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Fun Laotian Facts
On Thursday I head to Laos. In this post, I honour the country and inform you, dear reader, about things you probably never knew about Laos. 1. The full name of Laos is the Lao People's Democratic Republic. It is a Communist country. Like other Communist and Democratic countries in the region, private enterprise is encouraged and everybody gets to vote for the only party they are allowed to vote for. 2. Its legal tender is the Kip, but the people prefer more robust currency like the US dollar, the Thai baht, the Monopoly dollar, the Argentinian peso and the Indonesian rupiah. Haha. I'm kidding about the rupiah. (FACT!: In 1997, the rupiah was so devalued that they had to switch from the decimal system to base 20 to cut down on the zeroes used in everyday transactions. "That'd be 7,000,000,000 rupiah for the coca cola please.") 3. Its main highway is the Mekong. The main mode of transport is the buffalo. Buffalos can float. Make of that what you will. 4. Once known as the Land of the Million Elephants, it is now the Land of A Couple Hundred Elephants. 5. Sometimes also known as the Land of the Zillion Mosquitoes the Size of Elephants. 6. It is cheaper to bathe in the naked bodies of a hundred naked Laotian boys than it is to buy a bottle of Evian. 7. The Mekong River is the longest sewage system in South East Asia. This was supposed to be a picture post but I got lazy.
Random travel memory
When I was in New York State with James and his parents we went to Howe Caverns in New York State, where we descended 156 feet below the earth. My memories are sketchy at this point but I remember that at one point the guide decided to demonstrate that none of us here really knew what total darkness was. When he (or she, I cannot remember) turned out the light, woah. It was darker than being in the dark with your eyes closed. It was very cool.
Old people keep touching me
Today I had to visit the relatives for my grandfather's 75th birthday. His birthday is next Friday. Visiting is always quite dreadful, especially because there are so many women around. When women who are genetically-linked congregate, they create a high-frequency buzz which totally shatters my will to live, like music by Enya, which incidentally was playing in my father's car. When we arrived at six about half the family was already gathered in the ancient three-room flat, i.e. my godmother's family and mine and the unmarried uncles and aunts and my granddad and his two wives, whose legitimacies still confound me. Great-grandmother was also there, after the evil branch of the family whom we don't keep in contact often kicked her out of her house, the bastards, and so we took her, and even at what must be 217 years of age she was still sprightly. One of my cousins asked me if I had a girlfriend and my great-grandma picked that up and said, "Hey you have a girlfriend?" in that scratchy, high-pitched berserk bag lady way. I looked at my mother and she was shaking her head and I said, "Uh." She jabbed me in my side with a bony finger and asked again, "Girlfriend ah?!" "Yes, yes!" I screamed. "Girlfriend?!" she said, jabbing my chest. "Yes! Really!" I yelled, covering my nipples with my arms. "You have a girlfriend or not? Answer me!" she asked as her finger stabbed my unprotected ribs and I tried to crawl away but it was useless, there was no escape from her finger until my mother pulled her back and told her something in Hainanese and she went off to eat what must have been her 10th plate of food. Now you know why I am deaf and I like poking people in the sides. You know I can't hear shit and I don't have the excuse of being an ancient matriach. One of my cousins got so tired of me saying "What?" to her questions that she tried to hurt me. I think my brain scans out stupid questions. One of them was this: Cousin: "Hey how do you look without spectacles?" Me (confounded): "With my eyes lor." Cousin (eye roll): "OMG." Moments later. Cousin: "Take off your spectacles I want to see what you look like without them." I take them off. Cousin: "OMG put them back on." What could this, and Punkfairy's fairly recent "You better warn us when you take off your spectacles next time" possibly mean?! Later an aunt brought the cake and they lit 12 candles on it for my grandfather to blow out. The usual make a wish shit resonated around the room but that wasn't what everyone was waiting for. My dad had the wonderful idea that on this special day, that is, grandfather's not-birthday, that the not-birthday person should pick out 4 numbers to gamble on 4-D. One of my aunts turned to me and said, "You know, reporter boy, you should write about this." I said, "Yeah, I will." Of course I ain't a reporter no more. Then I said, "Only the Chinese." After the number was picked out I saw more scribbling on notepads than at a press conference. For those interested, the number was 6442. Go buy. I am not encouraging gambling. Gambling is bad. Gambling lands you in debt. If you gamble too much, you may get loansharks scribbling your address around the block. But even loansharks have been afflicted by the Singaporean/SMS tendency to abbreviate everything. We were going home when we noticed the writing on the lift doors. The usual address, handphone number was there, but above it was written the symbols O$P$ which confused me for a second. Then it dawned on me. O$P$ = Owe Money, Pay Money Which was a literal