Truths of Old

I'm in a Mood.

Granted, I've only had 2 hours of sleep in 24 hours. Someone ICQd me and I woke with a snap, and now I can't get back to sleep. Doh.

It's been Bad. Sat and Sun were heavy, heavy evenings. I think I saw about 30 - 40 patients on sat, and more on sun. And I broke my phone. And, and, and. I had a bad dream. It involved my mum nagging me about girls, or rather, specifically, about meeting girls of her choice. Okay, so it sounds funny in retrospect, but at the time it wasn't (in the dream) and I got really, really irked, and I woke up feeling that way. I guess some of it's still there, a latent sense of frustration at nothing in particular.

The scary bit, though, is I think it might become real if I went home for good.

My mom's never really known much about her kid's love life. Probably because
1) he doesn't often have one
2) he doesn't talk about it when he does have one
3) he secretly suspects that as long as he does the choosing, she'll do the disapproving.

evidence -

exhibit A) Paddington.

Yes, the formidable. Well, mum had some choice things to say about Her. Despite not knowing her, and her son's abject refusal to commissurate any of her speculations about their status quo.

and then

B) The Third

I remember mum meeting her for the first time. She acted all nice and mumsy (my folks only go folksy around strangers for some reason) and warm and receptive. And then later, in the privacy of our own castle, she turns to me and says, "... (my mom has pronouncing three dots down to a fine art) whatever happened to the Tall one?"

oh. so suddenly you approve, four years too late. harrrrumph.

I've resisted mum's feeble attempts to hook me up so far, and I guess I take a childish pride in it. Never!! Never will I sink so low!

Besides, how awkward would it be, to meet someone on a "date" because our mothers had arranged it.

I can imagine the dinner conversation.

She "..."

He "."

She "...?"

He "."

She "."

On the other hand, there is a very remote possiblity that my mum will accidentally strike gold, and I'll meet some beautiful, intelligent, funny chick who'll start by pointing out how awkward the whole scenario is, and end the evening by confessing that I'm her soul mate or something. laughs.

ponders.

0.00000000013% probability. Even lower than the chances of England winning the next world cup.

I'm ashamed to say this, but I was nearly tempted to meet the vet the last time around.

So it was a transparent attempt by my mum to find some way of snaring her son back home before he gets irretrievably lost to the evils of the wild west, what with the unconsciously affected ang moh accent and all. (which, anyone who's heard me will attest that it's weird and certainly not affected. Affected would be a permanent public school accent, not the strange hodgepodge of irish, scottish, north and east accents that i've somehow wound up with)

But who knows. She might have been interesting. And maybe even funny.

(pause. daughter of mother's friend. likelihood : - 10020%)

We might have had something in common. (Both trained in london. Mutual ability to bitch about weather.)

And we might have babbled about dogs all night. Hmm. Not. I bet a vet talking about dogs would be like a doctor talking about a patient. Stale, old news. Let's not talk about work...

Sigh. Mebbe I shoulda met up. It might've been funny.

(Txt msg to mother : Thx mum she is gr8 girl. yr sugg tt i drv by clinic obsessively resultd in dinnr d8 we r now married in NY this is picture of our flat, not comng home for dinnr.)

I guess I must be getting old to even weakly consider a match made in mummy.

Maybe it's just the string of nights making me hyperemotional.

Emotions

1) Bemusement
Reading some song lyrics, he understands them - much to his surprise. Despite forgetting most of the language (nearly Ten Years in Not-Quite-Tibet does that), and not really understanding the individual words, the thoughts are communicated effortlessly anyway.
It must be because I know a smidgen of the story already.

2) Bemusement
He's made it a point to never judge a book by it's cover. It's become an almost inevitable rule in today's mixed-up world that shabby, battered old books contain beautiful stories within, and that immaculate, flawless covers invariably entomb hundreds of pages of superficial, brainless drivel.
Apparently we're creating the new 2000s stereotype. Or maybe it's just me.
Still waters run deep.
But don't forget that sometimes apparent shallows have hidden depths too.

3) Envy (extremely cryptic)
Reading someone else's story, he is surprised to find himself feeling a touch of envy. Not the mundane hormonal envy a bloke has for another bloke for the attention of an appealing female specimen. Envy instead, of her, because her "What-If" is being handed to her on a silver platter.
It's a personal envy, notsomuch for her "What If", but mostly at her chance of discovering the answer to it, and partly because it reads like a fairy-tale. Or humourous romantic novel/movie.
And probably because my time of movie moments has ended.

No fairy-tale reunions, no surreal re-encounters. No chances at reconciliation -- or even possibilities of further strife and anger. No more shared moments of mutual, silent, thoughtful measuring-up, no unexpected laughter amidst the frigid, imposed tensions, no sudden flare-ups blindsiding you amidst the laughter.

Shrug. But then again, it could never happen anyway, because

1) She would never accept. She wouldn't want to. And She wouldnt, even if she wanted to.
2) I could never accept, either : I've run through the tired scenario - what, a thousand times? by now in my mind. And always the answer is the same. And never will I have the chance to experience it in the flesh, outside of the matrix within my head.

And, to be fair, I've had a fair share of What-ifs

- no
- maybe
(- yes?)
- no

I've probably expended my credit and dipped well into my overdraft already. Better not attract the banker's attention. heh.
My What-if.... is academic. And perhaps that's not such a bad thing.
But it would be so nice... to have it handed me on a platter.

4) Amusement
Desperately clutching my goblet of orange juice for reassurance of familiarity, in this sea of distinguished, greying strangers (some old enough to be my parents! and some, my grandparents!!) my gaze meets hers.

The world freezes for an instant. She's beautiful - long, brunette hair cascading magnificently off her shoulders, framing pretty, almond shaped eyes that look slightly lost and alone. And as we have that odd, unthinking instant of mutual nearly-recognition that only utter strangers can have - of both being slightly out-of-place in the here and now... we smile with our lips, and laugh in relief (at, and with each other) with our eyes.

We step forwards automatically - I, not against, but before - my volition and we introduce ourselves, and begin that chain of empty pleasantries strangers ritualistically engage in... mindless words flooding forth to fill the potential gaps in conversation, while we take each other's measure inside our heads.

Don't get me wrong. It might read like it, but this certainly wasn't about flirting, or even attraction. It's just... it's... I don't know how to describe it.

It is an... ? amusing moment of daily life, of two people mutually pausing for a second to share each other, before unconcernedly passing each other by.
A moment I had (in my daily isolation) begun to forget the taste, and touch of.

5) Impatient, insatiable fury
Reading him for the millionth time bemoaning his inadequacies, his failings, his amotivation and acopia, I feel the familiar itch of that... ugliness in my soul, that hidden part of me I spent hating in my last relationship. The cruel urge to reach out and... pick that crucial supporting stick of Truth from the pretty framework of illusions - to pluck the Jesus Pin from that ceaselessly turning rotor and - Jenga! Pop goes the weasel.

I won't waste words consoling him. I can see through him - there is really no point - there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.. especially when somewhere inside him, he is hearing the words... and then deliberately ignoring them, because he feels that he has heard it all before.

I wonder at his motivations, or whether he has any at all, or is simply, like it looks, blundering along in his own way, flip-flopping between hope and devastation because he is as lost as he paints himself to be. The ugly, cynical side of me is inclined to disagree.

And is tempted to challenge him to... but no. I shall not. Steady your hand. Nobody deserves that.

And I'm angry.
But not at him... I'm just tired of him now. And tired of watching the same old, same old story unfold. A dozen well-wishes later, he will hope, and then he will doubt, and then he will fall again. He will envy others their strength, their love, their supposed God-given mercies that his life is so devoid of, he will see silver spoons up everyone else's mouths, and whinge about his own spoonless existence.

He will begrudge other people their love, and happiness... not because he wants to take it away, but because he feels it lacking in his own life.

He will ignore the wonders in his own.

And I'm angry because I know how it feels.
I think I'm angry because I'm afraid that I might one day fall over the precipice into the abyss he occupies now.

An abyss I found myself in once, years ago, that I painstakingly clawed my way out of. And so I DO know how you feel.

As if you're the saddest, most pathetic person in the world.
As if your heart torn asunder, not by heartbreak, but by apathy, and nothing, absolutely nothing will help you feel alive again.

I have felt ugly, and deformed - something must be wrong with me. I'm so old... and not a "proper" relationship to my name.
What am I waiting for?
Why am I waiting?
Am I waiting... or am I so hideous that love shuns me, and women will never cast a second look my way - that way, anyhow? (perhaps, unlike him, I am blessed... or maybe cursed? with the ability to make close platonic female friends easily. I think it's a factor of the slightly dysfunctional Y chromosome. Women feel safe around me. dammit!!)

I have sat on a cliff and felt so utterly insignificant in the scheme of things, and so sad. People pass me over. I'm invisible in a crowd of two. Maybe, just mabe if I lean forwards just a little bit more this will end. Nobody would notice anyhow...

I'm older now, and if I could go back and face myself (and by implication - him) I'd :

1) slap myself in the face. Hard. and say

2) it's not so bad. other people are hurting out there, and they're hurting

3) just as bad, if not worse than you. Open your eyes. Look at them. Look at the girl who's pouring her heart out to you about how she got raped by her then-boyfriend. Look at the girl who's boyfriend of three years, the love of her life - died of leukaemia. Look at how she holds her head up with quiet dignity, despite the invisible tears cascading down her cheeks that her eyes betray.
Look at yourself, a few years later, falling farther into the abyss, missing someone so acutely that it actually hurts, physically, and it really feels like descending into madness. And realise that it isn't so bad where you are now. And brace yourself, because it does get worse.

4) And then it gets better, oh, about six or seven years later. You just have to learn to put up with it. And stop

5) seeing things through your own eyes. And realise that you're being bloody self-centred and you really ARE being pathetic, but

6) you can be more. And you can live with yourself. and really...

7) a "proper" relationship isn't all that it's cut up to be.

8) Love comes and goes. Someone quoted someone else (this is a bit hazy) as saying there's love, big love, and Great love.

Well, love, and big love, the type that fall apart... they're not that great. They're not everything they're cut up to be, and the aftermath of all that is horribly inconvenient, unpleasant, and you're really much better off never knowing it. Really.

9) You're waiting for "great love". That's your answer. And it's better to stay unsullied while you wait...

10) So quit being a pratt. Because life ain't so bad. And you don't need anybody to tell you that. You just have to learn to open your eyes, and then open them again.
See yourself as you really are. (not so pathetic)
See everyone else as they really are. (more pathetic than they look)

And smile. Because life's... a bitch. And someone up there sure has a funny sense of humour. But it is kinda funny. And you know what? You'll live.

Euro 2000. Heartbroken.

