yes, no one cares, but

interviews: sia yesterday and mcys today. the former is for a generalist post which i have no real intention of taking (the bottom of the barrel, she is being scraped), and involved five excruciating hours of tests, including a gp type essay that i thoroughly flubbed. the interview itself was not much better. what, the woman asks me, do i think the people who were retrenched from sia felt when they heard the bad news -- to which i give the extremely eloquent reply of 'er', just because, well, what possible bearing does the question have on my employability? i left feeling a thorough wreck, the only consolation being that i did not get lost finding my way out of the free trade zone onto the ecp, although i did have to pay $7 for parking. ouch.

mcys was somewhat better. i had been fortified before hand with a semi-decent lunch (leftovers, but good ones), and promised myself time at galilee if i did well; plus, the job is actually one that is sort of interesting to me. one of the interviewers reminded me of e-ching: sunny, imperturbable and rubicund, which gave me hope that not all who stay in the civil service for years at a go are grinches and grumpy-pants. it was a first round, group-chat thing, something i manage better than one-on-ones because i tend to feed, remora-like, off my own superiority complex and own the room that way. so much for humility, but if it works, i say run with it. knock on wood, i think it went well. oh, and i did go to galilee, and would advise future customers to stay away from the "NEW" teriyaki chicken because it is synthetic and highly overpriced.

Whenever I read about people having twenty-page papers due, I realise that while I don't miss having to write those things, I do miss the complaining.

today

many happy hours with styron, who thankfully does not write like saul bellow as i feared. movie with yen ida jianyi dom wendy and their psc friend ken at the new arts house. the show was torremolinos 73, viewed in a very cozy, teal-lit theater that reminded me of cat's cradle in chapel hill, then to a food court after that for them to get dinner. ida never seems to age; it is most unfair. abandoned them to other friends for prata and dou hua supper at rochor, and now, home, stuffed to the gills, and not really looking forward to waking up early tomorrow (4 duke interviews to give in the morning, starting at 9.) still, a good day, all things considered. bed.

the missing piece

by shel silverstein -- everyone has read it, yes? i was reminded today that it is most apropos, especially as it begins:

it was missing a piece
and it was not happy

the language thing (ii)

Credit where it's due: MM Lee's speech yesterday hit the nail on the head, and I guess I forgive him this particular trespass. You can read it on ST online if you're out of the country.

von

i realise that i didn't advertise his blog, so the few people who read only this one do mosey over to the link on the right some time and find out what's going on in his life. he is unrelentingly funny.

edited because I am still using bloody 's's and 'z's interchangeably. aargh.

on getting a phd

does everyone remember that mcdonald's ad that ran many many years ago, the one with the little boy who is sent up to the counter by his parents to make an order, and the waitress is all smiley and bimbotic and 'would you like fries with that, sir?', and the little boy goes back to his parents all doe-eyed and carrying his burger and says 'she called me sir' in a tone of reverential awe as if he's whispering paternosters in a basilica? that's half the reason why i want to get a phd -- so that people can call me doctor and cause me to go into quiet delighted giggles as soon as they've left the room. i'm so pathetic it's not even funny.

the language thing

The parliament debate on syllabus reform for Chinese is getting on my nerves. Action is certainly long overdue -- what irks me is that even in pursuing change, the powers-that-be are still clinging on to the old utilitarian philosophies, the ones that got us into all this trouble in the first place. Yes, we all know about the 21st century Chinese economy -- all of us except seven-year old kids who really, I would imagine, don't give a flying fig about their chances as entrepeneurs thirty years down the road. What the gahmen should be doing (if anything at all) is making kids excited. They should make learning Chinese seem cool. I mean, hell, it is cool.

And yet, over and over again, it's the same stupidity. The Straits Times today proudly carries an article entitled: "Can having too much fun learning Chinese be bad?" -- I personally can't think of any ways my experience learning Chinese could have been less fun without bringing leg shackles and an iron maiden into the picture. I know the adage is that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but guys, it's broke.

Over dinner the other day (the Westlake one), we were talking about how Singaporeans don't really have a handle on any language. We can communicate -- but so can chimps and dolphins. And cockroaches. The grasp that most people have on either English or Chinese is insufficient for anything other than the expression of basic, literal meaning -- it's not that people are without the intelligence to come up with abstract ideas or novel thoughts (well, in some cases anyway), it's that they lack the vehicle with which they can share them.

It's sad. And it's all because education is firmly dictated by policy, and policy (correctly so) is geared towards the end, the prize. Language lessons (I feel) just can't work that way, because there is no end, and the milestones are not obvious until they're passed. The journey is everything, and the trick is getting people not to fall by the wayside, not to give up, no matter how slow their pace may be.