translation of the Chinese phrase "qian4 qian2 huan2 qian2". Surely this has gone too far. And the last thing I need to mention in what was a fairly strange day was that I discovered my grandfather was a martial artist. My brother and I were monkeying around and he was pretending to try to throw me to the ground when my grandpa came out of nowhere to say, "If you roll with it you won't get hurt." Then he proceeded to get my brother to attack me and he showed me how to fend off his attacks proving that once and for all that after a certain age, Chinese men automatically acquire the knowledge of kung fu. But seriously, it was embarassing to be schooled by a 75-year-old man who believes that loose-fitting boxers are appropriate outerwear for all occasions. "How come you know all this?" one cousin asked my grandfather. I was wondering the same. I looked to my uncles and aunts and none of them had ever seen this behaviour from grandpa. Grandpa said nothing. He simply stared at my cousin... and smiled. Man. That would have been so badass if he didn't start scratching his testicles immediately afterwards.
Annoying redundancy of the day
"Basic Fundamental" FIE UPON THEE IF YOU ARE ONE WHO USES THIS MONSTROSITY
One Man Went Home Today
After five years in Singapore, my Laotian friend Xai took the 3.35pm flight home today, whereupon arrival, in the imaginations of those who saw him off, he will weep and grovel before the soil of his fatherland, right before the communist police arrest him for disturbing the peace. There is always something special about a return, to a place you always belonged, which may not always be the place you were born. For Xai that was where he felt he belonged, Laos. Five years! I wondered if I could go overseas and stay overseas for five years and not look back. I think I could, given the right drugs. Anyway before he left we all popped pills for malaria. Even Xai, who was Laotian, who lived there most of his life, and never had malaria. He was going back first to scout the territory, so to speak. They are going to film a documentary about Laotian life and the Mekong river. I'm a freerider. We had to take malaria pills because malaria can kill you. Unfortunately these pills can cause depression, confusion, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, insomnia, and nightmares (the brochure said "vivid dreams"), which made some of us wonder whether malaria is really so bad after all. Later I went off with Cis and Chat to go shopping. They needed some wintry clothes, because 17 degrees Celsius is bitterly cold weather. I said I needed a sweater. Nothing caught my eye though. Cis managed to get a ski cap and a scarf and they looked pretty. Chat had to go to the airport later at night and I ended up at Cis's house with them, where I read most of the book I was trying to finish, sitting on the edge of Cis's bed, while Chat watched a movie on Cis's Mac. After placating an angry deep-fryer we had dinner. Then I left and said goodbye because I felt tired and sullen and I blame the pill. While on my way home I started thinking about things and one of the things I thought about was Laos. This is the Laos of my imagination, a peaceful, idyllic locale, all Zen: 
But I am afraid the truth may be closer to this. 
But we won't know till we get there. Until then, to you, and to the pill, goodnight.
So long and thanks for all the fish
Every other blog probably has this piece of news up because dolphins are cute and lovable and the only species that's worth a shit on this pathetic planet but dolphins are extra special to me, because I am going to Laos to see the mighty Mekong river where a river dolphin lives and even at one's most fucked up, I can't help but be excited by the fact that I am going to be seeing dolphins! There are dolphins on the Mekong river, you see, but they are in trouble, much like the English in the website I linked to. Anyway, the story is that a pod of dolphins saved a bunch of New Zealand lifeguards by fending off a great white shark. Aren't they lovable? So stop eating tuna or only eat dolphin friendly tuna because the next time YOU are bathing in the Mekong River there won't be any dolphins left to protect you from the giant squid that's going to rape you with its tentacles. I love dolphins. When I was in the Navy I had several experiences I loved, and one was them was seeing a dolphin bobbing in the water on one of my routine missions out to sea. I remember vividly the seaman (there's only a coxswain, a seaman and me, the combat technician on a fastcraft) pointing out the dolphins as I was climbing out of the engine room. A pair of dolphins were staring at us, then with flips disappeared beneath calm sea, while I, an animated 19-year-old corporal, was pointing and saying "Wow, dolphins". Looking back there were some good times even if I was always tired and my uniform always crusty with salt and engine grease, and even if I hated waking up at wee hours in the morning so I could go to prep the goddamned engine which would always stall, overheat or leak no matter what I did. The last time I was on water it was during the internship for a Buddhist press conference, but there were no dolphins. I miss rivers and boats and cruising silently under bridges at night with tired men asleep on deck, and me leaning against the coxswain's panel looking out at the shore. If I had the river I could be happy. Just dolphins, waterfalls and a little bit of paradise. PS. Opposing viewpoint.
