You got big gun, so what.

Being an amateur photographer (read:broke), it annoys me to no end that too many people carry DSLRs these days and can't wait to show them off. These people naturally assume that just because they have a bigger, longer and more expensive lens than you do, they will shoot better than you do too.

It happens most often at events, which I cover a variety of these days, like cycling competitions, triathlons, fashion stuff, portraits, conventions, mainly because I have a camera and I'm free labour because I don't feel good charging friends for what is essentially a hobby to me.

There will always be some uncle or 30ish guy there who will be brandishing an obscenely huge camera with attached lens, and judging from the way they use it, they don't exactly know how to get the best out of it. Like um, why zoom in and walk backwards to shoot, if you can just choose not to zoom? It's a zoom lens after all.

Okay, maybe you want to make your subject look more flattering because the wide end tends to make people look fat, but if your kid is prancing around in front of you, using a telephoto lens to shoot them prancing while trying to keep up with their movements just makes you look retarded. Like you have a pipe sticking out of your face and you are trying to engage in some spastic head bobbing behaviour akin to an ostrich, only that those don't have pipes sticking out of their faces.

But more annoying than those are the people who you meet at such events who look at your amateur camera and lens with a look of scornful pity in their eyes, because you aren't using an L-lens. Usually, I just continue shooting and ignoring them. Like okay, you have a big gun, big deal.

A friend of mine suggested a way of dealing with them, saying that I should stroke their ego to make them embarrassed, like go "wah yours so big, you win already, so envious." Well, if there is one thing about guys, it is how their inflated egos tend to take over and speak for themselves.

They will then go on and on about where they bought the lens, how much it cost, and how awesome it is. After all, if you spent a damn lot of money to enhance what little there was, you would want to talk about it. It's all part of the "I am bigger than you and I want you to know it mentality."

She then suggested that maybe I should ask them if they knew how to use it. Well, apart from being unable to tell that they obviously don't most of the time, there is this additional problem.

No guy will ever admit to being unable to use his tools. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but just because you have a huge tool, it doesn't mean you are good with it.

A flashback of summers

What are we, but mice on a little running wheel, running without a destination in mind, only to realise that maybe we're trying to escape something we don't even know yet.

And in my mind's eye, I go back to the events of several weeks ago.

"It is unhealthy to live in the past."

Don't I know it. There are some whose lives move on, inevitably, and for others, time stops. Reminiscence takes on a different value here, an ethereal impermanence that is both unnatural and real, like the still air in an airlock, silent, stale, an unblinking gaze fixated upon its very edges. There is a strange quality to such memories, how they are all linked together illogically and out of sequence with time itself, almost as though a pin dropping in one would effect its sonorous ring throughout all of them, rippling into memories past and future as well.

And it comes back in snatches, like the flash going off on a camera. The setting is cozy, the time late afternoon, and the minutes take on a languorous quality, almost as though they are dragging their feet through time itself. I'm in a coffee joint amidst the bitter aroma of espressos and lattes, suffused in a dim reddish tint as light filters through the translucent glass windows, with comfortable red circular plush couches marking off one area from the next. It is on one of these couches I now find myself, engaged in the inevitable dilemma of our times, the post graduation job search.

In a mild dreamlike state, I press my fingers to the scalding hot cup of coffee before me, and I withdraw my hand immediately, chastened by the harsh jolt back into reality.

"What kind of job are you looking for?"

It is a question that has been on my mind the whole month. And I realise more than ever that I do not know. I know what I do not want, a job at a newspaper. Or a "writing" job, in all of its shapes and forms. It might seem strange, seeing how writing comes naturally to me, but I know now more than ever that it is not something I will want to make a career out of. My best writing is done when I don't have deadlines to meet and editors to please.

And right on cue, an SMS from the company arrives. I don't know if I should be flattered that the HR department which did not even entertain the emails or resumes of my peers actually bothered sending me a private SMS asking me to go back. I guess it is a form of recognition, and there is no shame in feeling a little trill that maybe, in these four years, you did do something right after all.

