 |
too much and too little |
| heyheyhey |
|
HAPPY RETIREMENT PLEE. MAY YOU PROSPER AND GET FUCKED TO AN EARLY GRAVE BY A BUXOMY BABE. IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO GO. YOU WERE MY FAVOURITE EDITOR YOU GROUCHY, BIG-WORD SPOUTING CYNICAL BASTARD, EVEN IF YOU DO SING "THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER" AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION. I WANT TO KNOW HOW COME YOU DO NOT SMELL LIKE AN OLD MAN. MY GUESS IS THE CIGARETTE SMOKE KILLING MY NOSE. THIS POST IS IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE I WROTE A LENGTHY BLOG POST THAT GOT EATEN UP BY THE INTERNET. DAMN YOU INTERNET. DAMN YOU. ALSO I AM SLIGHTLY DEPRESSED AT ALL THE STRE*TS TALK. NOW THAT WAS A FUN NEWSPAPER TO WORK FOR.
Election
Went to JJC to cover the election. It was a walkover, but that didn't stop it from being crazy. Supporters in white thronged the place. I was very confused. Too tired to really write more. Have worked many many hours in last few nights. Cya.
Separate events I am too lazy to cohere into a narrative but I thought I should write down for future reference
I have had to do three phoners with overseas musicians over the past week. All three have fallen through. I am angry. --- On bus 156 two days ago, a woman yelled "UNCLE! Stop the bus!". The bus driver did. He went to the back. The woman said, in Mandarin: "This man keeps pushing against my breast!" I was talking to Yasmine on the phone and didn't pay attention as to what came next. Then I heard the man shouting. "Don't call! Don't anyhow call the police! If you call them, I'll have to go sit in jail for one week! No matter what. Don't call!" Yasmine remarked that maybe if he didn't want to go to jail he shouldn't have molested the girl. The bus stopped for a long time. The girl's circumstances and boredom inspired passengers to make small talk with strangers. Eventually both got off the bus. I think the police arrived. But I'm not sure. It was too crowded to see anything.
OKay this is tougher than I thought
Ok the only thing that happened is that I have come to realise that I am incapable of pronouncing A and O properly. Which vowels are next? Stay tuned.
A POST A DAY!?
YOU DON'T SAY! Well, I'm seriously thinking of restarting my old regime. I ought to take note of my day, shouldn't I? Of course by the time I get home I've forgotten all the conversations I've wanted to include. But that's why people get wiser as they get older. Lousy memories.
Daylight Savings Time
PART ONE It was 8.45 in the morning when my handphone rang. I was standing in the bus stop fidgeting from tiredness and a night's worth of breathless insomnia (my chest felt tight as I rolled about on my bed). So it was unpleasant to discover that the person on the other end of the phone was a representative for Emmy Rossum, the starlet in Poseidon I was supposed to do a phoner with, on the other end. "Can you do it in five minutes?" No, I can't do it in five minutes, I'm at the bus stop! I left my questions in the office! It'd take me 20 minutes in the very least to get back! THE INTERVIEW WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AT 9.45AM! THAT'S WHAT I WAS TOLD. "We'll see if Emmy can wait." So I got on the bus as taxi after taxi evaded my attempts to get back to the office in time but in the end I boarded the bus and jumped off a few stops early and did the interview in a void deck with what questions I could remember. Emmy was very nice and seemed amused at what I had to do but amusement wasn't what I felt. Returning to my office I send the PR an email. She calls back 30 minutes later, apologetic. It turns out of course that our dear PR pal had got the time wrong by one hour. I couldn't be angry though, since the interview went through. I understood. Carelessness is comraderie. If people like you didn't screw up, if people like me didn't screw up, we wouldn't have jobs. We make each other look good. It's the clinical ones who fuck it up for the rest of us. Blur fuckers of the world unite. PART TWO "You know, we laugh not because your jokes are funny ha-ha, but because the things you say are so... strange."
Opium of the people
This is the first time I found the full passage, off the net. It's much better than the cliche it is now famous for. Fuck man, it really sucks that I don't read much serious stuff any more. The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man - state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)
Good Will
I've written about my encounter with this Buddhist monk before, but I thought I'd write about it again. I was a reporter with the now-defunct Stre*ts when I had to cover a Buddhist fellowship meeting in Singapore. A couple of esteemed monks were coming, especially one particularly notable Australian, whose name I have forgotten. He was calm, happy and quite lucid with his answers, and very humorous. He used anecdotes and spoke in parables - how else to express the ineffable? I remember I asked him about nirvana and nihilism, and he seemed amused by the question, even if it must be a question he gets asked all the time. It is a common yet fundamental misunderstanding of Buddhism, the idea that Nirvana is nothingness, that Buddhism is nihilistic. "It is about happiness," he told me. He had become a monk after an encounter in a monastery. All its inhabitants were cheerful and happy. He wanted it too. To be free of burden. And the end result of Buddhist practice is just that: joy, endless joy, untamed joy, spontaneous joy. Lightness. A true bliss not connected to anything but oneself. In Jan 17, 2005, Time reported the findings of professor Richard Davidson who was measuring electrical activity in a monk's brain. As the monk entered a trance Davidson found a surge of activity in the left prefrontal node of his subject's brain -- the part of the brain associated with bliss. Imagine that! Being able to induce happiness at will!