*****
English Weather in a nutshell :

1) The sun only ever comes out when you go indoors

2) Only in England can one catch a chill in the height of English summer, lying on the ground in a park catching some sun.

*****
Bemusedly sitting on the couch being slowly squished to death under the weight of my tormentress, (who, while stick thin, is about a head taller than myself) my oxygen deprived brain struggles to come up with a retort suitable for the occasion.

Number of times facing this scenario : 0

Number of suitable quips for extrication : 0

"help..." I hear myself saying, weakly.

I'm convinced she just likes scaring the hell out of me. That's it. That's probably why she pokes me in the sides in front of patients too, everytime she walks past... right?

Yes, yes. I do remember the odd hanyupinyin thingie.

The Filipino Sister's hand brushed mine the other day as we both reached for something. There was an audible (and very tangible) crack as she discharged onto me. Oww.

I'd been kidding around about it back home, a barely remembered memory. But as it happened yet again, I paused to think. Gee. It happens EVERY time we come within a centimeter of each other. And suddenly, I was siezed with the urge to kiss her, just to see what would happen.

Bah! Dammit!! Mind corrupted!!!! /purge
not good. negative outcome. this is what comes from talking to pervy people.

moving swiftly on...
*****

Now the Senior Clinical Pharmacist at my hospital, though. She has the face, body, and temperement of an angel. I remember falling slightly in love with her, in a platonic way of course, as a pre-reg house officer. We hugged goodbye the day I left, and it was a moving experience.

A year and a bit down the line, I returned to the same hospital, but we only meet occasionally, usually outside the hospital on the way home (and apparently once in london when I flagrantly ignored her err unintentionally) and stand and chat, and I look in her (...angelic) eyes and think she's simply the bestest...

deviant thoughts like "if only she wasn't married..." don't even come into it. (so get your minds out of the gutters!) although, well. cough. well moving swiftly on.

It's funny how cultural barriers come crashing down after living in a truly cosmopolitan society like london (as compared to, cough, the Motherland, where undercurrents of racism bubble constantly under the surface). She's not, if any of you are wondering, platinum blonde with blonde roots. She's actually "asian", ie (in this country anyhow) Indian.

On that note, however :

walking home from the gym today (ouch! argh! I hurts!) some white children threw a rotten egg at me. It missed by a mile, but where it lay smashed on the ground emanating the most foul odour imaginable, several huge inch-long maggots crawled out and started dying in the sunlight.

I eyed them for a while (the kids, not the maggots), contemplating charging them down and rubbing their faces in the egg for a bit, but they at least had the decency not to shout some racist slur or other, and after a short and slightly uncertain standoff, they decided to run for it, probably because the chinese guy looked pissed off and might know something about hurting people.

Grr.

It's a strange, mixed up country I'm living in, where half the population is colour-blind, and the other half seeped since childhood in insurmountable prejudice. But I rather prefer it to the latent, but prevalent racism of home.

I remember listening to the ex, and her family go on, and on, and on about Ah Pu Neh Nehs, and the horrible smell of their hair.
And slowly, very slowly, burning with hate.

She writes :

"I sometimes read, with sadness and a great deal of envy, some of your entries and observations because you seem to have it. Just a sheer honesty about your lives with that added dash of humour. It's a trait I've noticed that all bloggers seem to share - that superordinate ability to see your lives outside of yourselves as some kind of comedy, or sometimes satire. The ability to make light of yourselves, yet imbue it with a moodiness that makes one stop, and sometimes wish that they were there, or that they were you."

How odd. I sometimes read, with no small degree of envy, her utter joy and happiness at having found the man to spend the rest of her life with, and ogle at her wedding photographs like everyone else does. What must it be like, to be as lucky as she? What must it be like, to have that?

It's such a mind-boggling experience to find the perspectives reversed. This life I lead, in this ordinary shell I wear, is pretty mundane to me.

Slightly dark, self-deprecating self-satire? Over-rated. :)

Now lucian, on the other hand. He's just a lucky bastard. :) If he grins any more the top of his head will fall off.

"Me on the other hand, am deluged by my work, this humourless, insipid environment. Around me, everyone is buried to their necks in their keyboards, typing away typing away at ...what? the latest speech? rushing to get the next "Errata" out the ST to correct them on the wrong nuances made in one or some of their reports?"

Do I have time to reflect? To just "be"? Hardly.

Work. I know that word. Ten hours a day, mind numbing questions repeated ad nauseum, but with an odd, apathetic form of relief. Because when things get exciting... sure, there's that little buzz, that awakening of the senses - almost (I'm beginning to like this phrase) a "prickling point of awareness"... it's very, very slightly like falling in love (sans the love part. heh) when everything becomes hyperacute, and thoughts race... but they race in an almost frenzy. And there is fear, somewhere in here, reigned in and carefully controlled and masked in a guise of professional calm. And when it's all over, come what may, we step back outside of resusc and restart the mind-numbing questions. A smooth transition between two worlds.

It's exhausting. And consuming. And sometimes it feels like I'm drowning.

So I come home, and I struggle to the surface - with words. Before plunging beneath the waves into the depths of slumber.
I've discovered, by the way, that 6 hours is the absolute minimum for optimal performance. But sometimes optimal performance goes out the window, when something needs to be scribed.

Perhaps I reflect, and "am", so much because I have nobody left to reflect to.
This is, strictly, untrue. I have several friends (and with the passing days, I try to ressurrect more) whom I still email with. But emails are for snippets, pleasant cutouts tailored to the friends.

Thoughts like these, whole, overwhelming thoughts, are either for oneself, or for a better half - someone intimate, to share everything, good bad and ugly with.

In the absence of a better half, to laugh with, lean on, listen to, and unburden upon - I use these pages as my release.

Don't envy these lonely reflections - or I will envy your completeness, JN. :)

This may just be a Monday blues phenomenon - reading the Scriptures for today I am also reminded that we all have our bits of lives to live, that ours is not a life to compare with each other's and feel bitter that our lot is not as fascinating as someone else's.

ah.
No, life is fascinating. In different ways. My life does, in it's mundanity, fascinate me -- but yours fascinates me as well. A random stranger impressed upon me that all life is beautiful, regardless of the intricacies of it, because everything happens for a reason - whatever that reason be, ours is not to wonder why. Bitterness, and resenting "short straws" is a waste of humanity. It leads to... something we see still, evolving on someone (unnamed) else's page.

I know you are seizing your life with both hands, and am happy for you. :)

Still. Is there anything truly fascinating about Chai Tea? Hardly. =)

Whaaaaaaat? Blasphemy!! Sacriledge! Send forth the centurians! Assemble the ranks! Put a contract onna head! I want no expense spared!

Or that the smallest things can send one into orgasmic heaven? Well, not so uncommon, that one, but yes, I take the point. This individual introduced me to Chai tea once, and I commiserate with him that the only cafe that found it worth its time to sell the concoction in Singapore is Coffee Beans.

Psssshaw!!! ACCEPT NO IMITATIONS!!!! Borrrrrrrders!

To arms, to arms! Viva la Revolutione!
oops. sorry. got carried away there. cough.

I don't know why, but my feet carried me to Langham Church today.

I'd just rushed to the medical supplies store on Wigmore Street to buy some earpieces for my Cardioscope. Mission accomplised, I just... wandered. Sometimes it almost feels like I'm running, although I don't know what from.

She was there, standing on the steps of All Soul's looking distantly out as if to sea. Clearly waiting for someone. An old acquaintence, from days long since past. I'd always thought of her as "handsome"... I don't know why. Not quite pretty in my books (but very pretty in my mum's lol)... just "handsome". Even in the days when I very nearly counted her amongst my friends, and she counted me amongst hers, when we shared the odd meal and concert together. Before I went slightly ga-ga over her rather pretty friend *laughs*.

I hadn't met her here in London in years. I didn't even know she was still in the UK. She looked slightly older, wiser, and even more handsome now, her long hair billowing slightly in the wind and her bright, and slightly amused eyes searching the horizon.

I paused, then dropped my head and hurried by. I don't know why I did that, either.

Fifty yards down the street, I stopped, and then turned around. Something was drawing me back. Perhaps it was common decency. I could hear my mum's voice ringing in my ears - why didn't you stop to say hello? My friend's daughter!

I drew nearer, and she was no longer there. The steps stood vacant, and forlorn.

And it didn't really matter at all.
I felt no disappointment. I guess that shred of common decency was just a pretty lie to myself.

I drifted up the stairs the way, I suspected, I'd meant to the first time around.

So many memories of these steps, and this yellow stone church.

People from yesteryear stood on the steps by me, before me, shadows almost spoke to me, some hugged me. Some were cold and awful. Some were lukewarm, and one, sultry like the breath of wind on a summer's day, the memory of her touseled hair eliciting images in my mind, for some reason, of a comfortable well-worn fleece. Truly, I regret losing that one.

I found myself standing at the wood-and-glass doors to the church peering into the darkened interior. Searching... for what, I don't know either.

And then I turned around, and strode away. Quickly, as quickly as I could. Run, run away.

Fifty yards down the street, I wheeled around again, and again, I found myself at the glass doors.

This time, I pushed. And strangely, they opened.

More memories, within. Familiar memories, like old friends. Strange, how a vacant room brought back so many more intimate memories of the past, when it's Sunday incarnation, teeming with crying children and sombre adults does nothing for me.

I knelt within, before a generic grey cheap metal seat... (A church like All Soul's deserves real pews, IMO)
...and prayed this prayer :

"Father, I pray to You :
for all the people I have ever hurt,
and for all those that I have failed to help
that You might hold them close to You."

I prayed quite a few more things, and I had one or two thoughts that simply don't translate into words. And a few things that I'd rather not write here.

And then I stood, and left for the last time.

*****
I crossed myself and genuflucted on the way out, unselfconsciously, for once.

*****
It's funny how, as a Christian, with the sheer, bewildering and utter freedom of prayer-form available, I was never quite sure how to pray, yet as a Catholic, mouthing prayers now committed to memory (eg: Oh my Lord, I give Thee my Heart... grant me the grace to pass this day in Thy Holy Love, and without offending Thee) -- I now feel how to apply that freedom of form in my prayers. And I realise that there is no "right" way after all.

I've just awakened from the most tormented dream of my life.

And the words I spoke - or rather, shouted at my mother (gone wrong) in that dream...

my salvation?
my subconscious truth?
my denial of reality?

what was that anyhow?

Another day. To work.
*****
Low Life (2)

Reading him describe derisively how other boys used to cursorily cross themselves as if swatting flies... and hearing her rant about "false" catholics betraying their ignorance when taking communion by putting their right hands in their left (instead of left, in right) he wondered :

what are you Watching (so closely) for?

He reflected and realised that he never really looks up in church. He's usually trapped in his own personal reverie.