But I know that is not my place. My peers do not understand why I say that a place that has a job waiting for you should be the last place you apply to. It is the comfortable choice, the safe one, but it is not necessarily right. And having been a journalist, I know what really matters in the job. It is not your writing ability, or the ability to stay cool in a difficult situation, but really, it is about your people, or "soft" skills. Most of my days in the newsroom were not spent writing, they were spent pulling favours with people from all walks of life, to give me a catchphrase, a quote, to find the right contacts to point me in the right directions, name-dropping the company name to pressure people to give me exactly what I wanted.

Sometimes I wondered if the story was already written even before I'd put pen to paper. In a sense, it was a series of daily exercises in mental and emotional manipulation, and I guess I was more adept at it than I realised I ever was. But perhaps, that should have hardly been surprising.

And I catch her looking at me. I must have wandered off again, my mind does these things, all too quickly, going through months, years of memories in the time it takes for others to sip coffee. I mumble a series of job descriptions, but they are an account more of what I do not want, than what I plan to apply for.

"Maybe some management position. Something where you get to learn on the job you know?"

She gives me a blank look, with more than a little frustration slipping in, something I notice by how the edges of her lips start to pull sideways and downwards. Maybe there is a bit of biting on the lower lip as well, but that I'm not very privy to. I'm lost in my own world, as usual.

"Well, why don't I help you instead. Tell me what kind of job you want."

And so, a discourse begins. And my mind is in two places at once. Even as I run through her options and give suggestions, I'm already thinking about another chance meeting that took place two weeks before that on the streets. I'd run into yet an acquaintance from school. And it was strange. I'd never really spoken to her in all four years of school, but I greeted her like a warm friend.

Was it graduation goggles like they say on "How I met your mother?" You know, how everything seems so much more in the immediate month after graduation, where even people you detested become familial kin because you shared times together. In this case she wasn't someone I hated, just someone I should have spent more effort getting to know but never really did.

She asks if I have found a job, or whether I was going on a grad trip. I answer in the negative for both, and she smiles. It is a sheepish smile, one I have seen many times on her face, only that this may be the last time I'm seeing it. She seems relieved that she is not the only one, or perhaps that someone like me shares her predicament.

In her expression I read a certain self-consolation, that someone whom she perhaps sees as somehow academically superior is actually just as gutted at life as anyone else. But I've known that all along. On the rough ocean called life, mine is a ship that has never left the harbour, weighed down by an invisible anchor, chains I've strained to break free of my whole life but am now tiring of the effort. It's so easy to settle for those irrational fears, the neuroses of the afraid impinging upon your mental consciousness till they become real chains.

I am tired. Just yesterday, I quit. I left the family car stalling in the middle of a lane, threw down the keys, and walked off. I don't know who parked the car eventually, I only know it wasn't me. I've had the license for four years, and I was not even trusted to park the car. I could do nothing right, because being right was something nobody ever wanted me to be. I had to be wrong, so others had reason to be.

And I had just parked the car perfectly a few hours before in the afternoon, when nobody else was with me. It seems that the driving gets worse the more others are in the car with me. By myself I'd done everything right. All these four years all alone. But now, even with the license to show for it, I was not trusted to take over the reins. It's not me is it, it never was.

Maybe I don't really want a job, because I don't want to be wrong. Because it would prove them right. But, by not finding a job, I am proving them right anyway. The worst of catch-22s, when you cannot be right either way, because you are only around to be wrong, a mistake, so you can be the mistake you are needed to be. So you can be a vassal for fears, fears they have grown so used to so as to be comfortable with.

I never used to be this afraid. I thought it would all become right, once I did everything right. But perhaps I should have realised it sooner. The problem, it was never mine to begin with.

There is no right job. There is no right path.

Nothing, will ever be right.

I like watching Glee, but seriously?