Anyhow, I guess that on the whole I'm glad they're trying to change things. Yes, they have the wrong motives and methods as always, and it's probably going to end up being a case of too-little-too-late. Still, as Justin always tells me, people like us always succumb to idealism in the end -- the triumph of hope over experience, as he likes to say. Here we go again.

Currenly reading:
Lie Down in Darkness - William Styron

book pairings

minz had an entry on this a while ago, and i'd like to contribute number9dream and ishiguro's when we were orphans as 2 books that seem to be natural bedfellows.

bow-wow dogs?

i think that's what they're called. has anyone seen them in the stores? they're like beanies. adorable and (i think) made locally, and there are about a million of them, all different breeds. the problem (isn't there always one?) is that i spent twenty minutes in a toy shop rummaging through piles and piles of them the other day and couldn't find any corgis, which is sad. corgis always get short shrift.

guilt-free

-- just thought I'd tell everyone that I had sirloin steak with a very passable red wine sauce and mashed potatoes and steamed veg, all home-cooked, the best meal I've had for days. And now I'm going to take a nap.

circle line

-- construction is sprouting up everywhere, and I just had to see exactly where it goes

more woe

you know, i really am rather tired -- it's not that good things aren't happening on the job front, it's that they're happening very very slowly. i fear putting the full details here will jinx me as appears to have happened the last time i did so (not to mention the fact that you'll be bored to tears). i think i will need to look for another temp job but have no idea what to do -- tuition is out of the question at this time of the year and everything else is either sales which i am hopeless at or burger-flipping. it is moderately amazing how fifteen years of top-class education prepares you for absolutely nothing in the real world.

Currenly reading:
number9dream - David Mitchell

spufford's

-- opening chapter is the most wonderful thing i've read in a long long time. and i have spelled his name correctly this time round.

ugh

all of the stores are playing very bad christmas music

philosophy

Have started watching Dead Like Me. Gotta love a show where the opening monologue in the pilot has the lines:

"I also don't have a lot of interest in being a good person or a bad person. From what I can tell, either way you're screwed. Bad people are punished by society's law, and good people...are punished by Murphy's Law. So you see my dilemma."

meanie

living fifty meters down the road from a mormon church is turning me into a very uncharitable person. when we first moved in to casa rosita, i used to allow them to stop me, say 'hi', and chat about their gospel, but years and years of that has worn my tolerance down to a nub, and i avoid them now like the plague. i do feel bad doing it, mostly because it's different missionaries every time, and i do like to let a person say his piece at least once. the problem is that it's always the same piece - they must have a script or something because whenever one of them stops me i know the exact words he's going to use before they're out of his mouth. and they're so persistent! - i've tried everything from staring fixedly at the ground as i go past to plugging myself into my ipod to changing the subject to duke basketball - but nothing ever stops them from giving the five-minute spiel.

to make matters worse, there's now a team of buddhist monks plying bukit timah road asking for donations, and i have been stopped by them thrice in as many days. i allowed myself to be accosted and detained yesterday and the day before, but today's experience was the limit - the guy just kept tailing me and hounding me even though i insisted quite firmly that i had given them quite enough of my time and money already. i was angry (and i got the impression that he was as well, somehow), and i even think i hated him a little because of how un-christian he made me feel. same deal with the mormons really - there's just no way to walk away from them quickly without being rude.

you see, getting rid of evangelists is not the same as getting rid of salesmen or those people who try to get you to do questionnaires. with the latter you can tell them: 'no thanks' firmly and walk away, but the opening salvo of the evangelists is always something like how are you (fine, how are you) do you live around here (yeah, down the road) have any of our brothers told you about the saving love of jesus christ - and then they're off to the races. their trick is that they start a conversation first, they make a connection, and to not respond to the first one or two questions is (to me) just plain rude. salesmen (in singapore, anyway - this is why they're more successful overseas) often don't have the skill to forge that link, and anyway, it's easy to stick in a 'i don't want to buy anything, thanks' before they even have the chance. i've tried the strategy of immediately inserting something like 'i know what you're going to say but i already am a catholic' after the 'how-are-you's, but like the telemarketers, they have a comeback for that too: which church do you go to? (st. ignatius) have you ever considered etc.

i mean, dammit. i can't wait till our house goes en bloc.

argh the grammar police have returned run for the hills

my ten dollar, bought-from-a-random-american-mall, digital watch is approaching the end of its life, and browsing for a new one yesterday was a sad experience, for all the usual reasons. all the really nice swatches and fossils are in the 150-200 range, and while that's not obscenely expensive it's not an amount of money i want to put towards something like that right now. grr. i hate wanting things. will go and distract self with fried food.