I had it all worked out. Sunday :

1)go to church
2)Go to gym
3)Finish Job Apps

Somewhere after 1), and slightly before 3) things went slightly pear-shaped.

Despite my brain's best attempts at controlling my feet, I found myself mysteriously standing by the Thames, which is, oh, only about 30 minutes walk from the gym. I love walking along the Thames. I don't know why, it's grubby and grey, but something about the pure expanse of open space... and seagulls wheeling in the air... and condoms floati - err scratch that one - ... gives me a sense of utter freedom, and lifts away my mundane little worries and life-stresses like nothing else can. The only thing better, IMO is a hot cup of Border's chai latte. (which I'm having now. Ooohh. Ahhhh. Mmmmm. Yesssss.)

Another ten minutes later, I was standing in Covent Garden listening to the Last Remaining Friend in London distressedly unleashing her tides of woe and fear upon me. (Job applications can do that to a bloke. Or bird.)

Her voice was practically quavering with fear, and somewhere slightly beyond it I could sense imminent tears.

So, what the hell, sod the gym. (eh?)
Suddenly, twenty minutes later I've

1) discovered the route of the RV1 Riverside Bus, and watched all manner of geria... - OLD - fogeys striding confidently past. You know that Knight Bus in Harry Potter 3? Well, imagine the complete opposite and you'll have a handle on the RV1. It didn't help that everytime we met another RV1 crawling by in the opposite direction the drivers would stop in the middle of the road for a bit of a natter. fume.

and then...

2) ...I'm sitting in her posh Butler's Wharf flat feasting on posh takeaway pizza and imbibing (a little too much) posh - and simply exquisite Moscato d'Asti white wine, and playing pretend-interviewer to Ms Bundle of Nerves.

I dunno if I helped her. Hope so. It's all in the wrist. Oops, that was something else. I mean, it's a sleight of brain. Lie, through your teeth. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't have followed my mum's path and become a lawyer instead...
(fear leads to anger. anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering...)

I do know that I didn't go to the gym, or complete my job apps either. bugger.

So this morning, at the crack of (a beautiful, cloudless, made-for-thames-walking) dawn, I bravely ventured forth to the vaguely remembered realm known as "The Gym", which I last visited, ah, a year ago. (blame the job. blame the job!)

Whaddahey. This place is overflowing with hot, sweaty body-beautiful people... At 0730 am?!?

And is it just my imagination, or is it a very... select... type of woman who works out with weights?? Damn, they can bench press more than I!

Cough, not, of course, that I can do a great deal. Atrophy is a nasty thing. Sniff.
Much to my distress, I discovered I could no longer reliably press / haul / push / shove / squeeze / lug the weights I remembered , and had to set all my mental presets back about 10 kg. For everything. agh.

Naturally, by the time I emerged from "The Gym" a mere hour later, it had turned cold, grey and drizzly.

Ah well. There will be other days.

Oh yeah. And it's also a select type of woman who runs on the treadmill at this particular gym. The poor dears don't seem to be able to afford much in the way of clothes.
Yummy.

*****

I've only just realised this was only available in the UK. So, for the rest of the world - click! It's funny :)

Oh. ohh. oh! ohh. ohhhhhgod.
yessss.

if there was a phrase for what I'm feeling right now, that would be it.

current activity : in my bed. savouring cup of Border's Chai tea.

Some people, it seems, get this from wasabi. Border's chai does it for me. If Claudia Schiffer were to drop out of the sky suddenly and strip off, well, sorry, tough luck Claudia but I'd still choose my cuppa.

When Border's cafe London closed it's doors, to be replaced by cheap and cheery Starbucks (shudder) I thought my life was over. I'd spent many an evening, alone at Borders contemplatively looking out through the long glass wall at the night sky (granted, this was shortly after Paddington. For the next couple of years.) nursing a stein of Borders Chai (tm) tea, and feeling that things were nearly right in the world again. There's something so therapeutic, so soothing about the smell of it. And it actually translates into a taste that does justice as well! Electric shivers down my spine. Okay, sue me. I'm weird. I get this with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata sometimes too.

Encountering authentic Chai this summer hols in Borders Singapore (till this year the dunderheads couldn't seem to figure out how to get the hot water / milk mix right, serving up insipid cups of brown chai-flavoured water instead) was like rediscovering an old flame (and shagging her too! hehe. oop. sorry. bad boy. down boy down. woof.) Warm, gentle and all-enveloping like a summer's breeze. Heady and slightly intoxicating, like your first kiss. (only, rediscovered.) Familiar. Perfect.

I couldn't resist. I asked the waitress if they sold this stuff, y'know - under the table, like. Out the back. Whatever it takes, I gotta have a bag!!! She paused - it's quite expensive, Sir. Over $100 for a hundred pound bag.
Quick mental arithmetic time - how much does a pound weigh? Dunno. How much is $100? About £30. Sod it, I'll buy it even if it turns out to be the size of a coke can! gimme! Gimmmmeeee!

The manager appeared a short while later under the weight of what looked like a small sack of flour - oh wait! it's - gasp - Chai. Hushed, reverent silence.
Gee whiz, it's the weight and size of two newborn babies! I'll TAKE IT. NOW. GIMME. GIMME. LEGGO. MINE! MINE. MY PRECIOUSSSSSSSSSsss.

okay, so here I am, in bed hugging my cup of airflown Border's chai tea. Not even the wildest, wettest male fantasy made flesh compares to this. Honest. Move over Claudia, you're blocking my keyboard. And you leave my tea alone!!!

*****
All About Gentlemen

My best friend and I, over dinner. Discussing the finer points of life, encompassing and including :

1) soon-to-be patented Ultimate Buffet machine. (as an aside, what is it about parents, farewell dinners and expensive Buffets anyhow? not a good thing for a slightly queasy youngest son)

pause. Yeeees. I think he migh be onto something here. We laugh :)

2) Martial Arts 101, as described by the um. cough. Mildly unhinged nutter listed on the left as "national nutplane". Urgent Crane meets Sullied Tortoise, stance #546 has to be my personal favourite, by the way. (article reference : "For Men: Why we take so long in the loo, 12/06/04 02:49 since her doubtlessly highly paid coders haven't yet figured out how to give her html reference markups. I note with amusement the uncanny resemblance between the mydreamd8 and the national day moblog templates. Meeroow.)

A few terse sentences from the best buddy about smells, and floors... and ah yes. The perfect comeback. Since he's too shy to write about it, I'll do the dirty.

Mens lavatories the world over invariably have these slightly damp blackish, brackish shoeprints on the floor, which smear as you step through them. They're always slightly more densely distributed about urinals and toilet bowls as well for some reason.

There's always this reassuringly familiar sensation that a foot placed even slightly awry will result in one being in a position to make a very sudden, close and above all personal acquaintence with the millions of friendly bacteria living in the sea of life spreading thinly but insistently across the floor (and occasionally, up the wall). And take them home too, on your shirt sleeves, back, and trousers.

Toilet seats. Need I even write about the cheerfully-coloured water streaks that slide enthusiastically off (white! why white!!) plastic seats as you lift them up - because some friendly bastard before you with the aim and continence of Schwarzennegar after thirty pints of strongbow has decided that the seat is obviously too heavy for his muscley arms to move, and in addition has gotten in into his mind to decorate the floor, rather than the inside of the toiletbowl with the aforementioned thirty pints? Interestingly though, Arnie's aim is often unerringly accurate when it comes to cigarette stubs and spent ciggy packs, which always bob merrily on the surface of their own personal red sea no matter how insistently one tries to flush them away.

And the odour. Pheeewwwwee. Lemon-y fresh scented napkins? Welcome to the Real Man's world. Eu de Caveman-piss. Unga bunga. (ougha even.)

So no, we don't have any sympathy for you women, with your probable deli-compli-cated lineup and landing sanitary manoevres, and your faintly inconvenient ringing mobiles interrupting a leisurely moment of effluence. Us men have a 100% probability of stepping into precisely the same hostile environment the second we open that door with cutout-ken on it, anywhere in the world.

Aren't you glad you ladies don't use urinals? What's a little wait, with a hop, skip and twiddle, in the grand scheme of the sanitary piddle? :)

... it's about being in love with the right person.

"You see, sometimes I'll catch Alice looking at me while I'm watching TV and she'll have a huge inane grin on her face that really doesn't become her. I'll ask her what she's doing and she'll take her time before answering my question with silence. Then she'll ask me if I love her. I'll pretend to take my time thinking over the question and then she'll throw a cushion at me. This is my cue to tell her that I love her with all my heart (which I do), then she'll tell me that she loves me more than anything (which she does). Then it will be my turn to joke that because we're 'friends' and 'more than friends' it kind of makes her my best girlfriend. And then she'll laugh, look me in the eye in a manner which still makes me go weak at the knees and say, 'No, I'm your Legendary girlfriend.' Whenever she makes this statement I always nod and smile in agreement - but the truth is I'm not so sure one way or the other. The one thing I am sure of is this: our love doesn't feel bad.
And that is all that matters."

- Mike Gayle, My legendary Girlfriend

(beautiful)
lucky bastard.

It made me think of this lucky bastard. And smile.

I now know how to throw a forehand, and backhand reef knot, with my eyes closed, in a deep dark place. woohoo. Set for life.

I can also anastomose bowel walls end to end, and end to side, and create a vascular patch.

That's like. Just so awesome. man. not.

sigh.

Well the sun is up so I shan't waste any more time online, suffice to say my next post will contain a liberal dose of masculine toilet humour. Sans humour.

I've been doing a lot of thinking the last few weeks (and a lot of tying, the last few days! groan. my poor fingers... as an aside, laparoscopy is simply the coolest. I love it to bits.)

This is what I've come to :

Worlds
Watching the familiar shores of home slide smoothly out the bottom of the limited view presented by his ubiquitous porthole as the plane traversed a steep bank, he felt an overwhelming sadness. Which was odd -- this hadn't happened before : at least, not from leaving these shores, anyhow.
Forty-eight hours later, watching soft golden-hued English sunlight forming shifting dappled patterns in the tree-leaves outside his window somewhere in Porthsmouth, he felt that same sadness, still.

I am beginning to miss home. Not, as many would assume, because home is such a miraculously wonderful place brimming over with good old' oriental asian values and that magical mystical allure of the east. And whilst I do have family and friends back home - many have left as well. And faded into my past.

Having stepped outside of the fishbowl, I no longer harbour any illusions. Singapore is frankly sterile and soulless. It's a city to exist comfortably in - simply to exist in. It's difficult to grow when all around you are happy, fuzzy illusions of warmth and comfort (does anyone remember what happened when those illusions melted away with our recent SARS and financial crises?)
Singapore is the matrix.

I think I'm beginning to miss home because I'm tiring of the UK.

