there is a new set of measuring spoons in the kitchen and the smallest one is labelled 'just a pinch'.

fin de siecle

was hunting through books just now to find an appropriate passage to sum this year up. came up empty-handed, which either means that 2004 defies encapsualation or that all the books i buy are shallow. probably the latter.

so.

may next year be better, or shorter, or more alcoholic, or, as some of you have wished, just different. may the people who keep posting random things on my comments board start making more sense, or at the very least spell better. may this be the year in which justin and i finally win something of significance in a bridge event.

may life stop sucking for the people for whom life sucks.

may we all try to complain less as a prelude to the previous thing, though i would not put this down as a resolution because it is one that will be broken several hours after midnight when i cannot get a cab. may we all laugh a lot, because god knows where i would be without that.

(yes, all of you are hysterical)

may we discover, and make, and revel in lots of good food, even if the ingredients don't have fancy foreign names. (su-lin: i'm sorry you didn't get any cheesecake.)

and finally, and very vitally, may harry potter and the half-blood prince be worth the bloody 3-year wait.

happy new year folks!

pda

someone needs to convince su-lin that she needs one. someone who is a far better salesman than i.

there's no denying it, i feel ashamed, somehow, of the fact that i'm going to be starting work in as an administrator -- despite all the self-talk about (a) this being only temporary (i hope) and (b) the fact that i should be happy to have any work at all, there's still this feeling that i am letting everyone - and myself - down. one forsook the scholarship road four years ago for the freedom to choose, and it just seems that i'm now making a terrible hash of what was so dearly bought.

boondocks

for dinner, we embark on this odyssey across singapore in search of buckaroo's, a bbq place buried in the deep nowhere that is sembawang. the usual combination of lack of foresight and pure bad luck means, of course, that the restaurant is closed when we get there, leaving us to contemplate what else there is to eat in a place where the most salient landmark is dieppe barracks.

we eventually light in a rather suspect food center beside sembawang mall, and mike and i trot into a 7-11 to get drinks. we bring our gulps to the cashier, who is clearly new and who decides to ask us (in Chinese) how much they cost. submerging my displeasure, I point her to the prominently displayed sign on the soda fountain that says GULP: $1.20, but she is incredulous and duty-bound to charge us the right amount, not a penny more not a penny less. thus, she starts trying to scan the barcode on the cup in the hope that it will reveal The Truth. a queue starts to form behind us. the machine beeps, and reads out BM Valentine: $35.00, which allows her to rapidly compute that our purchase of four Gulps and one can of Yeo's chrysanthemum tea totals $141.00, an amount that she then stands in eager expectation of receiving. i gently try to tell her that she's made a mistake, but she's not buying it - it's her first night on the job, she says, and she doesn't want anything to go wrong. the guy behind me in line fumes. we ask her if there's a store manager; she disappears into the backroom, and finally emerges with someone who sorts the whole mess out, releasing us to return to mediocre satay and tepid gado gado.

and that's the last time i'm ever going to sembawang.

the bowl now has two oxygen stones and ornamental bubbles that strongly resemble dippin' dots, and the fish appear considerably happier. insofar as icthyoids can play, i swear that these do.

new pets

-- two fish, sleek and orange, bifurcated tails and see-through dorsal fins. They are in a cookie jar turned fishbowl, not doing very much at the moment except quivering slightly. I suspect hypoxia. There is an 'oxygen stone' in there with them but the directions said one stone to one fish so they might indeed be suffocating to death as I type. Will procure more slow-reacting oxidants tomorrow, as well as maybe some ornamental pebbles.