I may be the last one among us to have seen it, but if you haven't, do check out Before Sunset, one of the few honest movies I have been to this year, and well worth your seven dollars and fifty cents (on average).

sandwich

for whatever reason, bacon and grilled cheese in wholemeal bread just doesn't work very well

belated

-- thanks to everyone for making Sunday night wonderful - yes, it has been said already, but without you lot the marauding world would not be quite so bearable. Not to mention that I would not know what a quire is.

Books:
Tepper Isn't Going Out - Calvin Trillin
Deep River - Shusako Endo
Minz's copy of The Child That Books Built (Francis Spuford), purloined from Su-Lin's house
And Going Postal, of course

no accounting for taste

(dad and i, in JB, perusing dvds)

me: (looking at we don't live here anymore) this won't be released in singapore for a while. one of those with potential for oscar noms that the theaters don't seem to pick up on till june of the following year. and i bet you the same will happen with ray
dad: ooh, look! frankenfish!

last night: jiahao's b'day dinner - more than a week early, but with good reason. it was the usual six of us - the pre-birthday boy, zisheng, eekia, choonping, chun leck - whom many of us had not seen in forever - and, yeah, myself. started the evening off sonwhat poorly by meeting at 5:30 at the wrong restaurant. (yum cha in chinatown as opposed to teahouse in china square food court), which turned out to be sort of fortunate anyway because teahouse doesn't open till 6.

it's a tung lok place so the food was predictably good - and it was one of those a la carte all you can eat deals to boot. after the shark's fin came a drunken prawns wannabe dish, crab with ginger and spring onion, monkey-head mushrooms, peking duck, deep-fried prawn rolls with mango, tofu with scallops, a roasted meat combo, frogs legs in chili, stir-fried kai lan, siew mai, chili crab, prawns with salad cream and those little fruit bits, pepper beef, and many more i can't remember. for dessert: gui ling gao, mango xi mi lu, hua sheng hu and i think someone had a red bean thing though i'm not very sure.

and salmon sahimi (because no matter what kind of restaurant you are in singapore, as long as you have a buffet, that has to be on the menu).

and then we went home to suffer our individual, quiet attacks of gout.

something new every day

From TWoP:

"Stacie herself interviews that she feels like she's in a position of having to reclaim her reputation after the way she was fired. You know, in rescuing your good name, it's considered a good start not to wear a vest made from Wookiee fur. Furthermore, can someone tell the captioning people that seriously, there is no such word as "restauranteur"? There really isn't. It has a red squiggly line under it right now in Word. That's not a thing, I promise. It may be counterintuitive, but it's "restaurateur," and you can find that out by using a dictionary, which is that big book on your shelf with the never-cracked binding between your copies of The Bridges Of Madison County and Who Moved My Cheese? (Although really, they're kind of getting what they deserve by referring to a Subway owner as a "restaurateur" in the first place.)"

Must confess, never knew that.

busking (iii)

many phone calls later, we make the impossible happen and eke out a time when we're all free - 6 to 7 this wednesday. i email the arts council, and get a reply saying: oops, when we offered you that time we were just kidding because it's the eve of a public holiday.

i go to burn buildings.

excuse

i would blog more, but i'd only make everyone so miserable that you'd all need prozac.

today: bummed again, stayed in bed most of morning reading natsume and feeling like doom. finally got up and remedied situation with:

i) endless repeats of r.e.m.'s everybody hurts

ii) cappuccino and fudge cake at coffee club and

iii) second season premiere of arrested development. i've said this before, and will say it again: you have no excuse not to watch this show! u.s.people: sundays on fox! s'pore people: coming soon to tcs 5! family in thailand: i know you're already being good. everyone else: no excuse!

finishing my saturday quietly, with brie, table water, a wyndham estate shiraz, and natsume soseki's i am a cat. if it would only rain now, the evening would be perfect.

maybe

-- i should take a leaf from lucille van pelt's book, set up a booth in the middle of town, put up a 'the doctor is in' sign and charge people for a good swift kick in the pants (or was that last one calvin and hobbes?)

wrong side of the table (ii)

met with the other duke alumni interviewers last night at the post bar in fullerton (which is totally one of the places i'm going to go to spend lavish amounts of money on other people when i have it - don't hold your breath). the chairman gave out assignments, and we discussed the possibility of holding a group thing in rjc, which i said that i could put together since i know e-ching and friends. early admission interviews are happening as you read this.

