old acquaintances

Bumped randomly into Cheah Poh Teen today on the way to lunch – she’s not teaching in RI anymore but has been posted to the MOE (to do something or another which I didn’t catch). She remembers me, which is much more than can be said of a certain Mr. Evans who reportedly did not recall who I was even after my name was mentioned (harumph.) Also, a whole brigade of ex-Rafflesians who have all ended up in this part of the island for one reason or another – becoming teachers or engineers or what have you.

The image of ball bearings in a funnel comes to mind. You can start off with as much momentum as you like, even circle the lip of the funnel for quite a while, but in the end, gravity and centrifugal (centripetal? I don’t even know the difference any more) force will get you every time. Then, it’s down the chute and, well, you know the rest.

Currently reading:
Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee.

Writing is therapeutic. (Certainly, in the case of this blog, it’s cathartic as well, but that’s a whole different story.) It’s therapeutic in the way that arranging songs for my a cappella group was – it’s fun playing with lilt and cadence and trying to get everything to sound just right, mellifluous. It’s soothing to play with syntax and punctuation. (Which reminds me that Choonping tells me that he is getting formal grammar lessons from NIE. That would just spoil everything for me. Unlike the stereotypical male, I don’t believe in taking things apart to see how they work.) It’s not something I feel rabidly that I should get better at, because after a point, you don’t get “better” at writing the way you get “better” at bridge or lifting weights or DDR. (Thus, my dislike of the intrusion of the Reader, the admittance of the Other, because that’s when value rears its ugly head and compulsion and “perfectionism” – whatever that means in writing – appear.)

That, I suppose, is the joy in work at the moment. Even though I’ve no interest whatsoever in the material I’m reading, I can, at the very least, make my reports on it pleasing to eye and ear. (Have I mentioned the doctorate holder in our lab? Ugh! She’s in charge of the lion’s share of the writing, and the gobbledygook she comes up with makes me want to weep. I should reproduce more of it here some day.) Here, then, a call to arms. We must find happiness in the little things. We must write and add our quotient of beauty to a world bereft.

I'm not very sure why I stopped my "currently reading"s

Currently reading:
If I Die In A Combat Zone - Tim O'Brien

week 2

1.
even going home from nie is a trial. as choonping said, it dawns on you as you sit on the mrt that you have never before heard the train speak names like ‘chinese garden’ and ‘lakeside’. could we be any further west?

2.
glancing through a document written by one of the phd candidates in this group, i’m assailed by such marvels as “…scaffolding can really become beneficial only when the number of students are very less and can not be used in large classes.”

3.
not to mention that i have had a fever on and off for the last 4 days and really should not even be here, never mind having my eyes gouged out by sentences like the above.

4.
i show choonping to the place where i work, and he accompanies me as i punch holes in a stack of papers and bind them together. ‘fifteen years of education,’ i say, ‘and a degree in neuroscience, all leading up to this.’ ‘well,’ he replies, ‘at least you know exactly how your brain is degenerating as it happens.’ which is true.

5.
not that every teaching job is a dead poets’ society fairy tale thing either.

6.
i need to get out of here.

overcome with sleepiness

i have a job interview, though, with the police force. next friday. so there's some hope that i'll make it out of this dump soon. ish.

did anyone watch 'singapore's brainiest kid' last night? i know we're not supposed to laugh at little children, but this really cracked me up:

cheryl fox: what is the fruity nickname of new york city?
contestant (emphatically): the big banana!

hehe

I have to say, this is rather unfair. I think our batch got t-shirts.

broadband!

at work! on my laptop! suddenly this job is beginning to look a lot better. bit torrent here i come.

so what do i do here? research, mostly, trawling through databases for articles on this and that. writing annotated bibliographies/synopses/summaries. it's not the worst, i suppose, and the people here are friendly enough (the only other fresh grad happens to be an rj alumnus as well). the hours are flexible and reasonably short, and as i said, i'll get to see choonping for lunch as soon as he actually gets his ass to school and stops pontanging (sp?)

and people are right - blogging from work is a guilty pleasure that everyone should experience.

all roads lead to nie

- says choonping, and alas, it has yet again come to pass. i started yesterday as a temp in the psychological studies branch doing pointless research and getting paid an absolute pittance for it.

on the bright side:
- i guess that this propitiates my feelings of guilt over my idleness (though at what price?).
- choonping and eekia are there and there's nothing like shared suffering over lousy canteen food to lighten the load
- any salary from here on in is going to look good. and money, i suppose, is money.
- it's only for 2.5 months


on the not-so-bright side
- nie! jurong west! 3 hours of traveling every day!
- it feels yukky, and i'm sure it's is in some way damaging to my self-worth. 15 years of studying, and this.
- and other things. which i don't want to talk about now. i'll blog again later.