The UK is rich in abundance. Rich in words. Rich in variation, of thought-form, of humour, of cultures. THIS is the true cosmopolis, the melting pot of cultures that Singapore pretends to be.

It is also very dark. It has the worst of all worlds, alongside the best. And the prevailing Englishness paints the country - cold, and grey. Dreary. Cynical, sophisticated, and oh, so world-weary.

A stranger commented that she thought from my writing that I wasn't quite sure where I belonged. I wondered at first if she might be right, but then I realised - it's not that way around. I think it's more that I know where I don't belong. I don't really belong in Singapore -- as much, or as little -- as I don't belong in the UK.

Here I am too quiet, too timid. Too easy to overlook. The beliefs and significances that I hold dear to myself I share with nobody. This is the land of eternal twilight, the endless frustrated clawings at the wallboards under the ambitions pasted high up, near the ceiling.

In Singapore I am too vocal - but not in the way that people want to hear. I clumsily, and obstinately in my quest for truth, smash to the floor the pretty scaffolds upon which other people's egos and happiness are built upon.

I read with amusement the flurry of articles about ABCs feeling that they "fit in" best in Singapore... pretty, pretty scaffolds. But oh, so fragile. When, one wonders, will they finally run away whimpering, tails firmly wedged between their legs? When will their bubbles burst?

The reality is, Singaporeans don't want to hear the truth. We don't want to know that we're intrinsically a racist people who cast slurs at our neighbours behind their backs, that we've got a second-rate government which is so busy painting their own CVs a glowing white that they've forgotten what their people really want... that celebrities are real-life people who get cut and bleed too.
We delude ourselves at so many levels of society -- and are happy doing it. We must be. Best in the region. Best in South East Asia, and someday, Best in the World. Olympic football, anybody?

When journalists cross the line, and write that perhaps we should just learn to sit back and smell the roses and maybe, just maybe alter our concept of the "Singapore dream" to forget being "best" for a while -- they get ominous summons to the PMs house for little "pep talks."

Our press is free to report on current events, within acceptable limits...

I don't know where I belong, or, if there is anywhere that I will ever fit in. But right now, that potential British PRship doesn't look so bad. It doesn't look great, either.

Words
Words transcend the boundaries of individual senses - the written word. The spoken word.
How often I take for granted that they are not one and the same. I confess that I speak my words "aloud" in my mind as I read and write them. It's a little like having a movie soundtrack in my head. (Rachel Stevens, apparently, has a permanent musical going in hers. Now THAT is disturbing)

These few months have reminded me that words hold a great power, both written, and spoken.

But for me, as a living, breathing creature blessed with the gifts of both sight and sound -- the spell that binds them for me, the final piece of the puzzle - is the melding of sight, and sound.

Perhaps I'm just superficial that way. Or perhaps I'm just a fool.

Women
"I now knew how pointless it was trying to pretend that I didn't still feel something for her. It didn't make sense to love her. I'd weighed up the pros and cons a million times, and the results were always the same: I needed her. She was no good for me, she didn't want me to be part of her life, but there was nothing I could do about how I felt. I loved her. I couldn't lie to myself, though it was the one thing I wished I had the strength to do. I couldn't forget about her. The passage of time had, if anything, made her more important to me now than ever. I couldn't replace her with another girl without constantly comparing them to her and finding them lacking. I couldn't move forward, and I couldn't reclaim the past. I was stuck in an ex-lover's limbo with nothing but happy memories to keep me company."

- My Legendary Girlfriend, Mike Gayle

That same stranger from before holds that I never really got over Her.
There certainly seems a lot to get over - when I did it, I did it big. She was (is?) tall, and looked even taller than she was. She stood at least at his height, if not a little taller, and had a perpetual intelligent sparkle in her eyes - a hint of that sheer, irrepressible humour - and yes, even effervescence - that could - and often did - well up suddenly and engulf her unsuspecting prey. She had a keen mind and a honed wit, and the most beautiful, rogueish smile. She was tanned, and looked like a fun-in-sun kinda girl, although in his foggy memory she never did anything more extreme than hit a rubber ball into a wall just above the tin. Her voice was pitched slightly too high for the rest of her, and she had a distinctive drawl that spoke of obvious origins down south, further from the equator.
She was pretty too. Unconventionally, but undeniably. She was more than he.
She was utterly, and completely out of my league.

I last met Her six years ago. But there are days when, if I close my eyes for just an instant, the full, gory technicolour memories arise unbidden - the perfect contours of those brows and eyelids overlying those devastating eyes, set above that provocative, flirtatious and very, very slightly sardonic smile.

But there's more - much more.

I also remember how She made me feel. It wasn't just the soppy Hollywood milkshake of adolescent endorphines run amuck, that thingie about stomaches falling into the abyss, and hearts clawing their way up oesophagi. It wasnt just a faintly electric tension in the air (or at least, the air between acoustic meati heh heh), a "prickling point of awareness".
It was also very... Jack Nicholson. As Good as it Gets -

She made him feel alive. She drew a well of wit and humour from the depths within him, In the constant tension when it looked like She was bubbling over with almost-laughter -- She inadvertently elicted a reciprocal reaction from, and set him free. The best part of him, anyhow.

He loved Her because of who She was -- and who he became around Her.

I know I write about Her often, and I must read exactly like that excerpt above. But the truth is... I've been there. And out the other side. I love her memory now. We will never see each other again... and I accept that. Six years is a long, long time to hold an antiquated torch, for a stranger one barely knows anymore.

Somewhere in the pits of this cynical soul smoulder the last embers of romanticism, which were first set ablaze (too early dammit!!) the day he met her.

He still wants to believe in that nebulous One out there, and that one day he just might meet her, and hold her when he does.

I see now through open eyes - too often have I used Her as a yardstick. Too often I have chased down Her shadow in someone else's laugh, someone else's eyes. Someone else's smile. And too often have I held people against that yardstick and been disappointed.

I know now that it is not, after all, "someone like You" that I seek, K****. And it is not a question of "unrealistic expectations" either, ye animaniac elf.

I think I'm seeking that elusive somoene who gives me the "movie moments" -- the moments magical when the edges of reality seem to shimmer just a little, when just sitting close by is enough, and just speaking is a shared, comfortable, funny intimacy. Someone who makes me feel wonderful about her - and about myself.

And I suspect that this is what we all seek:

Someone who sees past the skeletal flesh-and-blood frames we carry ourselves within, through to the rusty, creaky and most of all, fallible personas we hide with time and experience, and feels wonderful about it -- and herself, in return.

Wisdom
"Don't marry for money.
You can borrow it cheaper"

- from the Spicy Sauce packet of my pot curry breakfast today

London.

Hot. 27 degrees. Grey. Overcast.
Thanks to a minor miscalculation, I now have 4 hours to kill before embarking on the next leg of my journey halfway across the world. From Singapore, to Portsmouth.

It's been a strange holiday. One of the first where I was chronically sleep-deprived, and out there doing things - but having a good time. Good memories. Thank you, for coffee, Harry Potter, the scars on my hands and dessert cocktails.

It all seems so surreal now. So far, far away. An alternate reality.

Hmm. And I've got this itch on my arm.
Maybe I should have met the vet after all... heh

*****
I remember

Once bitten, twice shy
Twice bitten, thrice sly
Thrice bitten, eternally paranoid.

Yeah, that was it.

Last moments in Singapore :

the night before, falling asleep on best bud's couch watching an educational video about Basic Surgical Skills by the Royal College of Surgeons, England and tying my fingers to his settee.

Dammit. I know I'm good with my hands. But these blasted knot things. growl. who cares about tying things up, I want to cut them apart!
*****

"I've only got seats left by the aisle, is that okay Sir?" she says, barely glancing up at me.

Hmm. Sudden impulse -

Excessive eye contact. Open eyes a tiny bit wider, wrinkle forehead a tiny bit. Winsome smile. Tease -

"Ah. Could you possibly give me something with a bit more leg room?"

Pause. Smile.

"Well, actually the flight is rather empty today..."

Holy crap. This s*** actually works! Yay me.
*****

Leaving home to go home is always a bit confusing. I never know if I'm coming or going. Hmm. But this time around I have to reassemble my Accent, which has been somehow systematically dismantled into a Singlish (waaaah?) accent. interesting.

Okay. So I'm back home very, very late. And the brother is refusing to wake up despite my insistent tapping on his window. grr.

What to do. think. think. pace. think.

Nah. That won't do it. Nah... this chopstick thingie won't do it either.

Ah. clothes peg + Garden secateurs - I have an idea...

Entry obtained. Exp +10. I'll leave the details to your imagination. But... impregnable fortress... no longer.
The new locks go up today.

It's amazing the practical skills I've acquired this lifetime. grin.

Looking closely at "Big Brother" with renewed eyes :

Infuriating movie-star looks. That appealing elongated, almost cuboidal head-shape. Mildly curled hair arcing naturally away from his spontaneous center parting to fall into two locks either side of his forehead.
Perfect eyebrows, set in an almost horizontal line. Beautiful oriental eyes, emphatically masculine but not overtly severe. Gentle brown irises hinting at a quiet soul within. That most un-oriental, square, chiselled jaw and strong chin that his female classmates must once upon a time have swooned over. Lips set naturally in an easy-going smile.
Broad shou...

eh!! hang on. Facial hair. He doesn't have a single mis-placed facial hair!! No hair growing out between the eyebrows. Not a sliver protruding from his cheeks!!

Arrrgh! Edward must be right!
*****
Paranoia

Leaving the house for dinner, he puts on his grey dress shirt and looks about for a pair of trousers to go with it.
Eh? Where are my black trousers. No black trousers. Oh well, there's blue jeans... But they don't match. Nope, not colour co-ordinated, must find black trousers. Where are those trousers dammit, can't leave the house witho...

ARGH! How much does that rank on the gaydar scale??! I'm colour-matching! hyperventilate.

Puts on the blue jeans.
Groan. It looks awful. Goes out. Swagger. Remember to swagger. That'll make it all okay.
*****

Somedays I'm convinced I must be clinically insane. Or maybe just manic depressive. Checks - not feeling manic at the moment.

Actually, for such an ordinary guy, re-minisce has had a pretty damn unusual time this life. Put one foot wrong, and the whole path goes wonky.

1) The Crime Lords
Sitting, pouring wine for the son of London's #1 triad leader and saying, with a vague (and trembley, and slightly forced) Honkie accent (when in rome...) : "Eh dai kor, drink, drink." and "This is very good wine! Thank you so much!!" he thinks to himself : "DAMN! HOW DID I WIND UP HERE?!??! Oh yeah. It was mumblemumble's damn sister who rubs shoulders with These "local celebrities." who twisted his arm into coming along. mommy. Get me outta here."

