We were taught that murder is bad, killing people is wrong. But when someone in an uniform addresses a crowd of one hundred thousand on a podium broadcast through the radio all around your country, his words trump everything you have learned. At the end of the day, we are just chess pieces manipulated by the people at be. The politicians have been using those tricks, the lawyers have been using those tricks, the religious leaders have been using those tricks. We've been fooled for so long, and we don't even know it. 

And that, is the undisputed truth. Why? Because. 

It took a few moments to gather myself, and I asked for a few moments more after the ones before ended. It was strange, to recall just how little that dream felt like a dream, but more like a memory of sorts. You know how it is with dreams, you usually wake up and you know which part of that dream didn't make much of a sense at all, that you should have noticed them if you were actually conscious about yourself being in a dream. You would have noticed the absurdities, but there wasn't anything amiss in my afternoon trip to dreamland, nothing that could have pointed itself out that it was merely the product of my brain in slumber. Perhaps it tapped into the part of my brain that governed those memories, like finding a lost family home video in the attic, stuffed underneath boxes of old clothes and toys. It does bring bad memories, mostly beautiful and innocent memories. The worst part is always the waking up, when you know that the beautiful and the innocent has been lost forever through the sands of time, swallowed like an unwary adventurer in the Amazons into quicksand. You reach in too deep, and the quicksand takes you along with it too. And I was taken, taken away, taken within.

I bore myself to even think about such things these days, and I find more interest in watching the drivers downstairs trying to get out of their cars in the pouring rain. Or the fireworks down South in the city as they exploded into a vibrant display of colors in the storm. So proud of itself and so sure, so confident that even with the rain sweeping across the lands, the audience would still brave mother nature and look up into those explosions in the skies. I find more interest in sights like that these days, always in the present now and seldom backwards. Those rewinding moments take place only in my dreams now, and they have been occurring much more often these days that it is making me feel slightly uncomfortable. Just slightly, because the feeling wears off quickly most of the time, and a wash of the face in cold water and a few jumping jacks in the bedroom usually helps. It wakes me up, it takes away the lingering dreams. I speak as much as I think about it these days, which isn't a lot to begin with. Mostly to myself in the middle of the night, in the cover of darkness where I feel the most confident and less like a coward. 

But dreams, those nasty little dreams. They are beyond your governing, they are out of your control. What you do in reality matters little when you drift off into his realms, he takes away all your efforts to look ever forward, to look never backwards. Forget about the cold face wash and the jumping jacks, the dreams take you to wherever it'd like you to go and for as long as it desires. Hours or days could pass in a dream that lasts for merely a few minutes in real-time, and sometimes I wonder about the possibility of being trapped in one. Well, if I were to be trapped in one, then the one I had in the afternoon wouldn't be half bad. It wouldn't, because I know I felt great in that dream, I felt like I was before, and you were smiling too. I haven't heard a breath from you, but that's fine. I have my dreams taking care of me from time to time, and there you'd be waiting without fail. The hardest part is always the waking up, when the contrast of the real world and the dreams sets in, and you realize that you have lost something all over again. 

If only you forced yourself to close your eyes just a few more minutes, maybe those minutes would translate to hours or days in your dreams all over again. Do you think dreams continue if you go back to sleep as soon as you are awake? Like sequels to a blockbuster movie, maybe you'd be able to catch part two just by going back to sleep immediately. But like most sequels out there, perhaps part two wouldn't be as perfect as part one, perhaps it'd turn out to be a horrible nightmare. That is why I've never bothered trying, never tried to go back to sleep despite waking from a dream with you in it. I'd like to remember you that way when I wake, and not go back to a dream less comfortable. I carry on with life, move on from the dream and hope that the mundane things would take me far far away. It helps to forget doesn't it, it helps you to lose your memory. Isn't that why you cannot sleep at night at times, isn't that why you refuse to go to sleep? In sleep, you lose control, in sleep you go back to whence you came. And sometimes the comfort in where you came from scares you in waking, sometimes the contrast is too much for you to take. 

