Library twats.

It is really quite ridiculous when a library as big as Woodlands REGIONAL library (note the "regional" because I put it there for special emphasis), all 4 floors of it, can have insufficient space for one person with a laptop on a Friday afternoon. But that was precisely what happened.

It's Friday for goodness sakes. Stop mugging and go and do weekend stuff you twats. And if you want to mug, don't hog my power points because you don't need electricity to mug. Darned hogs. Pigs. Sows. Swine. Char siew bao.

Anyway, I was there today to waste time. Don't ask me why I always have time to waste. I just do and if you don't, I'm sorry but I can't sell you mine. Although I certainly would sell some if I could to wealthy old and dying billionaires who want to have wild hedonistic fun with twentysomething bunnies, with the help of a few blue vitamin V pills. Va va vroom.

But yes back to the main topic, I was extremely shocked at how people appeared to have colonised all corners of the library. It was so bad that every time I found an obscure corner behind a shelf that I thought no one would notice, I would turn the corner of the shelf to see 5 smiling faces looking back at me.

There was no such thing as an empty seat, despite the library having plenty of sitting room. People were everywhere across all 4 floors - On the seats, on the floors between the shelves, spread across the floor in every possible corner, in all the toilet cubicles (which was pretty darned amazing), and behind the library counters. Well the last group have no choice because they work there but since they're people I'll just throw them in.

So after much effort and walking around in frustration I finally found a corner in the children's section, chasing some little kids away to get my space. I ended up in a corner named "Captain Green and his forest adventure", filled with pictures of a smiley frog. Frogs are pretty disgusting creatures but this one was particularly so, because it had fingers on each hand like a lizard. Just like the Courtesy Lion. Which part of that looks like a lion to you? Yeah I know, the colour.

Anyway, this is really funny. Do you know why the frog is called Captain Green? Its because he is trying to save his hungry friend, Billy the Bin! Apparently, his home is being destroyed by rubbish, so to save his home, he feeds the very same rubbish to his friend.

Gee, what an elegant solution. That's what friends are for.

Being a musician - a gift and a curse

Being a musician, I have faced many tests of faith, but never more so than now. If you play an instrument, you will realise that playing one is a labour of love, and more often than not, you play it for yourself. Because no one can ever truly appreciate how much you give the instrument, and how little it gives you back.

Playing an instrument is not for the faint hearted. It takes you 10 years to reach an average proficiency, and you spend the rest of your life in a futile struggle trying to maintain it. The skill you have with an instrument is not retainable, which means that if you don't play the piano for one year, you become no better than a Grade 1 toddler tinkling with a keyboard. It is truly frightening how much you can lose, after you have spent all that time building it up.

The worst thing about all this is, in the age of computers, people like us are fast becoming obsolete. We might not want to admit it, but computers can do what humans can never do. Play a piece perfectly, doing it everytime, and the best part is, they don't need to practice. One might argue that computers can never capture the nuances and subtleties of a human's playing, but I know better. It is a matter of time before computers play catch up, and when they do, where does that leave us?

When you play an instrument, you play to perfect it. But if you play an instrument, you will soon realise you can never perfect it. And the more you play, the more you realise you will never perfect it. It begs the question, do you continue to strive for perfection, or do you settle for mediocrity? I don't want to settle, but I can never be more than mediocre, because I can never be perfect. It is a catch-22 no musician wants to face, but it stares at us everyday.

It makes me wonder, why do I still play the piano? I love the instrument, but there is no point in doing it. I will spend every day till I die in a futile struggle to maintain what control I have over the instrument, only to have all my efforts pale in comparison to someone who can manipulate a computer.

However, as much as it is futile, and as much as people like me are fast becoming anachronisms, I will spend these last few paragraphs in a desperate defence of why I will continue to play the piano, and do it till the day I die.

I play it, because when the walls of silence close in upon me, when the music of my life stops playing, my piano sings to me, a lone candle in that impermeable darkness.

I play it, because every time I hit a wrong note, I am reminded of what it is like to be human, how it is normal to err.

I play it, because the difficulty of playing it reminds me of how nothing can be achieved without hours of sacrifice.

I play it, because if I were never able to play it again, I would rather die. In life, there are few things that one can say that about, and that in itself has a value beyond anything one can find in this world.

The state of Singapore dramas nowadays

I was watching the 9pm drama on Channel 8, Crime Busters x2, some detective show with Tay Ping Hui and Dawn Yeoh as the leads.

