from the complete plain words

"Few common things are more dificult than to find the right word, and many people are too lazy to try. This form of indolence sometimes betrays itself by a copious use of inverted commas. 'I know this is not quite the right word', the inverted commas seem to say, 'but I can't be bothered to think of a better'; or, 'please note that I am using this word faceitiously'; or, 'don't think I don't know that this is a cliche'. If the word is the right one, do not be ashamed of it: if it is the wrong one, do not use it. The same implied apology is often made in conversation by interposing 'you know' or by ending every sentence with phrases such as 'or something' or 'sort of thing'. Officials cannot do that, but in them the same phenomenon is reflected in an unwillingness to venture outside a small vocabulary of shapeless bundles of uncertain content - words and phrases like position, situation, basis, arise, involve, in connection with, in terms of, with reference to, issue, consideration and factor - a disposition, for instance, to 'admit with regret the position which has arisen in connection with' rather than to make the effort to tell the reader specifically what is admitted with regret. Clear thinking is hard work, but loose thinking is bound to produce loose writing. And clear thinking takes time, but time that has to be given to a job to avoid making a mess of it cannot be time wasted and may in the end be time saved."

if you find yourself in australia (dorcas?), please do avail yourself of margaret river chocolate bars (and bring some back for me). i have just consumed a hunk of rocky road -- -- pink and white marshmallows, whole peanuts and turkish delight embedded in milk chocolate -- the size of my fist, and am cruising blissfully towards the weekend on an anandamide high.

tomato nation

Sars latest entry just made my day -- and if you've never been to the site before you now have joy and laughter for an entire week :)

on blogging

they've caught another guy where i work for making defamatory remarks (or something) on his blog. one is an example, two is a trend -- so i've gone back over old entries to thoroughly extirpate all evidence of what it is i'm doing right now. on the one hand, yes, people are tiresome, but on the other, in the litigious world of today you should really just save yourself the bother.

flamboyant online bitching is sort of like skinny-dipping at the beach at night -- a little exciting, a little cowardly, and also a little sad -- and people who aren't conscious of the fact that it is all three (and not the just the first) really should not be doing it. it's an outlet to vent, but to a certain extent it's also a cheap thrill, and if you cross the line or get unlucky you're going to get burned.

anyway, in case the point got lost in the shuffle, i freely admit that i'm one of the cowardly, disenfranchised millions screaming into cyberspace while secretly hoping that i'll never be heard. pity me! extravagantly!

thought

no larger gap exists in this cosmos than the one between corporate policy and practice (and i say this with all the assurance of my 3 months of experience and 10 years of dilbert comics). this would not be of note in itself except that what fills this gap is the entirely-artificial batrachomyomachia between auditors and consultants, all of whom are paid many, many times more than i am. why are we always on the side that suffers because of bureaucracy instead of gaining from it? one would expect that being intelligent people, we really ought to be profiting from the stupidity. my hypothesis (and whatever you may say this is not at all elitist or bitter) is that we just have too much integrity to capitulate/capitalise -- else i would not so absolutely balk whenver people suggest that i haul my ass into something lucrative post-haste. it's not laziness or avolition, it's just that some things are just not worth selling out to, thus the same bootless conclusion whenever the grand money-making schemes surface time and again. it's that we know, deep in our hearts, that consultants and auditors, and sometimes even entrepeneurs, have sold their souls to the devil, and we would rather suffer in penury than tread that path.

dinner last night at porta porta, and i feel like i consumed about a bottle-and-a-half of top-end olive oil. not that this is a bad thing. the antipasti -- zucchinis, eggplant, sweet red peppers and olives -- came drowning in it, with warm bread snuggling in a basket on the side. following that, chicken consomme, petite portions of cheese tortellini in pesto sauce and spaghetti pomodoro with squid, rosemary chicken with a solitary roast potato on the side, and lightly-fried calamari sitting happily in some sort of vinaigrette. dessert was the world's skinniest slice of apple pie, and an (unfortunately) indifferent tiramisu (the only disappointing thing about the meal). all for the very reasonable price of $39++, and certainly no worse than the better-known italian establishments in the country.

Deaths of Flowers

I would if I could choose
Age and die outwards as a tulip does;
Not as this iris drawing in, in-coiling
Its complex strange taut inflorescence, willing
Itself a bud again - though all achieved is
No more than a clenched sadness,

The tears of gum not flowing.
I would choose the tulips reckless way of going;
Whose petals answer light, altering by fractions
From closed to wide, from one through many perfections,
Til wreched, flamboyant, strayed beyond recall,
Like flakes of fire they piecemeal fall.