fast food

so i was in long john silver's on friday grabbing a quick dinner before bridge - ljs because friday is no-meat day for my catholic self. and i have to stand there squinting at the menu for several minutes before concluding that they have no (as in zero) value meals that don't have chicken in them. they have chicken fries salad and coke, chicken fish fries salad and coke, chicken fish shrimp fries salad and coke etc. but no fish fries and coke. and fish and fries on its own costs 5.50 and damnit i don't want to pay another 2 dollars for a drink that i wouldn't really want if the meal wasn't so salty to begin with and NOT get a salad in the bargain. so i ask the lady at the counter (who didn't really seem to understand english - but do i point that out to people? NO) if she can give me one of the chicken fish fries salad and coke meals but swap the chicken for fish. no. can i pay extra and swap the chicken for fish? no. is there any blasted way i can not get chicken in the meal? NO. so i end up with the fish and fries after all and get an extra slaw and i don't buy a drink on principle and imbibe instead at the scba water fountain. but hello. it's called long john silver's, people. pirates! the ocean! NOT SO MANY CHICKENS IN THE ATLANTIC THE LAST TIME I LOOKED.

fwiw

reading this , I'm reminded that I do rather dislike Alexandra Hospital - bad memories, I suppose, of interminable nights spending walking up and down the corridors, reading bad novels while waiting for dawn to come and duty to be over...

Went with a friend to the SAFTI MI library a couple of days ago (and I defy even the ardent library-hoppers to tell me that they’ve been there before). It was not just whimsy – I needed information on U.N. peacekeeping (particularly Singaporean involvement in) and I thought that that might be the most sensible place to go to find it. Arrived mid-afternoon on the 1-8-something and stepped out into drizzle and dampness. At the security checkpoint, there was a large sign announcing that visitors are not allowed to bring cameras/recording equipment/laptops etc. into the camp. I had my laptop but wasn’t about to give it up (I didn’t have the foresight to bring any other writing equipment or anything to take notes on), thus, in the spirit of pissing in the Army’s (figurative) eye, I clutched it to my bosom and brought it in anyway. (I can hear the sarcastic voices right now telling me what a rebel I am).

SAFTI was fairly deserted – just the odd corporal walking around and a clutch of majors on a coffee break in the canteen. Otherwise – wide open spaces, forlorn flags overlooking the parade square, military neatness with no one to appreciate it. The library is a non-descript two-story brick building, easily missed. It’s part of the NLB chain (no need to go back to return books!) but runs on a different borrowing system – you can check out four additional books in SAFTI on top of however many you’re entitled to normally. Finding that out was a nice surprise – I used to think that it had mostly reference books and whatever other important documents the SAF hoards, stuff that can't be borrowed. Also good to know was that it wasn’t a dreary, army-ish kind of place. It’s nicely lit, the furniture is new, and there are individual study carrels (ah, Perkins), all of which are enticements to stay. More importantly, the librarians are exceedingly helpful – one of them spent a good fifteen minutes hunting down a misshelved book for me. Props.

So I got everything I needed, and we had a little something in the canteen (horrendous) while waiting for the rain to die down a little, whereupon I went to play bridge and got scolded for a poor opening lead (which I didn’t think was so poor) among several other purported misdemeanours. And that was Monday.

unemployed as ever

I am discouraged by not being called for any interviews so far, but what is there to do but keep ones head held high and go on trying? The nasty thing, I suppose, is that the path towards self-despair is a little more direct for us, what with the good education and having suckled on the proverbial silver spoon. And in my particular case the temptation of course is to trot out the old jeremiads of Woe is Me Why Didn’t I Apply for a Scholarship/Accept the Place at Minnesota etc. But no, I shall desist.

After all, I guess I can’t complain about having all this free time. I peruse the Classifieds in the morning, send in an application when I can, then while away the afternoon with friends or just read/write over coffee and cake. Sooner or later, something good's bound to happen on the employment front. Nothing wrong with leaving tomorrow for tomorrow, right?

sigh

All Lovely Things, by Conrad Aiken

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.

Fine ladies soon are all forgotten,
And goldenrod is dust when dead,
The sweetest flesh and flowers are rotten
And cobwebs tent the brightest head.