Picture
Secrets
I am sorry recent posts have been so fucked and that this one is too. There is so little to say that is happy recently, and what is unhappy you cannot say. Sometimes what must be said cannot be said and so you say it walking on the streets submerged in the buzz of shifting traffic, below flickering streetlamps casting fuzzy shadows of you: You, looking at your watch, the hands going the wrong way. It shouldn't be counting how much time has gone but how much time is left, which is what everyone really needs to know. Like the watch, everything is going backwards anyway. You don't tell anybody these things. They don't understand and you don't understand. It's easier to make believe and say nothing. It will go away. You look away from your watch to your right to the street where a car whizzes by then another then a motorbike then a bicycle then a truck then another car a Mitsubishi or a Toyota then something else and on and on and nothing ever stops going, like the watch, in the wrong direction, but they go, they go away, they keep going away. But they're never gone. You turn back and around and head home because you have finished saying what is to be said, so when you actually need to say it nothing is said at all.
Ebaum's World Always Delivers
Really Fucking Bizarre Commercial "YEEeeeaAARHHHH BABIES EVERYWHERE!" "I'm filthy rich, I've always got a tan and I've got a great ass too but my marriage sucks so I hate my life."
ADVENTURES IN SHITTY PROSE PT 3
I bring to you my dear reader yet another installation of the adventures of Lai Lee and company. I apologise. ------- Lai Lee lived on the highest floor of the highest housing board block in the area and sometimes he would stand in the corridor outside his home and stare at the scurrying creatures below, like ants, walking back and forth in the type of determined action indistinguishable from chaos. Sometimes he would walk to the stairs by the lift and stare in the gap between the handrails down down down, and sometimes he would spit down that gap and watch his saliva gob fall down down down and splatter. Sometimes somebody would scream. One time it hit an unsuspecting hand. It was all very funny. Other times he would just stay in his house and stand on the sofa by the window in the living room and look at roofs, ugly beige and covered with water tanks and antennae. He was there tonight, but he wasn't looking out the window but rather at a small brown packet on which written in clean, black print was: TO LAI LEE ON HIS EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY. There was no stamp. It must have been hand delivered. With my luck, Lai Lee thought, it was probably a bomb, which would go off the moment he pulled the packaging apart. Then he recalled that one of the benefits of being insignificant was that people tended to not bother with grand plots to off him. Who the hell sends presents a week early anyway? Nobody sends him presents ever, anyway. He shook the box with one hand next to his ear. Something rattled inside. Hollow. He shrugged, and tore open the packaging to reveal a pretty green box speckled with yellow glitter. The top was lifted to reveal a toy fighter plane, and by the side, a note. He grinned at the plane; if he wasn't shortsighted he'd have considered becoming a pilot. He pull the note out, unfolded it, and took in a deep breath. Somebody had scented it with some sort of perfume. The note said in a square script: Dear Lai Lee, I hope you have a happy birthday. I like you very much and I would very much love to know you better, much better. I think about you all the time. If only you knew. It was unsigned, without even the usual cutesy pseudonym. Lai Lee grinned. A love-letter from a secret admirer! That has never happened before. He closed his eyes and imagined this slim, shy girl, sitting prettily at her desk writing slowly so that her handwriting would be different, dabbing the corner of her eyes with a pink handkerchief because she was so overcome with the emotion. His grin grew wider, and for a moment he felt strong and handsome and potent, and he opened his eyes, when he caught a glance of himself in the mirror by the tv in the hall, and it was still the same scrawny geeky Lai Lee, the guy who spends his nights typing in chatrooms "OMG SO ALONE" and wept watching American Beauty at the Lester Burnham line "Look at me, jerking off in the shower... This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here." How could he not when his sole purpose for buying the video was to jerk off to Mena Suvari? Now when he closed his eyes he saw instead a fat bloated girl with wild hair and crazy braces, sitting in a dank smelling room, writing feverishly, a cheeseburger in her off-hand, and he shuddered. Suddenly the paper didn't smell so sweet anymore. He sighed. Then he shook his head. Not even the fat chick. It was probably Zul or Robbie playing a prank on him. They were probably laughing right now. The bastards. The dirty bastards. Involuntarily, he burst out laughing. The bastards. This was pretty funny wasn't it? The bastards. Ha. They didn't even get his birthday correct. They knew him for years and they still fucked up a basic prank! He couldn't stop laughing, and was laughing when he crumbled the lovenote in his hand and threw it in the wastebasket. Hilarious!
