Rogue Deities Entertain Us with Interesting Dramatic Weather Conditions
Hello awesome invisible peoples of the internetz. Just a quick utterance of our upcoming plans till the end of the year:
We’ll be working towards a design folio before the New Year binds us with the demons of whyhaven’tIdonnsityets. We’re also prepping for our year-end visit to the Land of Sheep, Kiwis and other Monstrously Cute Creatures – yup, we’ll be tagging with the parents to New Zealand in a month’s time. Whoopie us. Next up? Our long overdue trip to Tokyo, come 2010. Scheduling begins soon enough, but first: Learning to speak anything else besides Takashimaya, Honda, Toyota and Kawaii neh.
In other news, I’ve been quietly grooving to a samba beat the entire weekend.
Don’t get too wet for the week ahead babes – the weather’s been absolutely killer in terms of unpredictability. One minute you’re a steaming coffee pot; the next, you’re a drenched hamburger in a washing machine.
The Silhouette of your Unrequited Governmental Love makes me Feel Briefly Bad about Myself
for a conversional discourse on the End of State-Truth, press one
At the obscure edge of reason, I’ve always had a nagging suspicion for this city-state of mine. It’s that itchy feeling that says: there’s a logical flaw in reality, somewhere. Possibly, nearby.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: Everything that’s wrong about Singapore (to me) is encapsulated by TVMobile.
Ah, TVMobile – the bane of my commuter existence. When you’re there, I feel like smashing my fist into your screens and pulling the speakers out from their electrical bus sockets and setting the entire bus on fire (once everyone’s been safely evacuated, of course). When you’re not, I’m in a perpetual state of bliss for half an hour.
And yet.
In a cosmic-sense of veracity, you’re still around. And probably always will be. If I did an island-wide street poll of SBS commuters, I betcha a good 90%+++ would agree that you’re a general nuisance to our lives. Your programming sucks – two thirds of the time you’re playing annoying adverts with lousy sales pitches and blaring back-jingles; the rest of the time you’re serving up re-runs of badly scripted Channel 8 serials and canned-laughter-filled “Just for Laugh Gags” segments.
When I’m not grappling with your awful content (which really, are discriminatory towards non-Mandarin speakers and people with a tasteful sense of humour), I _have_ to deal with your static-prone-ass-of-a-reception-cabling-that-makes-the-shitty-programmes-shittier-because-everything-freeze-jams-for-a-few-seconds-and-the-farking-sound-keeps-repeating-even-when-your-screen-goes-blank.
And yet.
You’re still here. In my face. Every. Single. Bloody. Day. Why is that? If everyone agrees that you’re a piece of shit technology that really shouldn’t be part of the commuting experience; if everyone wants you to go away and leave us the hell alone – why, art, thou, still, here?
In any working, democratic, developed country/city, you would’ve been fixed. You’d either have been dissembled and sent to the waste dumps, or your reception technology + quality of programming would’ve been upgraded. You could have ended up being like the Miami Bus Transit, with a way bigger screen, and a GPS-linked map telling us where the hell the bus is, and where we’re all going.
You could have been useful.
Instead.
You remain the self-reflecting mirror-artefact of all that is wrong with Singapore society. Where a politically autocratic system has set in place a systemic discourse of “I should really mind my own business”. Sure we start petitions and write letters to the ST forum. We bitch about everything in our kopi tiams and taxi cabs.
But in the end, nothing really changes. We’ll go back to our cannot make it, increasingly stressful jobs; we’ll return to our safe, normal, increasingly expensive HDB flats; and we’ll continue to journey our ways around with you, dear TVMobile. Because nothing says Uniquely Singapore better than paradigm-enslaved worker drones who don’t give a damn about changing the system.
Is there hope for the future? Perhaps. I suggest we start by smashing our televisions.
Hey it’s Sunday!
Hey it’s Sunday!
Let’s breathe a big sigh of relief together and get our heads wet with sparkling love!
Let’s evaporate away to the intimations of graceful pleasures!
Let’s dispatch our worries and cares and be beautiful!
Let’s stay in bed and daydream ourselves away, baby.