we reminisced about duke - all of the others had been there a decade or more ago and were quite eager to hear about what had changed, what was still the same. for one reason or another, it transpired that no one had since returned to the campus, and all of us agreed that we hate the idea of reunions, their artificiality, the forced catching up and faux bonhomie. consensus was that the best way to revisit the school is during the summer when everyone has gone home. wandering alone in the shadows of the gargoyles and clock towers - in one's personal duke, not the duke that students in generations after you have created.

it's a pleasure to meet good people; it's a comfort to know that duke alumni (this group, anyway) are not just successful but splendidly human. and it's great to think that even now, 10 or more years after their graduation, there's still a place in their hearts for the tranquility of the north carolinian countryside and a bowl of piping-hot grits.

busking (ii)

so we went for our audition this morning, but not before vocal complaints from cp about having to wake up in the middle of the night (read: 8 a.m.) to drag himself down to city hall. i was the one who did the planning, and there was good reason for allowing lots of leeway -- bitter experience has taught me that early morning (read 10:45) appointments are never made unless some form of breakfast (read: caffeinated beverages) precedes them. it was the golden rule in rhythm in blue, and it stood us in very good stead while i was musical director, even though i admit that i was cursed at quite a bit.

anyhow. leisurely breakfast, warming up, and we arrived at mita in very good time, only to be kept waiting for nearly an hour while the whatever censorship committee convened and someone named chris popped out intermittently to tell us about the "objectives" of the busking program (like, thanks, captain obvious. i had no idea that buskers were meant to make singapore livelier until you guys told me. i think it would be hilarious if the first objective was something like "to spread the message of doom and eradicate any last traces of joy from our nation")

it came to our turn just before noon. we were brought before the whatever censorship committee -- five very grey individuals who i suspect have not smiled since the 1980s -- and interrogated on our intentions (us, meekly, and in small voices: to spread christmas cheer). the singing took place in a cavernous boardroom, us separated from the panel by two tables and a yawning gulf of space. weirdly enough, they had all the other auditionees in at the same time, so there were a couple of people fiddling with instruments on our left and a skin artist doing henna tatooes on one of the whatever censorship people while we belted out o little town of bethlehem.

it wasn't our best effort. i will not defame cp through exposition of his musical transgressions, but suffice it to say that we did not really compromise on a key till the silent stars drifted by.

thankfully, the subsequent two-and-a-half verses went by with only minor incident. applause, etc., and then, of course, because nothing is ever easy when it comes to the gahmen (tm talkingcock), they asked us why jiahao was not with us. indeed, he wasn't, because the poor guy has just started his stint as a houseman in sgh and barely gets time off to eat, never mind traipse around suffering fools. we explained ourselves, and i pointed out, perfectly accurately, that i had spoken to someone on the phone about having only 3 people present and that they had said that it would not be a problem. the usual speech about gahmen policy got trotted out, and despite all protestations that o little town of bethlehem would not suddenly become a song of sedition with the inclusion of an additional part of harmony, they would not have it. we have no problems giving you the licence, they said, but there has to be a compromise.

the "compromise" came in an email later - they need to see jiahao in the flesh one evening next week from 6-7 to confirm that he is not an al-qaeda operative or a space alien with big laser cannons. This is, of course, an utterly impossible demand given that he doesn't get off work till the sun has long gone down.

so now i have to fight again. i honestly seem to spend about half my life struggling against bureaucratic stupidity and this isn't even really for myself - singapore could use carollers, and obviously charities could use any money we can raise. whatever - once again it has become a matter of principle (read: if i can't get my way, at the very least i need to show you how imbecilic you are). let's hope the pen is still mightier than the sword.

christmas decorations

-- are coming up on Orchard Road. Less gaudy than in years past, although that may change as places like Centrepoint and Taka complete their makeovers. One notable and unfortunate eyesore stands outside Paragon: a squat purple tree with enormous accusing eyes and branches hacked off at the joints. It looks a little like an oversized model of a human heart -- and is quite disturbing. That aside though, the light-up looks promising, and it's nice that they aren't starting the festivities in the middle of October like they used to. That was a bit too much of a good thing.

food

all of a sudden, i feel like making lasagne.

i was, by the way, going to give a running commentary of my mounting despair yesterday (as minz did) but blogger was down -- probably because of thousands of americans flooding the server to do the same.

bush, 2nd term

must look on the bright side. now the u.s. continues to ignore kyoto protocol and carbon emissions skyrocket for the sake of economy. equatorial temperatures rise precipitously, and everyone in singapore is fried to a crisp as the country is engulfed by fifty-foot waves.

just so we are on the same page

i like making friends, and people should feel free to get in touch with me and make comments. inane comments, however, make the baby Jesus cry, and anyone leaving them will, in the future, be banned faster than you can say jiminy cricket. thank you.