It's quite watchable because the criminals in the show are weird enough so that you keep coming back for more, although the acting is shit. I find it a common trait in shows involving Dawn Yeoh. Either its her, or she has an aura that makes people around her forget how to act. However, possibly due to her auntie hairstyle in this show, she is no longer as "teh". In the past, she was so "teh" you couldn't watch her shows as you'd just cringe and die.

Anyway, for baddies so far they've had a schizo, some uncle who loves his niece a little too much, and a random guy who got forced to overdose on Ecstasy. Well, he died really ecstatically. I guess that is something to be happy about.

The show is characterised by how it has a new case with a totally new set of characters every few days, so if you miss a few episodes, you're suddenly lost! I really think that the reason they have so many small stories in the same show is to allow struggling artistes to make cameos.

Such people would include previous Project Superstar contestants, random calefares, Mediacorp artistes who will never make it big, and people who always act as gangsters and bad guys. You should be pretty familiar with the last bunch. Its always the same 10 or so people. I bet children point at them on the street and go "Mummy, bad guy!", what with them portraying Ah Bengs, mad people, triad bosses, drug abusers, and worst of all, perverts.

There are a few recurring scenes in this drama though. Tay Ping Hui always visits a VCD shop, and a supermarket after that. And its always these same two places, staffed by the same two people. In fact, these two people appear so often their screen time would probably qualify them as supporting actors. At first I didn't realise why these two places kept appearing. Then I realised those two places probably sponsored the show, and suddenly it all made sense. Product placement yo. The number of product placements in Mediacorp dramas nowadays is obscene.

One scene in the supermarket even had me impressed at how the government uses dramas to teach National Education. It was a scene where Dawn Yeoh was as usual, acting cute, hanging off the arm of Tay Ping Hui in the show. Being extremely happy, she went around telling the whole world she had a new boyfriend. So first of all, she found an angmoh guy in the supermarket and said "My new boyfriend!" And of course the angmoh guy will sportingly say "Very nice!" and flash a thumbs up sign, because angmohs by stereotype are supposed to be friendly and approachable. Even if you are disturbing their grocery shopping.

But what was even funnier was, after that, she actually found a Malay woman, and told her in Malay about her new boyfriend! And of course, after that, she had to find an Indian woman too, and talk to her in Tamil. If it wasn't incredible enough that she could find all the different races in a supermarket that always seems empty, she suddenly became a linguist able to speak 4 languages. That's so bloody incredible because the only Tamil words I know are like Vanakum, Deepavali, Muneru Valiba and um, roti prata. Certainly not enough to form any meaningful sentence.

And it was all so subtly done the average Singaporean viewer probably wouldn't catch it.

I wish the government would stop screwing around with our dramas. Businesses do it enough already, and if that wasn't bad enough, the level of acting by our local artistes actually helps a fair bit.

ZZZ monster

I was taking the MRT home from Boon Lay, and as everyone knows I stay in Simei, so I have a pretty long ride. Hence I'm usually quite particular about getting a seat on the train, because if I don't I really suffer like shit. Standing for an hour is not funny.

So today as usual I went straight for the priority seat, which is my favourite. It is the seat that is at one corner of the row of seats, so you can lean against the plastic panel on your side. I usually just lean there and sleep the whole trip.

But on this particular trip, I was particularly disturbed by a guy on my left who was nodding off. He had this really irritating way of nodding off. He didn't just nod forwards or backwards. He actually went in an arc from left to right in a clockwise motion. The worst part was, he eventually ended up with his head resting on my back because I was leaning forwards trying to avoid his swinging head.

And he didn't seem to notice it! I was like shit his freaking head is damn heavy. And he put some products in his hair so his hair was oily too. I was like please get off my shirt now I'm starting to feel damn disgusted and if you continue any longer I might just punch you in the face. But of course he didn't wake up.

I tried to shake him off, but he didn't budge. He was freaking sound asleep. On hindsight I should have stepped on his foot. All I can be happy about was he didnt drool. If he did, I don't care I would have just elbowed him in the face. Not like I didn't try to shake him off already.

This whole incident just made me more determined to do one thing. If I ever meet such a person again, I will push him to the person on the other side, or physically shove him off his seat. No one should have to contend with people with greasy hair dirtying their shirts.

Stuff you learn during French lesson

I don't usually enjoy French lessons. It's probably because I usually arrive 15 minutes late, so by the time I do, the teacher is well into the lesson. In fact every lesson, I will hear a gasp from all my classmates who are surprised to see me entering, although you'd have figured that by now they'd know its me.