Any minute now, the doors will burst open and a crazed gunman will charge in spraying automatic fire around the room.
Or worse still - maybe the media will appear. cringe. He can see it all now. Chinese... underground connections... medical stu.... struck off...

The scrawny oriental security guys with their hands tucked into their jacket lapels don't look very reassuring either.

2) Viva, Las London
Round and round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows! Rii-ight. Someone remind me again how this ties in with the Faith? Looks to me like you guys have a little "problem". Oh. Apparently it's okay if your intentions are simply to enjoy it and not financial. (heyyy. Spearmint Rhino. and high class "escorts". I wonder...) Would you like to play? uh. no thanks. I'll just sit here and eat my snacks. nice snacks.

3) Keeping up Appearances
The setting - two people sitting in a car staring mutely at nothing in particular. The heat of the mid-day sun is oppressive.
(He's thinking - this is. ridiculous.)

She, tearfully. Angrilly : noise. (Something about dressing inappropriately.)
He, Angrilly : noise. (But it's a hawker centre. Dammit.)
She : noise. (meeting people, parents, putting parents to shame)
He : noise. (everyone else was in shorts and slippers)
She : noise. (do you want to be like these people?)
He : silence.
She : noise. (maybe we should break up)
He : noise. almost gratefully? (maybe we should)
He thinks (maybe this is the moment, at last)

silence.

The Trophy
Pan -
Box office seats. Front row, complete with red cord.

Zoom out a little -
Two Generic blokes. Besuited. With ties on.

voice-over -
(bloke 1, silently, in his mind) This is. ridiculous.
Bloke 1 turns his head slightly to look at the other guy in his suit.
(bloke 1, aloud : so why are you doing this? don't you feel... like you're for show? Like we're not real?)
Bloke 2 looks puzzled.

Zoom out a whole lot -
Rows, upon rows of seats. No, pews. T-shirted people sweating faintly in the open-air heat, waiting in anticipation for the show - no, mass - to begin. One almost expects a popcorn-and- cigarette woman, any second... now.

Zoom out yet more -
A stage. The show commences. Bright colours. Song and dance routines.

Zoom back in, and in, and in -
Generic bloke 1 has stripped off the tie, and now the jacket.
Silently, in his mind : this is a travesty of all that is and was significant in my mind. I will not play this game.
This is a place of worship. There is no place for this charade, in a house of God.

The Trophy 2
A man, sitting, bemused at a table of strangers. Everyone's smiling vacantly at each other. Oh, so you're (person)'s (appendage)!

Hello. I have a name.
This is ridiculous. She's not even here with me, she's floating far away. Playing their little, inconsequential games.

Words
"Don't you understand? All of these things - these things you do "for" me. None of them are important! You are missing the true significances!"

Tears. Anger. Resentment.

The words that should have been - but would have changed the outcome. And hence could not be said :

"I am not your dog. I am not a toy. I did not ask for these things, these shows of caring. I did not ask for these toys, these clothes, to be FED!
Time. Is all that is significant. Simple, uninterrupted time."

The MisGuide
Part of him sees the good in her. And he, in his obstinate almost-arrogance, keeps running into the wall, trying futilely to save her.
And part of him sees her, for her. Eyes renewed. And the part of her that is good... the part that sparked it all... is only but a part.
Stepping back - he sees the rest of her. And hears his mother's words : (tactful pause) Uh, what happened to the tall one?
And part of him is too gutless to do what must be done. It's a man's life. And sometimes that, really, sucks.

The Burden of The Ring
For her birthday, he decides to buy her a PDA. PDAs are incredibly useful in medicine, they store whole textbooks. They organise meetings and lectures. They can even store medical notes for on-the-go revision. PDAs don't come cheap either for a medical student financially dependent on his parents. She's initially thrilled by the thought.

Word filters through (her) that her father wants him to get her something else. Not something "cheap" like a three hundred pound PDA... a gift that "means something" - like a ring. Suddenly she's all upset that he's being cheap.
He thinks : What? Isn't the meaning of a gift in the giving? Isn't the significance the thought behind it all?
Isn't the point for the GIVER to give freely of his own volition?
Well fuck you, daddy.
(He gets her the PDA anyhow. She's unhappy for a while.)

The Ring
Christmas.
Two people speaking on the telephone.
She's become all upset. He's burning with repressed frustration and rage. Women have subtle ways of bending men's arms to get what they want. This is a prime example of one.
He : "What? What do you WANT?"
She won't say.
He : "Is it a ring???"
She seems happier, suddenly. He thinks "Is that ALL? That's all this was about?"
That's - so sad and predictable. But he holds his peace. She doesn't really understand about Significance, does she.
And about rings - they ought to be gifts from the heart. Given when the giver is ready to. They ought to mean something - otherwise they're just twisted lumps of metal that adorn fingers. Things to show off to friends - look, see, he loves me.
He burns for a while later, silently. Sure, she tries to meet him in the middle, settles for browsing "cheap" places, since of course, "poor" medical students like him can't afford rocks from Tiffanys.

The Watch
She's decided to buy him a watch to replace the less-than-acceptible thing that he wears on his wrist to keep time with. He doesn't really mind either way, it wasn't his idea.
Standing in front of a window display, she asks him which one he likes. He casts his eye over the bewildering assortment of watches and thinks, well, if I was interested in watches, which one would I like?
His eye settles on one with clean lines, and subtle inlays. Something that looks simple, yet appealing. He points. She pales. Oh. Apparently it costs somewhere in excess of a thousand dollars. Heh. I have expensive tastes after all, for a simple "poor" kid.
He doesn't, of course, wind up with that watch. Not that he really minds... he didn't even want a new watch to begin with. He'd have kept his peace if she hadn't dragged him before the window, and asked him to Choose.

The Gift
Christmas.
A cosy setting. Five people at home.
He's sitting on the floor, about to open his present. His fingers methodically unwrap it, and the box comes apart. Oh. Gee. A branded tie. And an ugly one at that. Everything I ever wanted.
But smile, smile. The cameras are rolling. (Quite literally. The click-click-clicks are rather unnerving) The cameras are always rolling in this household, even during quiet moments at home on Christmas day. Smile like you mean it, with your lips. Oh! how wonderful! thank you, thank you so very much!
And don't worry, these people don't know how to read eyes.

Release
Were they torn up to see the back of him?
He really, honestly, didn't give a damn.

Oh. So this is what sunburn feels like. I'd completely forgotten...

Today was spent sweating profusely, making contact with the ground repeatedly, and savouring the sensation of Real Sun on skin. (10 points for whoever guessed blading. -200590 for anyone who thought anything vaguely dodgy)

So now, staring at my slightly battle-scarred hands and feeling the residual stored sunshine (four hours of sleep later) radiating off my (properly red. and not just imagined either!) face, I'm recalling the prehistoric days of old, when our most intimate friends were the big guns in our hands (cough.) and our skins fragile, sunbaked shells encompassing all the juicy goodness within just waiting to dehydrate out into the world beyond.

In a strange way, it's kinda cool (must be fever. drink water.) My mom, naturally, freaked out and declared that I'd irreparably destroyed my skin, it would never be the same again! (wave hands agitatedly)

Random fact : Mum did indeed want a daughter as a second child. But, but. but. Re-minisce is quick to add that she coped with her initial disappointment well and never did the dress him up in pink dresses with parasols thing. And the only reason he learnt the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was from surreptitiously watching TV when the parents weren't looking. Honest.
*****
Fast as fast can be

The axe fell this morning. "What are you doing tomorrow night?" Wow. Does she never tire of this ritual? I'm tempted to say "meeting up with my gay friend" just to see if she's listening, but I dutifully say instead, as I always do, "Nothing." Pause. Wait.

"Okay we'll do a (cheerily) Family Dinner!!" Waah. Cool. Everyone sitting around in silence chewing their cud. Re-minisce nervously space-filling the silences with questions, which will eventually result in mom snapping at him "Stop bugging your dad!"

I can hardly wait.

Although if the Vet is really there, maybe I should just fly back now. Somebody kill me. They wouldn't. Would they? Argh!

Mum : "She's fair, slender, tall and pretty!"

Me : "Then why is her mom trying to hook her up with random blokes?"

Sod it, even if she were all of the above (fair. -200 immediately) which would be exceeeeedingly unlikely since mom's idea of pretty is. well. outmoded, shall we say. It'd still be a bad thing. hyperventilate. I can hear the wedding bells already. Help. Must escape. Need horse... No. Not for that! Grr. Run. Away.
*****
Other

What gives? Everytime I so much as touch food I feel all queasy?? I can't finish my meals?!? What's going on here. This is not normal. And just great, I'm feeling hungry again now.

*****
Gaydar

Argh. Apparently my err. relative. cough. rates 90% on the gay scale. Learning why, from an expert in the field has been an eye-opener.

designer underwear : +10%

able to bench-press everything : +10%

I am SO traumatised now. Suddenly, everyone and every body around me is taking on a different light. And is it just me, or are the men in singapore suddenly a whole lot... friendlier to each other... than when I remember them last?? It's only been 3 months dammit!!!

I'm told now that there's something different about the cheekbones. And the lips are a little bit poutier as well... why, we wonder... (discreet!) cough.

Argh! I remember the good-old days when it was as simple as an ear-ring. Left is right, and right is wrong. There. Sorted.
Then the water-bottle and towel variant. Can't miss that.

Uh. I wonder if leg-pressing 270 kg counts. Maybe I should shelve those plans of hitting the gym over the last few days of my holidays back in London... and er. what does songwriting on the piano do to the balance?? But but but but. what if there's no lyrics. yeah. just tunes. That's okay right? Right????

my eyes, my poor eyes. I want them closed again. whimper.
*****

I'm STILL awake!!! Bugger, bugger. Bugger, bugger and bugger!!! Stupid, stupid jet-lag. This... cannot be. Nein. Niet. Rant. Rave. Foam.

And the tried and tested hypnotic drug - the medical text that needs to be studied... is in the other room. Under electronic surveillance. DAMMIT.

Okay then. fine. I'll write myself to sleep. growl.

1) celebrity
I've had close brushes with "celebrity" in the past. Perhaps it was the GEP experience : the constant feeling that we were being Watched - by people who were waiting for us to fail - that led (and still leads) many of us to instinctively shy away from celebrity. I know I'm certainly not alone - the other mad cows... scrapied sheep really, that the government groomed; the "potential leaders of society" - where did they all go? We were the third generation, amongst the original founding fledgelings, unleashed upon the world.

Where did they all go? Has anyone ever wondered how they all became faceless? The brand-name, apparently, dissolves away with time. Hardly anything worth holding up to the hostility of public scrutiny.
Are they really out there, leading the country? Then how come so many of my own once-dear friends - have left the country? And those that stayed have made their homes, and their lives their fortresses.

Celebrity. I've brushed shoulders with "celebrity" often enough. It comes in so many flavours.