The Phantom Of The Opera

-- movie was spectacular in some ways and incredibly disappointing in others. Props, first and foremost, to whoever decided to block the scenes in such a way that the mise en scene still felt like a musical while making use of the unlimited space and angles of film. Kudos also the choreographers, costume and set designers, and for that matter most of the technical staff (if anything, I was expecting the film to fail because of production since the performers already had a lot to work with). As it turned out, all my gripes were with the singing and acting. It seemed like J. Schumacher was making a special effort not to get any A-list stars in the show - which is all well and good, but the least he could have done otherwise was find people who can sing. Gerald Butler's voice was a disaster - all his sound comes from his windpipe and he mangled the high A in Music of The Night so badly that I'm suprised that Michael Ball has not already hunted him down and killed him (his career, incidentally, is already dead, as evidenced by his resplendent recent roles in Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life and Michael Crichton's Timeline.) Minnie Driver as Carlotta was just...wrong, and Emmy Rossum, though tolerable as Christine (I suppose) is not a patch on Sarah Brightman and her glittering transcendence when it comes to hitting the high high E at the end of the title song. (Mercifully, God or someone else decided to intervene and nix the original casting choice of Katie Holmes. Ugh.)

The experience was not improved by incessantly-beeping pagers and audience members who thought it necessary to clap at the end of every song (seriously: who are these people?) Fortunately, the theater was only about a third full, the rest of the movie-going population having decided that Meet the Fockers was the obvious choice for where their $8.50 should be spent.

For all that, if you're Andrew Lloyd Webber's bitch (like I, unfortunately, am: where do I sign up for rehab?), it is probably still worth a watch.

investigated yen's ramshackle killiney road bar and it is everything that was promised. we must must must must go. byob!

Merry Christmas to all!

Received, just now, the sad news that my brother's godfather, and long-time family friend, has just entered the final stages of thirteen years of on-and-off illness. What began as nasopharyngeal cancer turned into a series of medical complications quite beyond my power to detail, the last of which was an episode of choking during a bout of pneumonia which led to anoxia and brain damage. Went straight from Mass to the ICU (in SGH) where the family was gathered, and married up with Jiahao, who managed to steal away from the urology ward where he was on call. Mom pressganged him into accompanying me into the ward (only 2 people are allowed in at a time), where, still in his scrubs, he did a perfunctory, official-looking flip through the patient charts (Can you do that? I asked him. Apparently he can. I'm not sure if I was expecting something wise and wonderful like "Oh, how silly, they could fix everything by doing X", but no comments were forthcoming.)

No matter how obvious, the juxtaposition - hospital wards on Christmas Eve - is still a horrific one. There's no inoculation either, no way to not put the two things together: out there, people are celebrating; in here, someone is dying. The mind, our minds, are drawn by irony, hungry for meaning, and, unbidden, do the interlocking. No stopping them. The best one can do is not feel guilty, not be the fulcrum - things aren't all about you, the universe is unfolding as it should.

xmas nosh (ii)

the cheesecake has uneven edges and is not the texture i had hoped for. i am tempted to blame either (a) the waterbath (maybe i should not have used one) or (b) the recipe, although of course it could be just one blaming ones tools etc. it rather reminds me of fiesta japanese cheesecakes which, though charming in their own way, are not really what one expects after spending nearly $20 on cream cheese, not to mention running all around town to find just the right brand of strawberry topping.

xmas nosh

i

accidentally threw bangkwangs instead of yams into the shopping basket in cold storage 2 days ago. candied bangkwangs probably don't taste so good.

ii

finally getting round to making cheesecake. spurning nigella's recipe because frankly i did not like the lime one we made in su-lin's place eons ago and would like to make something that is not the consistency of goo. poll: grahams or digestives for base?

iii

peanut butter cookies were quite satisfactory. only mishap: should have followed advice to letter and made indentations for jam deeper.

iv

why are artichokes so expensive?

v

the problem with christmas in the tropics is that food that might be considered hearty elsewhere merely makes one jelat in equatorial climes. (can one be jelat? or do you feel jelat? or have i just completely lost my mind?) also: many vegetables not available/are too expensive/not fresh. spent a king's ransom on brussel sprouts; acorn squash completely unavailable.

vi

food disappears all too quickly when there are 5 people in the house.

vii

year after year i am disappointed by christmas hams. our aunt dropped one by as a way of a family present and as always expectation has surpassed actual tasting. ham is a very stodgy food to begin with and is rather difficult to give a lift to. packing it into a dense log does not help the cause. am plotting to escape the imminence of sandwiches at lunch.