But I particularly enjoyed the last lesson. Our topic this week was true or false. So what the textbook had was a series of questions with two statements, and we had to tick the one that was true. So every time we reached a question, the teacher had to explain why it was correct in the context of France.

Like they showed this really old ruin, and asked how it got there. Option A was something ridiculous about the French having imported Italian architects. I think the French would sooner kill themselves first, if you knew what they were like.

Option B was the right one, about them being remnants of Roman conquest. So after a question like that the teacher would launch into an account of French history, which was really interesting to listen to. Anything compared to French grammar would be.

I was really surprised to learn that nobody in my class has read Tintin or Asterix before. All them iconclasts, ectoplasms and gerbils! In case you were wondering, those are a few of Captain Haddock's choice swear words. Captain Haddock is my favourite character from Tintin, because Tintin is a shit boring do gooder who makes you eat your vegetables. Ok, that's Popeye but he's also about as interesting as Mickey Mouse.

I found it sad that nobody has read those books. Like seriously, does anyone even read nowadays. A few days ago, someone actually asked me who Wee Kim Wee was. I felt an utter sense of shock, then I reasoned that people like me who actually read books are now relics of a past generation.

Well, most people now probably assume that Old Man Lee built Singapore on his own, with a hammer and chisel. I had a classmate once who was supposed to write an essay on the history of Singapore. He wrote an essay about how great Lee Kuan Yew was and failed by one mark. I think its actually quite surprising how he didn't get a zero.

But then again, how could any teacher in Singapore give an essay about the greatness of LKY a zero? They are probably weeping at how they had to fail it because it was out of point, despite agreeing with everything that was said inside.

Okay I've totally rambled out of point here. To end this off, I shall now demonstrate why I usually don't enjoy french lesson. As I usually come in late, I end up in the 4th row, which is really far back. And every french lesson, we have listening. There was an occasion when I couldn't catch what the tape said. My french teacher was real nice about it.

"Of course, Wei Li's totally in the wrong position to be doing listening isn't he?" (smiles)

Harhar. Very freaking funny.

Funny Japan Commercial

This is so freaking funny!

Street Fighter II - Never give up

If you've ever played Street Fighter in an arcade, you have to watch this. It is the most awesome comeback in a SF game ever.

This fight was at the semi-finals of EVO 2004 between Daigo Umehara (Ken) and Justin Wong (Chun-Li). Daigo is probably the best SFII player in the world, and this fight is a legendary showcase.

I am seriously in awe of how he had the presence of mind to jump and execute the last parry, after executing a combined sixteen parries before that, and then follow it up in style.

Some people seriously play computer games too much.

How to cheat on any test

This is so brilliant. If I see anyone bringing Coke into exams I know what you're up to.

You want to be the very best? Know what it takes.

I am currently taking French 2 as one of my mods. If you take language mods, you will realise that there are always going to be people who are so very darned good at it. Especially if you are taking Japanese or Korean, where there are plenty of dramas for you to get used to the way it is spoken and to familiarise yourself with the language.

But when the language in question is French, you really wonder how some people just seem to be so fluent at it. Like they are able to answer all the tutor's questions, and really fast. Some of them even know how to use words they have just learnt and apply them straight into the question instantly. They made me wonder if they had a gift for language I didn't have.

There is this foreigner in my class who is like that. He is able to answer just about any question the tutor throws at him, and often, he does it so well the tutor is like tres bien! Which means "very good" in french. It has become so commonplace that when the tutor calls him, I just prepare to copy because I know he will give a perfect answer. I used to wonder if it was because he had learnt french in his home country.

Today, I learnt the real reason why. Having a long break before my french lesson at 1230, I went for an early lunch at 11am and ended up at the corridor outside the french classrooms at like 1210. Having nothing to do, I started reading the notices outside the french classroom.

A few minutes later, the door of the classroom opened, releasing the previous batch of students from the previous tutorial. I hid at the side, pretending I wasn't there, because I didn't want the tutor to see me so that I had to go into the classroom and face the her alone.

Guess who I saw coming out of the class. Yes, that foreigner. I was like hmm he went for makeup lesson today. Maybe he's not going later. But I was super wrong. The worst was yet to come. It was what he did next.

If you take language classes, you will know the classroom corridors have two ends. What he did was, he walked out of the classroom facing the far end, walked straight to the far end without looking back, and reappeared miraculously behind me 5 minutes later from the near end. He made it look as though he had just come for my tutorial.