You see, I get that a lot, I get that with you. In waking, I lose the kind of reminders that you use to give me from time to time, in your soft-spoken words and your beautifully written lines. But, it's just a dream, a dream less comfortable. Perhaps the next dream would come tonight, a dream that might involve flaming cupcakes and curry shaving blades. Who knows what the mind would bring, who knows where the Sandman would take me. It just saddens me at times, that it is the ones with you that sticks, the ones with us that stays. I'd like to remember flaming cupcakes too, or perhaps flying sewing machines. I am being random here, but anything is better than waking up from a sleep and feeling lonely all of a sudden. You see, my will isn't as strong as it used to be. 

There comes a time in a music-lover's life, when you realize that you are too deeply in love. No, we are not speaking of it in a figuratively way, but you are literally in too deep into the realm of music that you have come to a point whereby the physical environment around you has lost its ability to satiate that endless crave any longer. I am talking about the availability of new music in my country in relative to the others, how difficult it is to find obscure and unknown bands in Singapore. You can't even find it in the biggest music stores legally, and you know that you are in way too deep when you cannot even find most of them illegally over the internet. That is a good way to stop piracy, make your bands and artistes as obscure as possible so that even the pirates can't pirate your music. It is a winning formula, but it causes a mountain of trouble for someone like me. Another day that iTunes store refuses to open in Singapore is another day that I come closer to experiencing internal combustion. Music is getting more and more difficult to find now, and the list of albums that I have yet to get my hands is growing at an exponential rate. Podington Bear, anyone? 

The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming by Club 8
If I ask you to think of a Swedish band, you are probably going to have just one band in mind: ABBA. Yes, the most famous Swedish band to ever walk the earth, or at least that is the common misconception of Sweden. The truth is, Sweden is actually choked with musical talents that I have only recently discovered. Club 8 is another one of those finds which I call "Label Finds". That is, I found a record label that produced a range of relatively similar music, and I would search through their artist to see which one of them fits my taste. Club 8 is one of those bands, and this album cannot be more soothing and easy on the ears. Once in a while, you need to put down those electronica records and just go back to your roots. Club 8 does somehow sound like some techno band, but it nothing can be further from the truth. Club 8 sounds more like Nouvelle Vague, but without the thick sense of Bossa Nova. Club 8 sounds more like the kind of music you would hear in a lounge at three in the morning, with a few late night drinkers staying back to curb their insomnia. Their other albums definitely have a little more electronic elements, but this album is that one that puts you to sleep - in a very good way. Certain songs are very karaoke-like, but I don't suppose this band is going to find its way into any karaoke lounges anytime soon, unfortunately. 

Albums by the band: 

1. Nouvelle (1996)

2. The Friend I Once Had (1998)

3. Club 8 (2001)

4. Spring Came, Rain Fell (2002)

5. Strangely, Beautiful (2003)

6. The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming (2007)

Yanni Live at the Acropolis by Yanni 
Now, this is a very very old CD that I somehow dug out from a box. I was reminded of this CD when I saw it in Sarah's library the other day, and suddenly remembered just how good it really is. This live album isn't the highest selling live DVD or any artiste out there for no reason at all. The reason is because this album is that good, although it does not include one of Yanni's most famous track - Aria. Anyway, Yanni is considered under the genre of new age I suppose, along with peers like Kitaro and all the other long-haired composers out there. But Kitaro can bother on experimentalism at times, and his music may not exactly be suitable for most people I would assume. Yanni, however, is ear-friendly for everybody. It is simply not possible for one to not be moved by his track "One Man's Dream", or to be swept off your feet by "Within Attraction". Can I just say, by the way, the latter song features some of the most insane violin playing I have ever heard in my entire life? Karen Briggs and Shahrad Rohani are completely off the hook in this song, completely mind blowing stuff here. Yanni is amazing, even if you want to make fun of him like so many people do with Enya's music. I proudly say that I love Yanni, and his music is brings happiness and life into me. It really does, in the most magical way that only good music can. 