Elaborate "high-society" lawn parties thrown by my dad's friends. There were a few, but I can't... remember them. Too little then. Not enough brains. heh. It meant precious little to me.

I do remember sitting opposite PM Goh once and thinking how haggard, and tired he looked. What went on behind those gentle - yet sharp - eyes, I wondered.
I remember the same man, a few years later, being verbally assaulted by a "subversive" young know-it-all, and handling it with amused ease. Somewhere inside that gentle smile... was a diplomat. And a dangerous one. One of the most celebrated of them all. I wondered then, what it might be like to look into PM Lee's eyes.... answer, shrug. Probably fatal. Haha.

I've encountered a few more of them, on-and-off over the years with my parents, or without, and dutifully said Hello. to them. Catherine Lim (eyes - sharp! in the early years. Then recently - dulled. slightly... vacant?)

Tony Tan. Tommy Koh. Prof Pang. Prof Chow, that endearing Incredible Super Fat Forensic Scientist Man, now, unfortunately deceased.

And the other ?lesser "celebrities", Andrew Whositwhatsit, the hunky swim coach from "Growing Up" -- probably clinically insane... heh. If you ever read this... it was fun working with you. heh heh. Remember Lt F***? those Teef. Heh heheheh.
Ms Wossname, another actress from Growing Up. Err. No impression there. cough. Perhaps it would have, uh. Taken more time. For an impression to form. heh.

I never really tried to empathise with any of them, strangely. I reserved my empathy for everyday people, and later in my life, for patients. "Favourite" patients, especially. Heh. Shrug, I'm human.

And then somehow I got thrown into the thick of it. From indifferent Watcher, to potential Participant.

And the GEP-kid in me was awakened. The "tatler parties", complete with press members. I... couldn't play the game. Didn't want to. Shrank back. Sure, I did it a little for. Hmm. Mebbe about 10 minutes. hah. Then it began to all feel a little ridiculous. And the enormity of my situation dawned on me. This pseudocelebrity... was almost anathema to everything I believed in. These games were so... trivial. And this was not for me. I would NOT lay my claim to a fame, which I did not desire, by being a faceless trophy who had to claw his way into the spotlight.

I didn't even like the damn spotlight. There were more important things at stake. There was a relationship which I'd chosen, as always to stubbornly defend. Even though insight had begun to make me realise that something... integral... was missing. There was a type of love, I suppose. Which Insight was beginning to tell me that I could not sustain, and that I might not even desire.

But DAMMIT it's so irritating when my mum (and dad!) are right!!! muuaarrrrgh.

I tried to empathise. To imagine what it was like, growing up in these people's shoes.

And it was not a pleasant sight. Euphemism-city. And so I ran screaming for the hills, at last. laughs.
My perception of "celebrity" had been rather unfairly biased. "High" society, pah. Give me my good old homebody parents anyday. I suppose we merit a stake to "high" society ourselves, but my folks are wonderful that way. They won't have any of it. They just... do the little things that make them happy. And I'm actually grateful to them for bringing me up the way they did. And for the chances they gave me, flying me over to the UK for med school. Someday I'll tell them how much all of it meant to me, and how much I love them. Someday, when I learn to break free of my stupid male ego. sigh.

Of late I've been hearing a little from another "celebrity". And, hyperventilate (heh heh. not) I actually met her last night, along with the best bud, who was typically... his -- not even corny -- self. groan. Where's a newspaper when you need to find something to hide your face behind.

Watching and listening to her, I began to wonder. I couldn't fish from her eyes, the way I normally can with strangers. These were... strangely closed. Though clearly alive. So I find myself trying to guess.

2) sacrifices
I can't begin to empathise, of course... but what sacrifices one must have to make, to choose this path of "fame" (even if, sniff, only local. I, Brit snob. heh heh. cuppa tea?)...

pause.
I can actually imagine quite a few, many of which must be rather unpleasant. Some quite probably painful. Nip/tuck? or wax/pluck? laughs.

And I can only *begin* to imagine. What annoyances to bear, what wonderous moments there must be, in recognition.

Different folks, different strokes, I guess. I've written a lot about my personal "significances", which involve my work - the people before me. The people, around me. Other people.
But there are so many other significances out there in the world, and everybody is chasing a different dream. Some people seek significances in themselves - and this is fair enough. The world of humanity really cannot function without all its individual cogs. To each his, or her own.

I see it now. And I also see that the "celebrity" I was nearly assimilated into... was not remotely representative of the whole.

The realisation that struck me a while later tonight... was that someday, in all likelihood I might well be part of that nebulous and diverse strata of society that comprises "celebrity" (err if I come back that is). Perhaps someday I will be that dodderring, crotchety old professor with the badass attitude. heh. Although, cough, the likelihood of that is severely diminished by my surname not beginning with 'L' and ending with 'E'. heh heh.
But yknow what? If I do... it would have been under my own terms. And I reckon that'd be A-okay. That'd be something I'd be glad to earn, rather than something I instinctively bolt from.

And I also see the sacrifices I have been making, which to now I've always taken for granted.

Those interminable chains of waking nights... and those incredibly slow last 2 hours from 5 am to 7 am physically willing time to pass... and shrinking almost tangibly everytime another patient steps into the casualty department (A different type of gut feeling. Slightly nauseating.) And always, that slightly oppressive fatigue that permeates the air. I think it comes from the sick patients, actually. Mebbe we should chuck em out. heh.

I can already hear the smartasses saying, you're a doctor right? You signed up for this right? Shut up already and do your job! -- and y'know what? You guys are unempathic fools, but I forgive you for it.

That ruined social life, that only leaves brief windows of opportunities for expensive, hazy Muscato-Asti wine-filled nights out with ancient friends (as an aside : Ice wine? Very sweet, very nice? HAhahaahaha. yeeech. After Muscato-Asti, Eis Wine tastes a little like nasty cough mixture. Sorry. Damn Brit Snob, Out, outt I sayy.) and 80 quid meals. Little desperate snatches at normality, done, uh, a little to excess.

But so, so nice. Ubon by nobu. Sigh. Sigh again. Swoon(hic).

And of course the sweaty tumbles in the sack with nurses. Not. Heh... for the pervs amongst you who think hospital life is just like Holby City... well. It actually IS! Except for re-minisce. Sigh. Who doesn't really, uh, get off (pun intended!) on that sorta thing. Too desperate, and also too incestuous for his tastes. Although, if they LOOKED like the cast on holby city now then, cough. Cough. Erg. I seem to have something in my through. heh heh heh.

And that is our life. Stepping back, uh, out of the. Chalk Pentagram of the mundane. HA. Kept my originality there - it looks pretty damn sad doesn't it?

Yet more - watching the docs back home combat SARS a year and a bit ago... people like Jen Jen... unsung heroes donning their hollywood outfits to grimly wage war against a killer disease - these were their sacrifices. Our sacrifices, although my time has not yet come. And might never come, God willing.
Watching some of them fall... not just out of fame and celebrity, but out of life itself, I realised the sacrifices that we make, for our calling.

And I know that I wouldn't trade it for the world. And neither would they.

3) Chocolates
These words I write often sound so detached... so high-handed
and probably also so naive. I guess it's partly my ineptitude with the language (sigh. all those wasted years as a debator... didn't pay off... I'm a doctor! batteries to power brain not included)

I dunno how to convey this any better... but I - and in fact, we. Us. Doctors, nurses. Radiographers, Physiotherapists. Healthcare Assistants. And all the other goody two shoes who work in hospital... we're not *quite* naive.

I'm not quite the same, I suppose. I am still pretty young in the job. I am naive in many ways, about many, many things. But I'm also cynical, and streetsmart about many others. And I've seen many, many different people - in the job, and out of it now to know that life really is, as the tired adage goes, like a box of chocolates.

Don't look at the other guy's box of chocolates. Don't look at his silver spoon, in his mouth, or her beginnings in abject poverty; don't look at his supposed boyish naivete, or her apparent coquettish streetsmarminess... (yes I made that word up)...

the thing really, is that we've all got different boxes, with different chocolates in it. They're our precioussss.

This one's for DW. It wasn't intended to be, when I began, but it seems strangely fitting I dedicate it to him anyhow. Uh. Just in case I don't manage to squeeze in a meeting with you before I fly.

Hmm. This jet lag business never used to bother me, but methinks my age is finally catching up with me.

Dammit, it seems like yesterday that I was

fourteen.
(And having a strange precognitive moment : telling my mother a friend's daughter's ECAs before she had the chance to open her mouth, in the car. (and that incredulous look - HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT? that she flung my way)

minor moments through the years after. nothing quite as spectacular. usually just consisting of predicting the endings of movies (blah) and predicting the outcomes of relationships. More cognitive than precognitive.

Yesterday, another major moment - fishing the best bud's MUDD moniker out thin air. weird.)

Then fifteen. Meeting Paddington. Evolving, shedding. Throwing caution to the wind. Rebelling, at least a little. Learning how to grow.

Sixteen. Exams. Exams. Fear, exams. Lots and lots, and lots of tuition.

Seventeen. Heartbreak. Yet more rebellion. The art of the sword. Wandering the world - okay, just a small part of it, down under. And fully paid for by government too! woohoo!

Eighteen - Exams. Exams. No fear - too depressed. Exams.

Nineteen through twenty-one. Err. Blurry images of days blending ceaselessly into each other. Wasted Time. Thank you, National Indemnity.

Twenty-two : strange times. strange days. Foreign lands, foreign sounds. Adapting, evolving. Freezing butt and bollocks off. Buying overcoat, yay me. No more freezing, ever again. Rediscovering the art of the sword. Knocking up people twice my height - HA! Making the uni team... fencing.

flying.
meeting.
leaving, dying.

living.
floating, laughing.
flying.

dying again.

Twenty-three :
Steeling. Waiting. Biding.
Time passes.
Studying, but without heart.
Closing in. Anhedonia. Socialising no longer.

Losing Paddington - permanently.

Twenty-four through twenty six :
Drifting. Walking, on numbed legs. Lost.
Small comforts. Insignificant pleasures.
Lost.

Twenty-seven :
learning to breathe, again.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Healing, listening. Healing.

Twenty-eight :
... thinking.
seeking answers.

******
Distances

These words now, are pure rhetoric. They relate, at least right now, in my head, to nobody in particular. Regardless of who it sounds like I'm referring to (STOP OGLING, JEN JEN) and it does not (STOP OGLING, K!) relate to a specific individual from my past.

I've been around for a while now. Granted, I'm only (cough) twenty-eight. I think. I'm losing count now. bugger.

It's funny how as a young, idealistic whelp (read : naive) I sought to fight, tooth and nail after the "acute realisation" that someone else actually describes incredibly succinctly :

"This feeling is so tangible and so real it feels like something from deep inside you is coming alive... slowly stirring from its slumber... from the pits of your stomach..