I like watching Glee, but certain times when I watch it I can't help rolling my eyes at just how ridiculous it is. I mean, it is okay that they want to burst into song all the time, how they can pull off Broadway numbers perfect without even rehearsing, how the other cast members know when to come in and blend perfectly and dance around, making the right faces at the right time when the camera cuts to them so it looks like they are a slick moving, breathing music machine.

That's fine, because this is a musical, and they only have 40 minutes to squeeze everything they need to squeeze into an episode. Which means song numbers take priority and all other aspects of school, like lessons, homework, breaks are 30 second cutaways. Why can't I make the banal and boring aspects of my life into 30 second cutaways too? Oh right, I'm not in a musical dramedy. Must be awesome being in one.

But you are telling me a polished act like this has problems winning Regionals, when their competition is obviously not at the same level? That the whole school hates them just because they are the Glee club despite constantly pulling off impromptu covers that would pretty much fill concert halls, and where we actually see students rocking along and smiling to it as well? Surely they must have some fans somewhere, especially since the whole sports hall can racuously sing along to Brittany's rendition of Tik Tok.

I get it, it's a show about struggling misfits, and they are trying to show you that even outcasts can become stars, but these people aren't misfits by a long mile. They are ridiculously talented.

It seems that what's really keeping people from signing up for Glee club is not how loser it is, but rather because it's too awesome. If everyone in the club sang like Rachel or Mercedes, I wouldn't touch the club with a ten foot pole because next to them I sound like bad karaoke. Even their second stringers like Santana can compose and pull off sultry numbers like "Trouty Mouth", which was my personal favourite of the season because it was hilarious. Yeah, Blaine is awesome, but he will never top Santana in a nurse outfit. Sorry.

Even the people who can't sing can dance their socks off, and their musicians can play freaking anything upon being asked to "hit it!" They are supposed to be invisible, but are somehow always present for all rehearsals, musical numbers, even impromptu last minute things like Rachel calling up Finn for a secret chat. Do these people even have day jobs apart from sitting in the glee homeroom/auditorium all day? Then where were they when Sue the Grinch stole all the Christmas gifts? Hah!

And, you know how Mr Shue is always fighting with Sue and haggling Principal Figgins about the budget, when their budget is so sick their auditorium can have among other things, an AV club doing special effects like water pouring from the ceiling and flooding up the whole place just for them to do a remix of "Umbrella". And they have all these costume changes and crazy props, but who pays for them?

No wonder they have to sell toffee to fund a bus to their competitions. If that's the case why not just do less elaborate rehearsals? Like, keep it real guys. The club is so freaking talented, you could do just about anything and it would still be good. At times, I have to suspend my disbelief so much Glee just becomes story, okay music video intermission can stop watching for awhile, story.

Bad plot devices also rule the day in Glee. Like, Artie on the football team? I know, the show is all for inclusion and giving people chances, but Artie on the football team just because he wants abs like Mike Chang? He's in a wheelchair for goodness' sakes. What is he going to do, obstruct the opposing team because you cannot manhandle a disabled individual? Doesn't anyone even realise its dangerous to have him on the field, not just for Artie but for all the other players as well? People run at high speeds on the field hello. Like, don't insult the wheelchair bound. I mean, it's bad enough that he has to roll himself around while the rest of the cast is dancing on their musical numbers, which is still believable though barely so.

The relationships in the show are also as tangled as a spider's web. Finn is sleeping with Quinn who slept with Puck who actually likes Quinn and because of that Finn and Puck are still best friends, and they can perform in the same glee club like it's the most normal thing in the world. And then Puck sleeps with Finn's second girlfriend Rachel, and they are still best friends! And Finn goes back to Quinn, but there is now Rachel who likes Finn who Puck also slept with. Are you mindfucked now? I most certainly am. If anything, they must be giving each other crabs or something.

And why doesn't anyone date outside of the Glee club? There would be a lot less fighting, so that Mr Shue will not be conveniently hanging around to break it up, because the school is only so big and they always fight at the lockers.

It's for the music, yes it's for the music. Must. Remind. Self.