Unseen Messenger
It was five in the morning and I was leaning on the fence of my balcony waiting for sunrise so I can go to sleep. The streets were yellow-orange and pale clouds dotted dark sky. However it was not the cock's crow that broke the morning's silence but the crazed barking of my neighbour's dog, and I looked to my left where the street was obscured by trees, because what the ear hears the eye seeks. At first I saw nothing and I wondered if the dog was barking at me. They all do. It wasn't. Out from under the trees a young polo-teed Indian man had cycled, a fresh stack of newspapers piled neatly in a basket in front of the handlebar, and he stopped in front of my house to deposit the day's news into the mailbox. He looked up at me, then he was gone, having delivered not just the news but a healthy dose of guilt also. I have lived here for a few years yet it was the first time I've seen the man who delivers my newspapers. It is a wonder how little one sees.
Prejudice
It was the boredom, perhaps, or the accompanying introspection, so grim --- what man can persist under the glare of self-knowledge? Surely he must melt beneath the beam, away, like make-up on a stage. I wonder: Is it possible not to blink come the lightning flash of truth? Does the umbral, nacreous mirage it leaves on the back of his eyelids not haunt him? And when he has finally blinked it away is he not thankful? One can have too many realisations, I think, like glasses of alcohol, and it muddles the mind just as surely. Tonight an ache lingers in my left arm, leaving it limp by my side. Discomfort is constant self-awareness. It reminds me, constantly, that I have a body. The automaticised functions are overcome and I am drawn constantly to the source of the pain, but helpless. No wonder ascetics have sought the source of the divine in physical deprivation and suffering. It must feel quite holy, taken to extremes. I didn't feel holy at all though, sitting there holding my arm, on the stairs leading down to the living room, which was lit only by two nightlights I always keep on because I like walking up and down the staircase to the living room when everyone is asleep. At the far end of the hall by the window opposite where I was sitting, facing a door, is an altar dedicated to the souls of my ancestors and some gods I care naught for, and beside it is a brown fishtank filled with dying fish and cloudy water. The fishtank has a cover which is held up by a single chopstick to let air in and the noise of running water out. Under one of the nightlights, above the fishtank with the dying fish and cloudy water are several framed documents written in some undecipherable script and a few pictures of my grandparents. One of them is yellowed and it has my father in his youth standing beside his parents, who are dead now and stored in urns just as yellow as the picture. The picture is hung crooked. My mother used to straighten the picture every so often, but the next morning it was always crooked again. So nobody touches the picture anymore; it will always be crooked. Sometimes at night I stand there with a glass in my hand and wonder if this is a metaphor for anything. But not tonight. Tonight the nightlight above the crooked picture by the altar with the dead names and the fishtank with the dying fish casts far too much light. You see, too much light can paralyze just like a diptheria shot in the arm.
It's no fun being free when nobody else is
Well my exams are over, as I mentioned, but everyone else is busy. Ain't that a bitch. I probably should do work during this period of time but I just can't be arsed. I promise to work on something tomorrow. Maybe clean my room, read something for my FYP, start writing the month-late interim report. Or something. You guys had better hurry up and get going. I can't even find myself being motivated to blog and that is unusual to say the least!