I don't think he saw me, so he probably didn't realise I knew about what he just did. I was seriously like WTF. He went into the class as per normal, and so did I. And as usual, he was able to answer all the questions, but I no longer felt the same sense of awe because I knew his secret.

That's what it takes to be the very best. You have to be so kiasu you go for 6AUs worth of lessons for a 3AU class. And you have to be so sneaky you have to make sure no one knows about it, about what a crazy shit you really are. Well, now I know. And sometimes in life, you realise you can't beat them all. Not the ones this crazy. That's where your SU comes in.

MLM madness

Have you ever been solicited by someone who wanted you to join an MLM? I think most of us have, and least to say, the experience is usually very darned unpleasant. I think it has to do partly with the fact that you don't want anything to do with the person, but you can't tell them outright because you still want to remain cordial.

I was doing some work when this Ah Beng I haven't talked to in ages asked me to join an MLM. I met him last year while working as a teacher at a charity student care centre. He had been sent there on probation because he was involved in a gangfight. I still remember the day he told me about how he left a huge hole in someone. I was as fascinated as I was revulsed. I was like "What did you use? A hammer? A parang? Your fist?"

The victim didn't die by the way. That's why Ah Beng was only on probation.

But yeah, Ah Beng was like "hey I recently found a mlm job. I tink u will be interested in joining too. it is home-based, nonid go out. so it gives more free tym + high earning as well"

In my mind I was like "No! Go away! I'm not joining your stupid MLM!" But unfortunately, being me, another part of me was like, why don't I lead this guy on so I can see what other interesting things he has to say? So I went like ok I'll think about it.

Then immediately he went like "With your huge network in university, you have huge advantage." Yeah, but I value my network in university very much. I think he doesn't realise that the fastest way to destroy that network is to tell your friends "hey I recently found an mlm job. I tink you will be interested in joining too." Like seriously.

So I went "So what do you do in this company?" Ah Beng said "Basically is just find pple loh, easy to do." Then as though to make his offer more enticing, Ah Beng went "y join now leh? cos the price is gonna rise once the company 'launch'. now pre-launch offer. once the company launch, now so cheap anymore." At this point, I was like ok I don't really want to play with fire anymore. I told him I wasnt interested.

Of course, he didn't give up. He was like why not? for what reasons? So I told him what I thought was the ultimate reason. I'm going on exchange soon to another country, so no point. He proved to be extremely deft at handling rejections. He was like u go on exchange to other country u can oso ask ur frens there to join oso other than using computer. :) (Got smiley face some more)

I was thinking like no! The last thing I want to do on exchange is to ask my friends to join your MLM. Later I come back no one want to welcome me at airport.

So I decided to find out how many people he'd conned already. I went like a lot of your friends joining? Ah Beng said ya i found frens rdy. my own bro oso inside. the people joining r growing fast. rapidly. It was almost like he was saying see even my own brother is inside. This company is definitely credible.

So seeing I couldn't shake him off, I asked him about the company. According to him, the company was the best MLM he ever came across, with a joining charge of US$1 a day, the price of "a cup of coffee". You got paid everyday, and there were a lot of benefits. Like you get a WEBSITE. Oh wow. And once you've earned enough, you get a car fund worth $360k too.

Yeah, and perhaps if you stay a little longer, you get a bungalow fund too. And soon you can buy your own private jet. Do they really think I am that gullible?

I just had to ask him "First MLM you ever joined?" He was like yeah.

Figures.

Fools' Eden.

Today I read a news report that simply announced that the government were finally going to build a dormitory for foreign workers in Serangoon Gardens. It didn't really have much of an impact on me, because I visit that place only occasionally, and even then, only to eat, so I guess I didn't really feel the impact of such a decision.

I would even go on to say that those workers probably can't afford to eat gourmet cuisine at Serangoon Gardens anyway so I probably won't see them around much although they live there.

Which reminds me of this rather weird incident. A foreign worker once queued behind me at Sweettalk and asked if they sold kopi. Well, I said yes because technically they did sell coffee, although its not "coffee" coffee. There was a Starbucks next to the Sweettalk but I felt it would be more than a little unkind to refer him to Starbucks. I was afriad that he would have no money to send home after that.

Of course, he went right up to the Chinese lady and asked for "kopi". I mean, who goes to Sweettalk to ask for "kopi". Obviously she was like "No we don't sell kopi here." I immediately took my honeydew milk tea and stealthily sneaked off like really really far away in case he tried to find me again.