viii

tomorrow, though, will be good.

echoes of su-lin

woken up at 8:45 this morning by someone from ****** berating me for not having gone for my medical checkup yet. i did tell them last week (in fact i swear i had the conversation with the very same woman) that i would not be free to go till today and was given the ok to do that, so i don't apologize for being curt and in fact now feel like going tomorrow instead just so that she'll be further aggrieved. for future reference, no phone calls to my home should be made before the hour of ten in the morning unless murther or similar has been committed. (i do already wake up earlier than most of the idlers i know.)

syntax and such

was pondering, in church last week, the lyrics of o come o come emmanuel, which go thusly:

o come o come emmanuel
and ransome captive israel
who mourns in lonely exile here
until the son of god appear

specifically, was trying to figure out why the final verb of the stanza should be plural and not singular, until i realised that this was probably an analagous construction to the one choonping eekia and i had had a discussion over not two months ago, that is, the bit from 'and is it true' that goes:

the maker of the stars and sea
become a child on earth for me

where 'become' (choonping explained) is not a verb at all but a more adjectival-like thing (sidebar: consulted mother about what exactly it is and got into head-spinning argument about what the word "won" is in the sentence "the battle is won").

on top of the grammatical muddle, carol lyrics, i have found, have terribly tricky syntax too - for instance:

what child is this, who laid to rest on mary's lap is sleeping,
whom angels greet, with anthems sweet, while shepherd's watch are keeping?

no matter how hard you try to untwist that pretzel of a question, you just can't ask it in a more straightforward way. i love it. people need to appreciate these things more.

spelling

but both minuscule and miniscule are ok, yes? dictionary.com and my ye olde webster's concur.

wasn't it granny who said something along the lines of i spells it like how i says it?

perkier.

have been considering moving this blog onto a private domain for a while now, however do not feel comfortable enough with html to endeavour to create a site without help. tried to enlist the brother who also pleaded uselessness, which leaves me with:

a) stick with blogger
b) go it on my own
c) find a kind soul to help out

we'll see

I have been offered a position by [yes, I have edited this out. why? one can never be too careful. and also because it makes a good running joke. if anyone actually reads this leave a comment and i will buy you an ice-cream)] , which I am taking while I wait for something better. (Smash cut, of course, to me sitting at a big desk, still in the company after 25 years contemplating songs about rainbows and what's on the other side. Also, should I be saying this on a public blog? Ass-biting, ahoy!)

I start 15 Jan.

Goof of the day in today's papers is a rather unfortunate headline that reads:

Here's hope for lymphatic cancer

Driving up to the airport to pick up the brother at close on one in the morning, I was amazed to see a line of cabs several miles long (no kidding) on the expressway waiting for arriving passengers. There always used to be a queue, but neither of us had ever seen it reach such an impressive length. Postulation by my dad: its distance from head to tail is an accurate barometer of the state of the economy, and also a good indication of who will prevail in the next General Election.

aargh

my sandals are broken
my watch is broken
all but one of the clothes hooks on the back of my door are broken
my umbrella has gone missing
my knee is hurting like heck
and i've skipped lunch for three days running

could something just please go right?

Yet more frivolous things that I absolutely must have (I especially love "You are full of bombs")

reading

sadly, the rest of my reading of late has consisted solely of trashy detective novels.

i think i shall re-read the grapes of wrath. it's one of those books i go to when i'm down, the macaroni cheese of my favourite literature. a somewhat strange choice, i suppose, but choonping tells me that he goes to paradise lost for comfort so i do have some company in my strangeness.

camus

just finished the outsider in galilee. feeling disturbed because of it (particularly because of the afterword, where camus mentions all too briefly the idea that mersault is a Christ-like figure), and itching for illumination. can one of the clever english students talk to me about it/tell me more (about existentialism to begin with, if nothing else)?