Wiffle The Wise
I admit it. I'm a pussy. I had to do two wisdom tooth extractions today and I was scared from beginning to end. It didn't help that the doctor thought it necessary to run me through the operation process. I think I fainted somewhere between "we'll slice through the gum" and "cut the tooth in half". Given a choice between local anasthesia and being knocked out for 2 hours, I picked nitrous oxide for an extra $200, but still $300 cheaper than the most expensive option. It's a gas that keeps you drowsy throughout the operation. A tingly feeling runs through your skin and a weight pulls down your eyelids, but just before the operation started I started getting worried that I might be overdosing as the experience was so weird and breathed air through my mouth where no gas was being pumped. Then I heard the zzzzzzzzing of the drill and started breathing the gas in double breaths. When it was over, the dentist offered me my two teeth and I wanted to keep them at first. I showed them to Yasmine, who had taken leave from work to accompany me to the dentist (is that sweet or what?) and her only reaction was EEEEW. I stared at my teeth for a while and the gum bits and blood still attached to the rotting wisdom molars stared back. "Why don't you throw this away instead?" I told my dentist. Yasmine followed me home as I staggered around high on nitrous oxide, painkillers, numbness injections and the taste of blood on the parts of my mouth that still had feeling. She prepared some oatmeal and helped calm me in a rather feverish and sweaty sleep. She even helped change the gauze in my mouth. Would I have been so nice if I were in her shoes? I don't know. I hope so. But there is something so kind and impulsive about her nature that I can't help but be desperately in love with. My colleagues were confused as to why I decided to do the operation on Friday. "Won't you waste your weekend? Won't you waste your MC?" they said. But screw MCs. Being at home alone as blood oozes through your stitches and enjoying tasteless porridge without a companion is far worse than going to work. Yasmine's made some bread pudding for me tomorrow. Mmm. Bread pudding.
Why I Don't Usually Write About My Day Pt 2
THE highlight of my day, besides hearing Yasmine's voice, is visiting the washroom in the office in the morning. It is to be at work but not working, if you know what I mean, and nobody can really call you out for it, because you are fucking shitting. Or so they think. The washrooms here are well maintained. They have to be. The cleaners go in and out of them all the time. But what I really like about them is the flush. First, it works. Second, it isn't the automatic type that drives me crazy. This means that I can rest my butt on the lavatory safe in the knowledge that my anus will not be getting an unintended rinsing. I always go for the same cubicle, the one in the middle of the row of three. It is habit. I've been doing my business here daily for, what, 10 months now, and it's already more home than home. It feels good, surrounded by the wooden walls, on a toilet. Sometimes I don't even need to go. I just go, put the lid down, sit there and close my eyes. It's Zentastic. But recently, something has really fucked with my mojo. Two times last week I entered my beloved cubicle to find shit stains on the area that's not in the toilet bowl proper, you know, the part that is like the collar, under which water flows when you flush. Did the guy have an oddly-angled anus? Did he have an explosive build up of faeces? Did he have the habit of arching forward way, way, way too much in the throes of defecation? I don't know. But it's screwing with my mojo.
Why I Don't Usually Write About My Day
Short answer: World Of Warcraft Long answer: I think I have used up the quota of inspiration that mechano-Jesus assigned me back in robot heaven when he and the alien angels were assigning attributes to souls. If only I knew I had a quota before I spent it all on that blog post about Laos back in 2004. I think I could have done better with it, like solve world hunger or figure out how to upgrade the goddamned chestpiece I've had since lvl 19 in WoW. But what's done is done, and like roboChrist said in his sermon on the mount, suck it up, sucker. For example, I have to help with a mock-up of a really short column called B.A.T (the B stands for Bitch), which requires my colleagues to each write a short rant about something that pisses them off. I think the idea is superfluous because, let's face it, half the stuff readers write in are rants, and the other half are indecipherable passages that probably are rants. So if people wanted that they can just turn to the letter pages or half the blogs on the sphere-o-suck. But anyway, the thing is, I can't think of anything to bitch about at all. And bitchin's all I do. "Why not rant about how you don't have anything to rant about?" I surprise myself telling myself. I don't like it when my brain activates my mouth without telling me first. No, it does not happen everytime I speak. I reply: "That's a really dumb idea, brain." Anyway, I am thinking maybe I should blog about how I think about masturbating everytime I hear Yasmine's voice and it's giving my fingers blisters, especially when I'm trying to play Warsong Gulch when she is on Skype but I think that comes under the commandment a copy-ed issued me from the lofty heights of his cubicle: "Please don't write about sex, lah, please." Plus, I think it's one of those things I really shouldn't write about lest it makes people think I'm crazy.
Don't mess with Churchmen!
Forgive them, Father! http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/31/do...t.ap/index.html LIBERTY, Missouri (AP) -- A youth minister was charged with assault for allegedly knocking down a 16-year-old boy and kicking him in the groin after taking a head shot from the teen in a dodgeball game. David M. Boudreaux, 27, was charged Wednesday with one count of third-degree assault. According to court documents, the incident happened in February at Crescent Lake Christian Academy. Authorities said the teen missed Boudreaux with one throw but then knocked the youth minister's glasses off with the next. The boy apologized, authorities said, but Boudreaux pushed him backward, and when the teen got up again Boudreaux kicked him in the groin and left. The teen suffered whiplash and post-concussion syndrome and had blood in his urine after being kicked, according to court records. Boudreaux later apologized, prosecutors said. Jeanne D. Hewitt, administrator of Crescent Lake Christian Academy, said Boudreaux had been placed on administrative leave.
|