That prickling point of awareness...

more latent then sexual arousal."

(eeerr. when was the last time I ever thought I'd be quoting the thoughts of a model, brain not included? heh)

something she omits - this prickling point of awareness - can actually repeat itself. over, and over, and over again with the one person. And for the ultra-dense male (apparently even New Age Guys can be blockheads. sigh.) sometimes it takes for a large number of moments to finally reach critical mass and penetrate his lead-lined cranium.

And so, suddenly distance becomes the enemy of youth. Mothers' kind - and wise - words are disdainfully hurled aside. What do YOU know about MY life??!

(Love transcends all!) Leave ME alone!

And then, day by day, it erodes. painfully.
Each day still sparkles as brilliantly, each wasted moment of youth still glitters as radiantly in memory as it fades into the past. But with the rapture comes mingled pain. Frustration. It's like picking up a lot of paper-cuts. Over, and over again. And then some more. Each individual soul-wound is insignificant, but over time, the spirit dulls.

And then it comes time to let go. When worlds collide, worlds, fall. Apart.

Time passes, and suddenly one day you've somehow gravitated to the other extreme of the scale.

Distance is the pleasant dream of youth.
Nothing is worth the pain of futility. Nothing...
...except something - or someone, extremely special. (Even cynics are allowed a touch of romanticism. So there.)

And the sheer... brilliant, bastard irony of it all, is - if you truly care about someone enough - you will not, not subject him/her to it. On deeper consideration - you wouldn't subject yourself to that, either.

And so you wonder, looking at yourself in the mirror (! where did all these forehead wrinkles come from, dammit!) whether the answers to questions are really that important after all.
Perhaps they are merely academic. Perhaps they're the screening tests, that really have no bearing on management. (ugh! a medical joke. heh heh.)

Perhaps they shouldn't even be wondered at.

**** and now, re-minisce reverts to the words from his past, which he knows K. was just waiting for him to do ****

I remember Her words, from once upon a long, long time ago. I do NOT harken back to the past because Her memory is still burning bright. OK?!? ALL OF YOU? It's simply because there was an unrecognised wisdom buried there, and I much prefer quoting her to my mum, in case mum ever figures out how to use the internet (ha. when hell freezes over) and realises that I'm me. Oh no. That sounded rather first-person. bugger it. Re-minisce must stop plagiarising other people. cough.

Her words - can't we just preserve the status quo? (please?)

I understand them now. It wasn't what I thought, when I was younger. It didn't have to do with doors closing :

It had to do with infinite possibilities. Days in the future. Continued laughter, indefinite, shared, pain-free moments.

It had to do with friendship.

These words I write are empty now, five years later.
But I am sorry. Not to "You" (K***n) today, since it's water under your bridge.

I am sorry, to me. And also to You of yesterday, long since passed into the mists of time.

But that's the way it goes. We always have the benefit of 20/20 vision, in hindsight. (cough. sans astigmatism.)
I chose poorly then. As I knew then, that I was doing. Perhaps that script could have been... discarded.

Ah well. Let this be a learning point. Smile, and carry on.
I hear my other life beginning to call me from afar. That slightly surreal life, when I actually make a difference to other people. Even though I (heh heh) love to claim, it's really, just, to cause people pain. :) Don't worry! This hurts you more than it hurts me!! Splat.

Heh heh.

The best bud (who FINALLY agreed to meet up with re-minisce, after several not-so-subtle hints) came up with the idea for a "fantastic" invention today.
I hope he doesn't mind if I write about it, in case someone (hah) steals the patent.

(sic)
So, have you ever been to a buffet and felt like eating EVERYTHING there, only the more you eat, the less good it tastes, because you're slowly beginning to get sated, and to feel bloated. Or full. Or generally nauseas to the extent that the unborn child within yourself is struggling to burst forth from the womb within your gut to the outer world, to catch a breath of fresh air?

So the idea is to have a device which acts as a touch-conveyor to your tongue, along which food is put into contact with, and an extension to the back of your oropharynx (that's throat. deep. throat. heh heh he... urgh.) which helps to stimulate the olfactory circuits of your taste sensation.

(analogy. For blokes : imagine an infinite orgasm machine, sans the pesky refractory period. For birds : imagine the same, sans uh friction burns. Cough. Where did that come from?)

Preliminary visualisations include a long tubular (? vibrator?) - design which goes down the mouth into the back of the throat. pause. Re-minisce prefers the more sanitised helmet version. Can mount telly screens too for the ultimate in laziness... eat and watch TV without moving a muscle! Maybe have voice controlled channel switching.

Gone, those toxic weight-loss pills... away, those painful sessions at the gym. Begone, foul liposuction procedures. THIS is the ultimate in gluttony, and hedonism.

Best bud also feels strongly that food should not be wasted, so an additional useful feature of this mechanised wonder would be recycling of the food substrates for the next consumer to use! imagine all the units chained together by their conveyor belts, with food cycling infinitely over all those tongues!

The (name to be decided) mk I! Indulge your inner child, and his mommy, and daddy too! And uncle, and auntie, and pet dog, and...

Oh yeah. And I have it on good authority that the (name to be decided) mk I will actually (almost) be endorsed by an official endorsing-type person!

...
Heh. This has been a pretty interesting holiday.

Downer : losing to best bud repeatedly at pool. Bah!

Okay, I've just woken up from the neverland between wakng and sleeping because I said something.

In the dream, I spoke.

And as I awoke, I heard myself speaking.

It was a strange experience. rather schizophrenic. and it woke me up.

What a strange way to come out of a dream.
*****

Phoney Business

Re-minisce looks sadly at his aging motorola V.50. it's always a bad sign when the plastic starts cracking, methinks. This phone has been tried, and tested, and then tried again. It's survived everything short of an all-out nuclear war. It's easy to use, and it's moulded itself to my brain. Text messaging is fast and frenzied.
Sigh. Yet perhaps it's time for it to go out to pasture, and sit in a field somewhere eating... whatever it is mobile phones eat when they retire.
Perhaps.

The Whos. Pun intended.

Some of the "Whos" are omitted from here... it turns out people are a lot smarter than I've been giving them credit for. They know how to play Connect the Dots.

Or maybe OCD is just more prevalent in the internet community than I'd previously realised.

So the Whos, who are safe to describe :

The Latter
Diminutive. (minuscule) Alternative. Mischievious eyes. Passionate. Driven... and also a watcher - but I learnt then that there are Watchers, and there are watchers. There are those who (cough. to borrow a phrase from someone.) step outside the box, so that they can look in on other people... watching them, inside the box.

This form of watching... was not for re-minisce. It felt, to him, suffocating. So... egocentric. So. Meaningless. So utterly, utterly boring. And the Why behind her "Drive". Was a flavour that re-minisce could not attune himself to.

And where there was "passion" - there was... little compassion.

She left some letters "hidden" on my computer for me to find, in the aftermath. Did I miss any of it? Of course I did. Holding her close, and sharing her warmth. Watching her sleep, in peaceful repose. Sharing her company - when she still deigned to share it. When Shep was the constant companion, rather than the show dog to tie ribbons onto, and to rant at. When we spoke to each other.
Yes, I missed some of it.

But yet... stepping out of that fishbowl into the clear sweet air of freedom. Becoming myself again. Shrugging off the shrouds of elaborate and expensive attitudes and hypocrisies that I had borne for too long... was a relief.

The Former
Tall. Lanky. With her fair share of (unconventional) looks, oh yes there was that.
And eyes... such eyes. There was this thing she did, narrowing one lid and raising the other in quizzical... cynicism, usually. Or suspician. Yet the eyes themselves stole the show, always. They... glinted. Or glittered. Or became hard. They spoke, almost aloud.
Funny. Often laughing - so many different pitches in her repertoire. Witty - a laugh a minute, to be with. Humorous - the gears turning over constantly. Thirsting. Craving humour. Finding.
Watcher. Keen, razor-sharp. Watching... and thinking. Processing. And filing away - for later reference. Usually accompanied with evil eyes, or laughter, or both.

Driven - also. But ironically, her fears were drawn from her strength. Endearing fears. And imposing strength.

Hair? Short. Ear-length. Shoulder-length. Straight. Curled. Tied back. Clipped up. It... didn't seem to matter.

Sometimes re-minisce wondered : would she still have made the same impact if she'd looked vastly different? smaller? or heavier? or plainer?

Quite probably - not.

Throwing off the familiar cloak of friendship... was like tearing away his skin. Losing a part of himself. Molting into something much smaller, and emptier than before. He did wrong - too many letters, later. And even the odd phone call. He didn't molt completely the first time. There were patches of dying skin stuck firm, and left behind.

*****
No Stake in this

Rummaging around in the bag... Damn. I lent the stake to Buffy... grumble. Nevermind, there will be other days...

Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkawossname

Was actually pretty dang good. I guess it helps to have read the book first. But still, the then / now / then linkup sequences were cleverly done.

My grouse. Why did the Grim look uncomfortably like a street mutt with rabies? I was kinda expecting something big, and heavy about the shoulders. With red eyes. Sorta like Cerberus sans the two extra appendages (heads! heads!!). That'd give the werewolf a run for its money.

*****
Adults Only

Warning. The video clip above contains Adult content which some viewers may find objectionable, namely wrinkled old prunes, men in white, and individuals with underdeveloped senses of humour. um. OOoo. Guess that means Singaporeans can't view it. muahahah.

(background, from http://rainbow.web.com : "Although often introduced as the unaired pilot, this episode was actually specially made by the team at Thames Television. Geoffrey Hayes told us, "The VT department of each ITV company, every Christmas had a competition to enter all the outtakes from their particular companies programme output, and see which ones were the funniest. But ours wasn't an outtake, we specially did it. It was specially scripted and we did it and I never saw it! We did it and Thames won it, but what they actually won, I don't know.")

You have a dominant kiss- you take charge and make
sure your partner can feel it! Done artfully,
it can be very satisfactory if he/she is into
you playing the dominant role MEORW!
What kind of kiss are you?brought to you by Quizilla

Err. Re-minisce is beginning to strongly suspect these quizzes are jury-rigged to produce only one answer. :|
*****
HA!



You're not so much depressed as you're totally
freaking insane. Kati would be friends with you
because she's just like you. You could stay
over her house and make pasta and biscuits at 4
am. You're also astoundingly similar to Invader
Zim's GIR. Viva la little robots wearing green
dog suits! Let's make biscuits!
How Depressed are You?brought to you by Quizilla

NoW THAT'S more LIKE IT!! I especially like the question : Why are you like this, answer choice : WAS DROppED on my haED as a BayBEE

Don't run. We are Your FrIenDS! *BZZZZzzT*

Giggle. Peek. Giggle.

