Good Enough Answers to Where Hath Thou Been?
Good Enough Answers to Where Hath Thou Been?
- Battling other Highlanders to ensure my immortality
- Got caught in a passive-aggressive abusive relationship – called the local news networks – wrote a best-selling novel based on my BDSM experiences – will be starring in the movie trilogy next summer
- Planning a multitude of ways to ensure the collapse of modern day Capitalism
- Filtering tiny particles of food out from the water using my newly evolved specialized gills
- Embracing the Dark Arts and learning to summon a psychic Basilisk (just for the heck of it)
Please Note
Theplanktonsociety will be going on hiatus for the next 3 weeks.
I’m due to go back to my sacred jungle shorts and shoving dirt in the middle of nowhere for the better part of the next few days. After which, I’ll be immediately zooming off to New Zealand, babies. In a fantastic turn of OMG-it’s-all-connected! – I think it’s a mighty coincidence that I’ll be landing on the shores of Middle Earth a year since I’d officiated my journey of Mount Thesis.
With that, we’ll leave you with this lovely acoustic cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s melancholic “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” by the folks of Fanfarlo, and a gentle listless waving of sayonaras – have a happy December flower people! It’s the end of the year liaoz!
The Zombies Vote No for the Second Amendment
You know something’s up when The Killers’ standing tickets get sold out faster than Green Day’s – it appears we need a drastic culling of the hipster sprawl in Singapore, people.
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I’ve been ridiculously busy for the past 2 weeks.
Mostly because something detonated, some batshit hit the fan, and I was (innocently) in the way.
Still.
I’m making my preparations to leave this misshapen muck behind in a blazing trail of TADA It’sa All Goodz Nowz~ by the end of the week, and let the whole thing go on autopilot when I’m over at Middle Earth.
I _so_ need a break from work.
Ah. Sometimes, in the midst of my listless agony, I blame the Peace of Westphalia and the birth of modern European statehood for my shitty troubles. Fucking ratified sovereignty; fuck that shit. What we need are zombie-apocalypse communes. You know. Lotsa guns, loud yelling, and low survival rates for stupid people. Damn straight.
Automatic Sunshine for the Happy People
Konichiwa sizzling bubblegum atoms of the cyberworld,
It’s 21 weeks since we started floating in this abyss of an occupation, and suffice to say: We’re enjoying ourselves, terribly.
Today, I was reminded that this whole experience (i.e. being an urban planner) is very much like my ragger stint. I’m surrounded daily by a bunch of hardworking, piah like mad for everything, fully stressed out, constantly on the verge of breakdown, people. We strive to finish the work that’s placed before us before we get caught in another tsunami wave of wtfs that’s just about to break the shoreline, and we’re screaming like mad (in laughter _and_ collective pain) as we do so.
Everything’s in-process.
And it just so happens. I’m enjoying myself.
Because just like Rag, we’re all riding this manic rollercoaster to the end, baby.
Much more than Rag, we’re dealing with discourse and culture and resultant implications; and we’re working with differentiated, gradated, realities.
If anything else, this is my payback, mon salutation, to this island-state of mine.
At the end of it all, I’d have done some manner of _good_, in some small way, for Singapore today.
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In other news, it’s perturbing to see white house interviews taking place with a distinctly Singaporean backdrop behind. What’s up with that, mister cameraman (or woman)?
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21 weeks in. A year ago, I was 2 weeks into my thesis fieldwork.
Ah, Time. Sometimes I can just squeeze you like a pimple, and the memories simply start oozing their mucous-y ways out – a viscous collage of crude gooey goodness. Mmmmm. Yummy.
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.
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