I really have nothing against these workers, although you probably couldn't tell from the last few paragraphs. Most of them are here to make a good honest living, and we need such people because no one in Singapore wants to do the same work for such low pay.

So when I read the report, it went straight to the back of my mind, until one of my friends raised this topic later at night. He went like "Shit why are these foreign workers staying so near me. I am damn sad you know. The value of my house just dropped."

Of course, with me being me, I just had to rub it in. "Don't worry man, it probably only dropped about half a million dollars. Your house is easily worth 10 times that. You'll survive."

I find that nowadays my friends even have a name for such behaviour. They are like "That's such a weili thing to do." So, I would be like "Eh why you say until like that!" And their reply? "Because you're weili." I guess I sort of had it coming, what with all the karma I've picked up with my brand of humour.

But, back to the topic, I'm actually a little sad that a very unique corner of Singapore is about to be changed in a way that would make it lose some of its charm. In this garden, it's like a place where time stops, a reminder of a time when life was more laidback, kind of like Dempsey but a little less commercial. It's a rustic little corner, one of the few places in Singapore where you don't really see high rise buildings around. I wouldn't go so far to say that the garden is being defiled, but it certainly will change, mainly because the area will suddenly have many more people living there.

I really wonder, like why this place, when there are so many others around. Perhaps they have some stupid agenda, or maybe the people doing city planning became blind overnight. Or more scandalously, they were looking for a centralised location in a residential estate to house the workers, so it was either this estate or Bukit Timah, and too many politicians stay in Bukit Timah. I bet that's it.

It makes little sense to me, how they take what makes Singapore unique, and destroy it in the name of city planning. One day, Singapore will become little parcels of the same city units repeated again and again, kind of like Sim City where you build everything in unit clusters to maximise city efficiency. It looks like some politicians have been playing too much Sim City. The product is certainly efficient, neat and pristine, but also devoid of vivacity and life.

Sarah Palin

This woman could be the most powerful person in the world in a few months. She is backup to a 72 year old cancer survivor with heart problems.

I would migrate but there's nowhere on this planet that wouldn't be affected.

But one line made me laugh. The world is too dangerous for mediocrity and reckless judgment. Then why has George W "I nearly choked on a pretzel" been up there for 8 years?

0259

0259. This is the time every night when I realise that I am very much screwed for the next day. It is the time when I realise there isn't enough time to sleep, but I can't not sleep anyway, because there is nothing to do for the next 3 hours, and I fear I will faint from fatigue or something. It is the time that when I sleep, I will wake up feeling more tired than if I hadn't slept.

Sounds familiar? Well, you haven't experienced the 0259, there is an expression in french for people like you. "Vous couchez comme les poules!" In other words, you go to bed like the chickens. You sleep ridiculously early at like 9pm, and you wake up at 5am to piss the whole neighbourhood off with your lovely voice. Especially if you're the kind who sings in the toilet, and you have a voice resembling chickens being slaughtered.

But after 3 nights on the 0259, you long for a ticket on the midnight train.

On a separate note, there is this phrase in the song Lady Marmalade from Moulin Rouge that goes "Voulez vous couchez avec moi ce soir?" I would advise you not to sing it in public on a French street. What it really means is, "Would you like to sleep with me tonight?" And I don't mean the kind of sleep where you get any real sleeping done. Now this is the part where you go "Just what the f--- have I been singing?"

A few months back, a friend told me that it was healthy to sleep at 9pm, and advised me to do it. The irony is, in the ensuing months, I have realised that she is the very same person who wakes up late for school and subsequently doesn't turn up. It really reminds me of this phrase that I consider a great pearl of wisdom.

"Take my advice. I don't use it."

Does anyone realise that good advice is seldom taken. I find that happens a lot. Sometimes when I give people advice I know they won't take, I feel like just not caring, and not saying it because it will fall on deaf ears anyway. I mean, it's pretty pointless telling a smoker not to smoke, just as it is telling someone who habitually sleeps late to sleep early.

"I said please don't slow me down, if I'm going too fast"

The greatest irony is, the people preaching advice seldom use it themselves. "You should sleep early you know, because there is 830 tmw." I always say that to my friends, and I end up looking at the clock and going holy shit its 0259.

"Yeah, the night's not over, you're not trying hard enough"

And then the fatigue gets to you.

"You're no longer laughing. I'm not drowning fast enough."