November's National Geographic
IS BLOODY AWESOME
Good afternoon world
It's finally over and I am free to do anything I want! Fuck exams! FREE! So many things I could go do... so why do I feel so strangely unmotivated to do anything?
I would have typed the whole paragraph but it was very long
...He is right: men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everybody's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a unique wonder; they dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone--even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull... (Nietzsche, from "Schopenhauer as Educator")
Weee
Proper update next time. Head hurts from studying. Exam. FYP. HL2 WOW EQ2 LAOS HOW?
Love and Textbooks
First gay marriages, and now back to the old bugbear: creationism in textbooks. "GRANTSBURG, Wisconsin (AP) -- School officials have revised the science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed." The Educator's Prayer: OH GOD PLEASE KEEP THE FUNDAMENTALISTS OUT OF MY TEXTBOOKS. The next time someone says the theory of evolution is as much a belief as creationism is I will fucking slap him or her. At least we don't get this kind of zany shit in Singapore. Fun Creationist Myth: That Darwin renounced on his deathbed. NOT TRUE. Addition: A good Wired article on Creationist tactics. I should be studying. But this shit makes me so mad. Creationism is a philosophy. Teach it in a damned philosophy class. Teach it in church. Most religious people don't think the Bible or whatever is literal anyway, except for you small bunch of crazed cranks. Now I think of it, there are probably more churches (or any monotheistic institution) than schools for higher learning. How sad is that.
The bricks are burning and I got nowhere to go
The one day it doesn't rain it swelters. My balcony, a monstrous thing that juts out from my parents' semi-detached house, has been where I've been studying for the past few weeks. I tried that today, but within five minutes I fled back into the cool embrace of my room. Man. It's hot and I'm way behind on the books. What I'd give for a cool pina colada and some fucking inspiration right now.
Up and Down Stairs to Nowhere
I think, for us, the day may be summed up by two things: pain and kittens. It was not a good morning, by all counts. Bush won, an exam awaited, and terrible cramps afflicted her. The fact that she kept getting accidentally punched in the stomach as it convulsed didn't help. After the exam, in which I foolishly left my name behind although we weren't supposed to, she told me: "I feel like watching a movie. I need something fluffy." So we went to watch The Princess Diaries 2. Haha! I jest. That happened in BizarroWorld, where she wears Hello Kitty dresses and I write pained poetry about the existential horror of having to watch movies like The Princess Diaries 2. No, we watched A Shark Tale, because if she had a penis, she'd have a raging hard on for Dreamworks, its makers. So we walked out of the cinema, behind a pack of secondary school kids and two women, down a staircase, behind them, while making weird fish noises. I think we descended six storeys. At the door, the kids went at the door - but it wouldn't budge. "What the fuck?" I said. We were trapped, like rats, in a... trap. So we went up and down the stairs, feeling at once panicked and resigned, knowing that we were doomed to end up as a slightly suspicious pile of bones at the end of the steps, with a message written in blood to the wall by my remains: "James, if you ever see this, know that you can have the Backstreet Boyz Special Collector's Edition you always wanted to have, you girly man." Moments later, as the group of us shuffled listlessly, a Malay couple broke through the door and walked steadily downwards, and disappeared. After some waiting we went back down too. The kids went at the door again. Only this time, they pushed. The lesson: The collective is sometimes dumber than the individual. Also, never be led by secondary school kids. It was oddly fun. But that was already two days ago. A long time sometimes.
Don't you wonder?
It's Raining
This is so fucked up
I don't think I've ever screwed up an exam as badly as this one, ever.
Hey, Gmail
I've got Gmail now, so. holy001 (not 002, not 003, but 001 baby). For you sneaky SCI bastards reading my blog, good luck, you bastards.
Exams tomorrow! Platypus Fun.
Woke up late even though I needed to wake up early. Couldn't get my mind off exam; can't get anybody's mind off exams. So I played a really cool Flash puzzle game called Chasm. You're a platypus trying to get water back to your town. It's really quite awesome. I'm as yet unable to solve it. Spent the last hour and a half trying. The part where you have to climb up some pipes but keep getting washed down is KILLER.
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