Albums by the artiste: 

1. Optimystique (1980)

2. Keys to Imagination (1986)

3. Out of Silence (1987)

4. Chameleon Days (1988)

5. Niki Nana (1989)

6. Reflections of Passion (1990)

7. In Celebration of Life (1991)

8. Dare to Dream (1992)

9. In My Time (1993)

10. Yanni Live at the Acropolis [Live Album] (1994)

11. If I Could Tell You (2000)

12. Ethnicity (2003)

Migration by Sambassadeur
Sambassadeur, like Club 8, is a "Label Find". They are under the same record label called Labrador Records, and they are a Swedish band as well. Migration probably bears a lot of resemblance to the featured album above, but this album has a thicker sense of retrospective to it somehow. Sambassadeur has a very interesting small-town feel to it, a small town back in the late 1970s. I keep picturing a small yellow truck driving down a long stretch of country road while listening to the first track, "The Park". That is the imagery that Sambassadeur gives me, one that is both comforting and nice in my opinion. This is the album that, I'd say, is the soundtrack to a long road trip that anybody should own. I am usually very critical when it comes to the vocalist of any bands, and I must say that the voice of Anna Persson is very pretty, although not exactly unique. She has a very old town feel like I said, kind of like how The Carpenters used to make you feel I suppose. Play this album when you are out driving, out in the woods camping, or just fishing by a great lake. It just feels like an album that'd potentially drive you out of your front door because of how hopeful it feels somehow. It is an album full of chances and opportunities, and something that I listen to forget my worries.

Albums by the band:

1. Sambassadeur (2005)

2. Migration (2007)

Everyone Alive Wants Answers by Colleen
Colleen, or Cecile Schott, is an ambient and electronic music composer from France. Colleen produces some of the most beautiful and creepy music I have ever heard in my entire life, and I know those two words don't usually come together in the same sentence. Everyone Alive Wants Answers, along with her other album The Golden Morning Breaks probably has some of the most haunting melodies I have ever heard, and they are strangely beautiful in their own rights. In an age when ambient music has become a tad bit repetitive even in the underground music community, Colleen has somehow broke through the conventional and delivered an album that is unlike any other. Using instruments such as the harp, the guitar, wind chimes and music boxes, Colleen has created a beautiful and twisted soundscape that feels almost as if it was plucked straight out of someone's dream. With the effect of the music played backwards, it almost gives the listeners a sense of going back in time and moving forward at the same time. It's like being trapped in an equilibrium, much like how the album grabs your attention late in the night. The music video for the song "I'll Read You A Story" that features a ballerina dancing in slow motion is probably one of the weirdest, but most astounding stuff I know. Colleen is, in a word, awesome. 

Albums by the artiste:

1. Everyone Alive Wants Answers (2003)

2. The Golden Morning Breaks (2005)

3.Mort Aux Vaches (2006)

4. Les Ondes Silencieuses (2007)

Susumu Yokota represents my second attempt into the Japanese music underworld. Mono is a good post-rock band, but then it becomes tiring at times when you realize that no one can surpass Sigur Ros in that field. Susumu Yokota is an acclaimed DJ from Japan, and this is my first time listening to his materials. Repetition is not the cup of tea that suits everybody, but his curious use of loops in this album is strangely alluring in a mystical way. I must say that this album took some getting used to, but the result of my patience was definitely very rewarding. You can hear a gradual growth in the sound in every song, and you slowly hear it develop in maturity as well as in beauty until it fills your whole room in waves of emotions. I have yet to pin-point any specific songs that have caught my attention yet, but so far the entire album has been a beautiful and interesting ride. Such albums can only be listened to from the first song, and not from the second or the third. You tend to lose a sense of continuum because of that, and ambient albums usually take a lot of patience in order for you to enjoy. Susumu Yokota definitely is an Asian electronica artiste that I will be watching out for. A delicate album that is full of life and beauty. 

Albums by the artist (Way too many to name all, so I shall pick a few):

1. Image 1983-1998 (1999)

2. Sakura (1999)

3. Grinning Cat (2001)

4. The Boy and the Tree (2002)

5. Distant Sounds of Summer (2005)

6. LOVE or DIE (2008)