menace to society

two times in three days i have accidentally injured a fellow citizen. the first was on the mrt when the train came to an abrupt halt and i trod - hard - on a poor lady's sandalled foot. the second - and jianyi will go into schadenfreude-induced rapture reading this - happened not two hours ago in ang mo kio library. i was leaning against a bookshelf trying to decide whether i wanted to give j.g. ballard a second chance when this young kid, shoulder-high, came hurtling around the corner. he was being chased or something, was not looking where he was going, and clotheslined himself violently on my outstretched arm before I had any chance to react. went down like sack of turnips, flat on back, very reminiscent of three stooges. i instinctively (and rather idiotically, in retrospect), started apologising but he was too busy seeing stars to notice, so i quietly crept away to look at bridge books while he recovered (and found something by stewart that i had not read before: his writing is funny even if his concepts aren't the best).

i do have more to say about heartlanders/cosmopolitans but the idea of turning these thoughts into lucid prose is putting me off at the moment so the entry will have to be put on hold.

weighing in on von's thoughts on the cosmopolitan/heartlander divide.

i disagree that the distinction is purely phenotypic/behavioural (as yen commented: a hawker center meal does not a heartlander make), and not just because of the traditional blurring-of-boundaries argument. the underlying dichotomy (certainly nowadays, perhaps less so in the past) is probably far simpler - the terms have become euphemistic catch-alls for 'rich' and poor'. therefore, being 'cosmopolitan', in the singaporean sense of the word, is not context-dependent: moneyed is moneyed whether one is eating in an hougang hawker center or les amis.

the truth of the matter is that singapore really is too small to have delineations that depend, at least to a certain extent, on possessing a geography that produces immiscible cultures. there is not enough physical space for our population to be hetergeneous - cosmpolitans end up in heartlander territory (and vice versa) by sheer dint of the fact that there is nowhere else to go. diffusion; probabilities. thus, it is impossible for us to produce two behaviourally distinct groups, and (sorry to say), people like von are probably not all that uncommon.

so if it's not what you do, and it's not who you are (i don't think anyone's going to argue that there's a heartlander gene), it must be what you own. and if that is the case, one really cannot be both cosmopolitan and heartlander, charming as the illusion may be. even if one could, not being well off in a nation of bloated prosperity is probably not cool - in fact, i will stick my neck out and say that it sucks - so at worst we're insulting the 'heartlanders' quite terribly by insinuating that we would like to straddle the fences

the moral of the story, perhaps, is that the division is more political than genuinely sociocultural. it's a gentler way of talking about inequality of wealth distribution, and, as von inadvertently pointed out, softens the plight of the poor, and even makes it, in a twisted sort of way, desirable. we're one of the masses! count on me, singapore! etc. me? i just don't believe in labels and pigeonholes. fade to grey.

craving

i would give a kidney right now for some waffle house

joo chiat

Tried, today, an approximation of the Makansutra Joo Chiat/Katong Jalan Jalan, all by my lonesome because people were either busy or did not pick up my calls. Booo. Fei Fei Wantan noodles were not as superlative as the description suggests - my mom and I (correct me if I'm wrong) like our wantan mee gravy to be fairly sweet, which is why the Farrer market stall has long been one of our favourites. (Jiahao's Sunshine Plaza one is not half-bad either). For $2, though, one really can't complain. Chased away pesky drink-stall owner and high-tailed it down to East Coast Road in search of kaya buns, admiring, along the way, some very architecurally interesting (and enormous) semi-ds. Where the bun shop should have been was a large and rather sketchy beer garden, which was disappointing. Fortunately enough, there was one of those old, Hainanese(?) confectioneries nearby, packed to the rafters despite it being 3 o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Crowds in Singapore usually indicate quality, so I perused the grubby display case and selected a Swiss roll and a yellow, custardy tart thing, sixty cents apiece. The Swiss roll was very sugary and jammy, and I polished it off before I had gotten ten paces from the store. The custard thing was less exciting, and made me wish I had gone with something else - one of the creamhorns, maybe, or the chocolate pastries.