                             Edith Joy Scovell

lost in translation

latin, choonping announces last night, is the most beautiful language in the world. this brought on by his just having viewed the telecast of the pope's inauguration, and hearing the single imperative oremus: let us pray. i point out that latin seems beautiful largely because all we ever hear of it comes from the catholic mass, which does not contain anything of the prosaic. we muse about latin translations of the banal -- how does one, for instance, say "how much for these three eggs?" choonping suggests "quantus tres ovo". two continents away, minzhi screams.

had to leave the house even earlier than usual to get to work on time because the car is being serviced. also: took a chlorpheniramine because my allergies were being naughty. lesson to be learned: do not take soporific medication when already running a sleep deficit from nights prior.

the weekend was unremarkable. saturday was all aborted plans with various groups of people, leaving only my dad for company. watched sean penn and nicole kidman somnambulate their way through one of the most laborious scripts since thirteen days -- someone really needs to take all the frederick forsyths/tom clancys/clive cusslers of the world and throw them into a vat of molten lead. sunday evening: dinner for su-lin's birthday, which really was just one of our normal let's-get-together-and-bitch-about-the-universe things (sorry darling!) that look destined to keep happening till we're all old and grey and full of sleep. (mmm...sleep)

i need to get into more interesting things on weekends -- and this is no specific reference to yesterday being bad or boring, just a general observation. shall we do a short trip? there are two long weekends coming up. jiahao says that he'll sign up for the big walk with me if he's not on call on may 22nd, and anyone reading this is absolutely invited to come along.

Lots of promising films debuting at Cannes. Cronenberg's A History of Violence and the first new Atom Egoyan film in 3 years are the two I'm most looking forward to seeing, I think.

It's interesting - more and more I find myself paying attention to directors and producers rather than the cast when choosing to get excited about a film. I think it's a symptom of old age. The calculus of movie-watching takes less and less account of explosions and pretty faces as one moves into ones dotage. College got me hooked on Atom Egoyan with Calendar and Exotica, and Darryl, in more recent times, introduced me to the twisted mind of David Cronenberg (how, he asks me, can a David Lynch/Chris Carter hanger-on not have seen eXistenz?), so that what would before have been Viggo Mortensen/Colin Firth (!) movies to me are now not.

In related though possibly contradictory news, I have a strange, self-destructive urge to go and watch Sahara

perfectionism

many of the entries i wrote ages and ages ago are riddled with mistakes. either i was high, or did not proofread them, or both. sigh. time to fix things.

oh-so-tentative plans are being made for a trip to japan in july. tokyo, osaka, nagoya and fukuoka are all possible starting points, and then off into the wilderness so i can finally have the opportunity to write stirring passages about water wheels. is nine days enough time to spend there? i'm afraid that once i rediscover inner stillness i might never want to leave.

Speaking of the damn Galilee card, mine was cruelly and forcefully taken away from me when I stopped by for coffee and cake a couple of months ago. I handed the card in thinking I was to get a stamp and before I knew it it was gone, leaving me with a 15% discount on a $6.20 purchase. No warning whatsoever, and I had 15 stamps on the thing! Surely I should have got a prorated discount, or a meatier reward, or at the very least been allowed to transfer my stamps to the new card when it eventually comes out. I mean, come on, I was $15 away from a $10 voucher, for crying out loud. Is this how you reward loyalty, you bastards?

boon

twelve gallons of water later, still no voice.

there are some benefits to missing a larynx. most important among them is that i don't have to answer the phone, which, after middle management, is the most pestilential thing in the office. making a call is a few baby steps away from passing the buck. corollary: most work gets rerouted to someone else when people discover that there is no way to get you on the line (e-mail, as all dilbert readers know, is only for correspondence that one doesn't mind being misplaced -- or that is meant to be misplaced). happily, in the monolithic organisation that is *****, there's always someone else around you to take up the slack, not that a good boy like myself would milk such a situation. now, where are those potato chips?

It's a remarkable coincidence that every other book Richard Powers writes has some bearing on an interest of mine -- Galatea 2.2 (neuroscience), Gold Bug Variations (molecular biology/genetics/classical music), Time of Our Singing (choral singing/classical a cappella), Prisoners' Dilemma (game theory -- one of the motifs is game theory right? i haven't actually read it). Maybe his next book will be about the disillusionment of Modern Man.

update

thursday: sitting in office daydreaming about chinchillas and fluffernutters. still no marshmallow spread.

friday: aftermath of flu - losing voice

saturday: voice just about gone. lunch at neil road guotie place. travesty of a bridge session in the afternoon that i will spend the next week trying to forget. tapas in evening with justin and friend shaun (tm minz); scaring myself by realising that practically nothing that has happened to me in the past nine months is really worth catching up on.

sunday: no voice. found that i could just about hit low low c. sang one hymn two octaves lower than i normally would, then gave up entirely. lunch at airport. mom and the other brother gone; back in june. the brother to be back in may, briefly. ironing. joan of arcadia. planning next weekend's debauchery.