She’ll Hurt You and You’ll Cry in Silence
The lady on the crowded SBS bus
Who’s standing beside me
(I’m seated)
She’s going home to cook dinner
And in her red plastic bag is a bag full of rice
At the next stop the man behind me leaves
And she hurries to occupy the empty seat
(The red plastic bag is heavy for her)
She rushes and doesn’t notice
When the rice bag smacks into my face
And hits me hard
Oh man that’s hurt and pain
Right there man.
Beware of food staples.
They should put a warning sign on those things.
Quickly! The people are waiting for your (slightly) more interesting life!
That ever-playing silly symphonic score of my life has drifted into a wayward Tristan chord progression of W O R K over the past two weeks. Remember when I said that I’d be rushing around with map layouts and talking in mathematical figures a few entries back?
Whelp.
I’m doing that now.
Every. Single. Day.
It doesn’t help that the standard office environment is generally sterile in terms of speech parameters.
I haven’t said a bad word for the longest time.
The upside to the whole deal is that my creative levels are inversely related to my shacked-ness.
So.
I’ve handwritten a bunch of stories that I’m hoping to churn out once I actually do have the time, and I’ve planned out a few collaborative design projects to get off the ground in the coming months.
10 weeks into the job! I shall knit a shooting star and surf to the condo rooftop of the universe and declare myself “wonderfully ambulant”! (after I get my sleep back, that is)
Stuff I miss doing
ever since I started working:
1. Cooking pasta
2. Reading + Writing
3. The utter casual randomness of an unplanned day
helter-skelter happy Beatles image: because I’m feeling nostalgic
They all talk in present tense
Ah. Rhythms.
in life.
I shall do a dance, and you can hum a tune.
We is always Changing
Tomorrow On Friday, I’ll wave goodbye to one of my dearest friends. And I won’t know when we’ll meet again, exactly.
for dessert, for drinks, for scrabble.
Life’s too short for Melancholy, but occasionally it does take a seat on your front yard, and then there’s no use turning on the sprinklers for it (because mostly, Melancholy loves moping in the wet).
Ah. But where will we be without the people who’ve travelled our ways? Probably, not a great distance (I think). And perhaps, a little lost, as well.
So here’s to the great journey ahead, my dearest Miss marycherry. And may our paths collide as much and as often as they have. I’m sure we’ll find each other again someday. After all, the galaxy is only so small.
And we.
This forever friendship of ours.
So much bigger.
Perfect is Ideal
Let’s talk about perfection. I’m a perfectionist at heart. The paradox of all perfectionists is that we vehemently know, full bloody well, that “perfection” is impossible. Which is precisely why we try to negate the negatives, to grind down the imperfections…and end up with something, quite possibly, nearly “perfect”. Which isn’t too bad.
The brutal description of the perfectionist is the anal-ist. I don’t mind being called that. Being anal retentive is the hallmark of being careful, cautious, and a general bastard to everybody else. From my stories, to my songs, to my digital designs – perfection, or rather, the pursuit of it, remains an agonizing component of the process.
Which explains why: I’m still editing my honours thesis. In fact, the “Special Cut” version is scheduled to roll out next weekend. It’ll be the first copy of my thesis that I’ll be intrinsically kinda satisfied with. I’ve tweaked a few more sentences, I’ve removed a few grammatical/spelling errors. It’ll be binded. And served.
But it isn’t the end.
You see, perfectionists are completely aware, that “perfection” is im-possible. Ergo, in the giant squid killing process that is c r e a t i o n, the so-called “ends” are only enthusiastic hiccups in the throaty phlegm of “hey…let’s do one better”.
So.
The “Director’s Cut” version of the thesis is set to come out this winter. That one is the one with the drastic cutting of paragraphs and insertion of multiple endnotes (of unused field data and the like), and a special “researcher commentary” chapter at the end. It’ll exist only just because it needs to. An artefact of something larger than itself, another story written among the shadow of possibilities that is the forever algorithm of the nearly “perfect”. And that my friends, is why some people have a tendency to go “Aiyah Carrick, why you so lik dat?”
Like that means like that lor. Sometimes, satisfaction is derived from the journey itself.
That, is the moral of the story.