Heading back towards Katong Mall, I located Makansutra's famous tau kwa bao, which was as good as promised, the tau kwa exceedingly fresh and its texture perfect both outside and in. It came stuffed with everything you would usually expect in tau kwa bao, plus many unidentifiable bits, and, (this is the kicker) everything was cooked in remorseless amounts of garlic. The chili sauce was superb as well.

I then took a little break to explore Katong Mall, which was almost a waste of time, because just about everything was shut. 'Almost' because I got to peek into a tuition centre upstairs, where, written on the whiteboard, was this:

BODY LOCI (LOCATIONS)
1. eye
2. nose
3. mouth
4. neck

etc.

-- which wins the WTF Singapore strangeness award for the day, and an overall WTF quotient of 7.5 out of 10.

Downstairs was a fascinating bakery named Awfully Chocolate. Enticed immediately by the name and its strangely minimalist layout (it has no display case, and is very white, sort of like an Apple store), I went to explore - it has but three kinds of cake (chocolate fudge, chocolate banana, and something else I forget) and a few flavors of ice cream. I make a call to the Goddess of Chocolate who, of course, has heard about the place, and tells me that yes, their cakes are indeed as mouthwateringly scrumptious as one might expect from a bakery that deigns to call itself Awfully Chocolate (Sidebar: does anyone remember the miniature golf course along the ECP, since closed, that was called "Lilliputt"? An actual pun! In Singapore!) The problem being that they don't sell slices, only whole cakes, so now I have to either wait for my family to return, or have, as the GoC suggested, an Awfully Chocolate cake party (anyone?). Or, I told the GoC before hanging up, starve myself for 2 days and do a Bruce Bogtrotter.

After that, went in pursuit of durian puffs, only to find that they are only sold in boxes of 20. That, and the fact the shop smelled rather horrid, made me pass, and decide to call it a day in terms of eating. Walked through Marine Parade to the shore, and sat for a while watching the rollerbladers and reading Minz's "irresistibly-titled" Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan, which I thought might be good seaside reading, what with it involving, you know, fish. I got neither land breezes, nor sea breezes, which Minz had promised me in an IM conversation earlier in the morning:

(lamotte: what abt
lamotte: east coast
lamotte: becos it's really v nice to sit under a tree and read
TryptophanCakes: true
lamotte: and there's a japnese restaurant there i'm v fond of
TryptophanCakes: it is sort of hot today though
lamotte: seabreeze!
lamotte: and land breeze!
lamotte: and whatever other breeze!)

-- but it had cooled down somewhat, so it was not all bad. Decided, since I was in the vicinity, to take another of her suggestions and check out the Fort Road excavation, where her mother (she said) used to play as a kid

(lamotte: i said, how come you so lousy and not inquisitive
lamotte: you could have been famous for it)

They haven't uncovered very much yet, about a hundred square meters, maybe, but there is still a ways to go, and it is, I suppose, kind of exciting. (Somehow, don't have much else to say about that)

And now I'm home, drinking Vanilla Coke and succumbing to Singapore Idol because I am bored, and The Amazing Race has been pre-empted.

december

-- is upon us, which means that it's time for:

X'mas wish list, 2004

1. DVDs:
- Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb, 40th anniversary special edition
- Schindler's List, widescreen edition (keeping copy)
- the Arrested Development Season 1 Box Set (lots of extras)

2. Eddie Kantar Teaches Advanced Bridge Defense, one of the best books on defense out nowadays, IMHO.

3. A heart rate monitor, for jogging.

4. This Swatch Irony, which I think exists in green, although I cannot find one on the webpage

5. A small bedside lamp that can clip onto my bed (couple inches of wood). I don't have a bedside table so the clipping bit is imperative.

6. A one-year renewal of my Bridge World subscription

7. Low-maintenance fish, with fishbowl, that will swim around and give me inspiration to write.

8. A dock for my Ipod mini - a completely superfluous accessory, I admit, but what is Christmas for?

9. (family only!) A pair of sneakers. It is embarrassing, but I don't have any.

10. To take each moment, and live each moment, in peace eternally

(P.S. I encourage other people to put up similar lists so that I don't feel like a greedy bastard. Thank you.)