Currently reading:
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

note to self:

perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim

it seems like i come down with the flu at least once a month nowadays. i guess it's the stress. last night: tossing and turning, febrile dreams of wandering aimlessly down dark corridors.

MC till thursday.

the neighbours have a black-and-white kitten that has decided it really likes hanging out in our home, much to the consternation of the allergy-prone mother. i personally think it's rather cute. this is, however, a none-too-popular opinion in this animal-hating household.

in other pet-related news, i have two new fish.

if you haven't read the pope's will, you kind of should. here's the very last bit of it, written in march 2000:

As the end of my life approaches I return with my
memory to the beginning, to my parents, to my brother,
to the sister (I never knew because she died before my
birth), to the parish in Wadowice, where I was
baptized, to that city I love, to my peers, friends
from elementary school, high school and the
university, up to the time of the occupation when I
was a worker, and then in the parish of Niegowic, then
St. Florian's in Krakow, to the pastoral ministry of
academics, to the milieu of ... to all milieux ... to
Krakow and to Rome ... to the people who were
entrusted to me in a special way by the Lord.

To all I want to say just one thing: "May God reward
you."

"In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum."

each slow dusk

the nice thing about the human mind is that it automatically accelerates the passage of time for you once you're numb enough. i'm able to dose myself by weeks now as opposed to days, with the medicine no more bitter. and soon we'll all be 62.

ice^3

-- after 2 months of pining to visit the place, finally got a chance with the father and the mother and the other brother. the last two are back from chiangmai for a couple of weeks which is nice because living with just one other person for any extended period of time is enough to drive anyone batshit crazy, no matter who the other person is (cf. college, with apologies to gab).

of note: homemade ice cream served with liquor in test tubes (mix and match - giant matrix on inner page of menu for those with...matrix fetishes). mudpies. a glut of chocolate. tables that fluouresce periwinkle. a bazillion varieties of ice coffee.

it's two shops down from brownbox. doubt not that i will return. (i should get paid for these plugs)

ok. no more complaining. bad me.

reasons i should quit (ii)

because life really is too short to do unpleasant things that are completely avoidable.

observation (ii), probably self-evident

the last hour of work is the longest

observation

dreams are porcelain ducks

sigh

perusing the "read" section in the lifestyle section of the sunday times is a very similar experience to exfoliating oneself with a cheese grater. i mean, i thought i had seen the worst over the past couple of weeks, but today, they hit us with an interview with one ivy lim, who has

"[...]just finished reading The Da Vinci Code (2003) and Angels and Demons(2000) by Dan Brown [and is] taking a breather by reading light material -- Reader's Digest"

just kill me now.

portobelle

-- is a tiny eating establishment behind comcenter on killiney road which is supposed to serve mediterranean food, but does, in fact, not. despite the misleading review in i-s, the quality of the food, thankfully, was not at all misreported. justin and i shared a near-perfect melanzane, which came topped with parmesan cheese, roasted garlic and (interestingly) the little fried shallots that you get with porridge; also: a melange of zucchini, kalamata and green olives on the side, pickled, which was so good i nearly cried.

main course: justin had the lamb shank with (i think) a red wine sauce, linguine and side salad, an ample portion well-presented. i had the chimichanga, which looked exactly like roti boyan sitting on a bed of lettuce with sour cream and salsa on top. in light of prior experiences with roti boyan, i was prepared for disappointment,; however, was excited to find the appearance of the crust deceiving, i.e. not at all oily/stodgy but crisp and light, the entire package having very nice bite and flavour.

we both had sangria. nothing to write home about, (too much fruit floating in it cubed too fine) but at least it was fairly alcoholic. i don't think i'll ever have better sangria than those served by spanish restaurants i've been to in the states (i hear that tapas tree in clarke quay(?) does a pretty good job with it, though, can anyone confirm that?)

reasons i should quit (i)

because, whereas in the past, i figured that desire drives the search for money, it is also true (and perhaps even more significant) that having money fuels greater and more meaningless desire. i really hate wanting things. i hate being tempted by fine dining and nice clothes and shiny gym memberships for no other reason than that whatever i'm earning puts some of these things, variously, within reach. money and the things it can buy should, in my world, come about as a happy by-product of working and not be its goal, especially because of the (inevitable) generation of said side effect. in sum: less money, fewer desires, greater net happiness; unless: money comes as result of doing something one likes intrinsically. welcome to my cosy nook of idealism; there's only room for one.

ok, everyone has to go take a look at this job