1. Funny

"Would you like to see a vet?" my mum asks casually over breakfast.

No thanks, I'm feeling perfectly... eh? (re-minisce gives mum funny look)

I say it aloud. "Eh?"

"Oh. She's pretty..." mum trails off.

Something about mothers wanting their kids to meet up, would I like her to fix me up.

Rolls eyeballs. One. (The First ever attempted blind date. And hopefully the last)

Let me see, what clever repartee can I come up with. munch munch.

"no." (eats on in silence)
*****
2. Interrogation

Everytime I go out, I face the dreaded ritual interrogation, which I'm actually beginning to think 100% of unmarried Singaporean para-people can relate to (regardless of race, language, religion or gender)

"Who are you going out with?"

"Mum, she's just a friend."

Funny though. The question isn't so much "who" as "what". Learnt through experience - answering the "who" only begs another question. (since my parents don't know my friends)

Heh. Unspoken :

A med student. Another med student. A doctor. An ex-model / college student. IT consultant. Yet another med student. Insurance Agent (oops. slipped through the back door there). Scientist. Another lawyer. (damn that faulty back door)

Oh if they only knew. laughs. The secret life of Walter Mitty.

Okay. Somebody explain the chocolate gingerbread man in the fridge to me...

*****
Pathetic

Stereotypes. More stereotypes. Yet more stereotypes.
Individuals? Or brands?

*****
Fire, with Fire

(from:The allure of the American-born Chinese man
By Mak Mun San; Straits Times, Jun 6)

aka, superficial twat

Wong, who has a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, melted under the charms of the ABC hunk and became Mrs Wu in a hush-hush wedding in Los Angeles last December. The couple are expecting a baby in October.

Obviously evidence of SPG syndrome. no chance that he's actually a great guy that she really loves, of course.

While most Singaporeans see ABCs as non-white expatriates, some are known to view them as fake ang mohs. Or, simply, white men with Asian packaging.

0% of Singaporeans saw them as simple, god honest people. It does matter if you're black or white. Or white-yellow, or yellow-yellow.

Their verdict? The imported guys win hands down in the personality department.
Accounts executive Sim Wai Hoon, 26, says: 'I think they're fun to be with because they dare to be different. They are just more eloquent, dynamic and worldly.'

Hmm. Speak Good English movement. (Hi. I Tan. want fuck?)
Exciting and stimulating growth-inducing environment, catalysed by abundance of free speech and self expression.
Whaddaya mean our guys have no personality?

'Basically, they know how to treat a lady well,' says marketing executive Sharon Lim, 25.

(ie, don't take out the club and hit them on the head till they're in the bedroom)

While most of the women agreed that ABCs would make great friends, boyfriends and lovers, the general consensus is that they are not necessarily great 'husband material'.

holy shit. Isn't that everything a husband should be? A friend, boyfriend, and lover?

'The difference in culture and mindset sometimes makes it hard to click with them. I prefer local men for the sense of familiarity they give me,' says student Serene Ho, 19.

Oh! I get it. Anyone remember this one : "love the man you marry, don't marry the man you love". We stand in the shadow, nay the Lee, of wise concepts indeed! Divorce? pah. no such thing.

Human resource manager Tay Siok Ching, 32, sums it up: 'They are good to be with but not good to marry because you never know how long they plan to stay. Local men can offer a better sense of security.'

Heh. so much for trust.

Jackson Pek, a 33-year-old lawyer from San Francisco, echoes a common sentiment: 'As ABCs, we don't really fit in anywhere perfectly. When I'm in the US, I can speak like everybody else but I don't look like everybody else. That's why I came here. This is the closest that I belong.'

Trans... no too many syllables - Turned into Good English Version
I'm a sad loser. Nobody likes me in the US. Think I'll go eat worms. Or maybe I'll go to Singapore. Yeah they'll like me there, I'll fit in. After all, I'm different.

'Women here are more demure as compared to American women. In the US, gender lines are so blurred, it's nice to meet girls who are feminine,' says Zee.

Good English Version
American women don't want to fuck me. It must be because they're too macho, and they're big enough to fight me off. Singaporean girls are small and weak. And they don't talk back.

Holman Chin, a 34-year-old screenwriter from San Francisco, adds: 'Singapore women are multi-cultural, multi-lingual, athletic and sophisticated. They are very, very attractive.'

Good English Version
... there is no translation for this one - that would be anywhere approaching the truth, anyhow. Snicker.

Personal thoughts : Yeah, right. Play it again Sam. While we're dishing out stereotypes, why don't we say it like it really is? Singaporean women are short, whingy, and insecure about themselves. And Holman Chin is obviously a consummate diplomat. Laughs.
Disclaimer - some Singaporean women are truly remarkable, and are witty, sophisticated, and highly evolved. And dare I say, very very attractive. The same is true across the world, about English women, and American women, and even (gasp) Australian women.

Postgraduate student Lim Wah Long, 27, says: 'While younger Singaporean guys are generally more Westernised than the older generation, it's a pseudo-Western thing. Singaporeans are neither here nor there.'

half brit, half yank. 50% male. The worst of all worlds.

Public relations executive Gary Gan, 28, says: 'I don't know whether it's a case of our local women being snapped up by ABCs, or whether local Chinese men are not doing enough to prove themselves.'

Or maybe even of local media presenting half of the story? I personally think blond women have wonderful hair. Some have nice blue eyes. A quite a few of them have beautiful smiles, and laughs. And are intelligent. swoon.

'When we go to Thailand or China, some local girls throw themselves at us for the chance to live a better life away from their countries. So, local girls here also want a better life,' says Herman Loo, 28, who runs an investment company.

Funny that. Singaporean men go to China to find women who are more "demure, athletic and feminine" no? MUAHAHAHAHA

'For all we know, they might be the guys who can't make it back home and treat their stint here as a stepping stone. They stay for a while and then fly off, leaving the girl behind.' -- SHERWIN LOH

And there might be guys who stay forever. Probably due to brain tumours or severe head injury. Geez Louise, who would want to stay in a dump like Singapore, where everyone's eyes are so blinded by stereotypes that there's no room for reality?

Garett Hoo, 32, California. -- ALAN LIM
'I don't live as materialistically as I did, but I'm much happier here,' says the affable 32-year-old who studied at San Francisco State University.

Wa. he doesn't live as materialistically as he did. Must be a Beverley Hills boy.

'Where else can I do what I enjoy doing in a place where I'm the majority in an English-speaking country? In the US, acting jobs for Asian-American men are so few and far between. But here, the possibilities are almost endless.'

Speak Good English :
No need talent to act here. Cool!

'I'm still very self-conscious about ordering food in Mandarin,' he says with a laugh. He can currently be seen in the Channel 8 serial Man At Forty playing an ABC playboy, Thomas.

Anyone asked him if he can do it in Cantonese? Duh!

'I feel it actually has made me more popular among both men and women. The women see a guy who is not afraid of himself and the men see a guy they can relate to.'

heh. The gay men, he means. Oo. Freudian slip.

He says he has had six relationships in the past but is not seeing anyone at the moment.

Not enough hunky men?

'Singapore men lack something. I know a lot of guys who are very, very nice. But that's what they are, they're nice. The edginess is missing.'

Speak Good English : Bastards always win. Hit your woman daily, with a stick.

'When you compare us to local guys who are content with the status quo, they will pale somewhat in comparison.'

Speak Good English : Thank God for my Fake Tan cream

But he points out that the reverse is also true. 'The Singaporeans I've met in the US also have a sense of adventure. I guess getting them out of the norm is when they come alive.'

Or maybe the clever rats leave the sinking ships first?

Mark Zee
The 1.84m-tall imported hunk is, technically, not an ABC. He was actually born in Brazil. His parents, originally from China, had lived there since they were young. Zee moved to Minneapolis with his family when he was six.

That's no good then. He's not even a REAL ABC. He's some cheap brand we've never heard about. Born in Brazil! Pah.

'To me, it's an important time to define my sense of self better and I want to do that while I'm young. Part of that is coming to Asia and learning more about Asian culture.'

re-minisce bows to this. Brave man, this. I hope you find what you're looking for, Mark

'I didn't come here to meet a girl, but now the best thing about Singapore is Rachel. She's the first girl I've met here that I can really relate to on a level where we can take it to a relationship.'

Uh. A nasty re-minisce would translate this into "nice tits and ass." but he'll be nice.

'As for Rachel and me, we try not to look so far ahead. That sort of thing kind of scares me actually. I just know I'll be here for another year at least.'

Nice. Time to buy new bedsheets?

Jackson Pek, 33, California. -- ENRIQUE SORIANO
'I'm a Singaporean American,' the 33-year-old declares proudly in his American twang.
'That's the difference between me and all the other ABCs. I've ties here.'

...Wah. He's so special man. He da man. Lah.

'ABCs are gentlemanly, yes, but a lot of things we do are superficial, like opening doors. Local men have a long-term intention to build a family and take care of their in-laws.

"ABCs are gentlemanly, yes." HAhaha. Brand name X is the best! But Brand name X can only open doors. Brand name Y leaves your laundry spotlessly clean and mediates wars too!

'Marry a local man. We may be fun to go out with, but you may have some nasty surprises down the road. We're very non-committal. It's an American thing.'

Yep. Look at the Gulf, no good reason to committ to a war, no good reason to continue it, and look where we are today! It must be an American thing.

Holman Chin :
'She's opinionated. That's why I love her. I can't go out with anyone complacent. But she says she has intimidated a lot of local guys.'

Hmm. What was that about the Local Women label being all demure and sophisticated again? HAHahahahahahahahaha

Know your ABCs How old are they? 20s to 30s. Where are they from? All over the United States, but primarily from San Francisco and New York. What do they do? They work in a wide range of sectors, but mostly in the media and banking industries, with an increasing number teaching in local universities. Where do they stay? River Valley, Orchard Road and Bukit Timah areas. Where do they eat? Restaurants which offer large and/or unlimited servings of meat, places which serve dumplings and hawker centres. Where do they buy their groceries? Cold Storage. Where do they shop? In the US, as there is a variety of styles and sizes not available here.What do they wear? What most Americans wear - T-shirts and jeans. Brands like Hugo Boss, Richard Tyler, Zara and Levis are popular. Where do they hang out? The American Club, gyms, cafes in River Valley and Holland Village and Borders. What sports do they like? Basketball, tennis and running. What do they drive? BMWs. What kind of girls do they like? Girls who like them despite their accents. What kind of girls do they dislike? Girls who like them because of their accents. What else do they like? Black T-shirts and the words 'definitely' and 'absolutely'.

Speak Good English :
Meat Market! Laaaddiiies, Step right up! Purchase your All American Schlong today! Lasts for hours and hours without need for charging! Pleasure guaranteed!!