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!--
But time goes on, and will, unheeding,
Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,
And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, remain!--
But goldenrod and daisies wither,
And over them blows autumn rain,
They pass, they pass, and know not whither.

grouse (3)

- in what is apparently going to be a long series.

I've always been a fervent supporter of the illegal downloading business, and newly-launched website Soundbuzz should convince law-abiding music lovers that I've been right all along. For a couple of months, I've been searching in vain on Kazaa for a particular Uncle Kracker song (Kazaa tends to be flooded with fake, non-working copies of Top 40 hits) - so when I heard about the $1.99 a track offers on Soundbuzz I figured why the hell not. I registered without too much fuss and managed to find the song in a couple of minutes - the only 2 good things I can say about the process. Once I had paid for the download, Netscape stopped cooperating with me, and I wrestled for a good hour with the system before figuring out that for some reason it only likes Internet Explorer. Fair enough - I switched browsers, completed the download, and realised unhappily that I had been given the file in .wma format. Which in itself would not be bad except that my iPod, thanks to Apple protectionism, only takes .mp3s and .wavs. So I try to convert the file and find, again to my great displeasure, that the song has some lock on it and can't be changed from its original format. Perfect. iTunes (the Apple music store) doesn't work outside of the States, and the other mp3 paysites out there don't offer the kind of music I like to listen to (Most of my downloads nowadays are alternative/a cappella/instrumental). Ergo, it's back to good old illegal file-sharing.

See, that's the thing. Music piracy continues to flourish because even when people try to be honest, they're thwarted every step of the way. I give the RIAA and their affiliates and their lawsuits two thumbs down. Boo. Booooo. Kazaa forever!

this morning

since we must deal with the pedestrian, i will give myself a cyber pat on the back for being good and starting up with the jogging again. in bermuda there was always one excuse or the other (rain, winds, gale-force winds, lazy, exhausted, homework, in-middle-of-good-book, etc.) and in beaufort i was a train wreck because of thinking of grad school. and then of course there was one month of being on holiday and 2 weeks of europe (during which, by the way, i actually lost ten pounds from walking six hours or more every day. ten pounds! does it show?) thus, with the exercise this morning and over the weekend, self-congratulation is most certainly in order.

[congratulates self]

on the bus ride home, i found myself in front of one of those television things (what are they called? i keep wanting to call them PortaTellies.) some tcs 8 drama was on - and i found to my surprise that camerawork has quite significantly improved since the lastime i tuned in to local television. it seems that the cameramen have learned the fine art of panning! and zooming in! and using filters that don't let in the entire spectrum of visible light! perhaps there is hope yet (and i'm not even being sarcastic).

grouse (2)

also, i think i should be given licence to give anyone who mocks my "accent" a big smack across the head. i mean, it's not like i go around asking singaporeans why they can't speak english.

grouse

i can tolerate (barely) people who use the phrase "quote unquote" in speech; however, i think it's fair to say that using it in print (with quotation marks surrounding the phrase after it, no less) is very very unacceptable.

still no broadband

Minz points out, and I readily agree, that our blogging suffers incredibly in Singapore by simple dint of the fact that we have to log on before posting an entry - on a 56k connection, all words dry up by the time we’ve actually made it to the page where we post. Whereas, while I was on a LAN, it was virtually thought-to-page, instantaneous. I have, over the course of the past few days, wanted to discuss NDP ticket distribution, job ads (again), manatees, the Half-Blood Prince and Hainanese pork chops, but have been continually bested by avolition, impatience and sloth. How?

qualifications

Have noted, in the course of perusing work ads, that almost all jobs for graduates ask for either honours degrees, or, in the case of civil service posts, "good" honours degrees. So, I ask the mother, what about the poor sods who only manage to eke out a passing GPA with a collection of 'C's and 'C-'s? The unconvincing answer is that "they must have other talents". Surely, however, people go to college precisely because they lack the aptitude for anything else - fixing a lightbulb, building a spaceship, going to war. Those who can't, study. Tjan tells me that non-honours grads get hired eventually, but they also get bled to death in the process (miserable starting salaries, etc.) - which fits a little more snugly into the bigger picture, but is also significantly more depressing (isn't the truth always?).

On the whole, however, I'm not feeling as bleak about my prospects as I thought I would. In the first place, there's always the back door, the escape hatch back into the world of academia where many think I will always belong. In the second, it has struck me that "career" is a concept to me both unfamiliar and unimportant. There are bigger things; there are other things. And I'm not saying that because a juicy scholarship and accelerated promotion to superscale salaries are sour grapes on the vine (although I'm sure that some will still scoff and call me a liar). There are Other Things. Que sera sera.