Cereal Hoarding: Discuss.

Can you tell I’m writing a book again?

This sort of thing seems to happen when novels are in progress as I feel like I want to keep on writing, yet don’t want to stare at the page and wait for my fingers to transcribe the movie in my head, so I jump over to something else, like e-mail, or the ol’ blog…

The fiance for whatever reason, went to bed at the amazingly late hour of 7-8 pm, and so I’ve been tinkering away, doing research, looking for new words to define a group (And finally settling on the French “Cortege” which also has associations with a funeral procession. Trust me, it’ll all make sense…) and of course, adding more dialogue n’ such to the novel (Now entertaining a debate to give in and just make it a two parter, so I can tell a 600 page story instead of worry about cramming it into 300-450 pages), but before that, we went shopping!

For breakfast cereal.

The brand in question is Post’s Selects: Great Grains Whole Grain Cereal, which contains raisins, dates & pecans and is supposedly “Inspired by the taste of home-baked raisin nut bread.” I know the minutae of the box copy because it is sitting beside me for reference.

Anyway’s, the fiance has taken a new–and in my opinion–wholly obessive attitude towards this cereal as it is one of the few breakfast cereals she enjoys and at some point a few months ago, for reasons still unknown, it was taken off the shelves, with the only explanation being some kind of product recall. Lo and behold, it eventually returned, but now is completely sealed in plastic, making me suspect that perhaps another round of poisonings occurred somewhere and this is the cereal equivalent of “If you find the seal broken, please bring it to the attention of your retailer.”

However its return, while wildly welcomed by her, was by no means a regular occurrence and in the ensuing time, more “droughts” of this cereal have occurred. This has kicked in the stockpiling/hoarding instinct in her somethin’ powerful and even though she had three boxes of the stuff lying around, she was unwilling to open them, and today, upon finding a grocery store that had more stock, picked up another four boxes and briefly, seriously contemplated simply cleaning out their remaining stock and asking the manager if they had anymore in the back.

Rationality prevailed (Well, not really, it was more like the promise of looking in other stores and pointing out that she’d be denying other Post Select Grains fans their fair share) and decided to leave it at that, but now every time I open the kitchen cupboard, I now find SEVEN FUCKING BOXES OF THE SAME DAMN CEREAL STARING ME IN THE FACE.

I’m thinking that Post needs to do a new advertising campaign borne of the desperation these “cereal embargoes” have created in their customer base. Something along the lines of people mumbling in the streets and weeping in pitiful heaps in dingy corners of alleys until a Post truck shows up the people hurriedly collect it and then it gets trafficked on the streets while the customers look around with darting eyes before saying “Come on, man, you promised! I need it…”

Once they get their cereal, they retreat to their squalid one room apartments and eat it while Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” plays in the background and they sit at their kitchen table drooling and slackjacwed while the cereal high takes them. Commercial fades to black with “Great Grains: You don’t want it, you need it.”

Y’know ten years ago, if someone had told me, “One day you’re going to get engaged to cereal junkie” I would have said “Yeah, right…”

Good thing I didn’t make any promises to eat, crow or any other grossly inappropriate objects.

What I’d Like To See In A Comedy Sketch

Camera starts on some woman that seems to be manning a booth, going through some forms, minding her own business, just doing her job.

A man enters the frame looking completely forlorn.

Cut to reverse angle, you can see just how broken and pathetic he looks staring with wild hope at the woman in the booth.

Reverse angle again, she’s still preoccupied with her forms, but finally notices him and looks wary.

“Yes?” She asks.

Reverse angle. “I can’t take it anymore,” he says. “I admit it. I stole all that money from the company. And I lied when I told my wife I’d never strayed. And when my kid was four years old and bent down to pick up a toy, I kicked him and laughed then blamed it on the dog. And the ring with the emerald on it when Grandma died that everyone assumed some janitor at the funeral home had stolen? It was me. And I was the one that farted in the movie theater and said my kid did it. I’m sorrrrrrrrrrry!!!!!”

Reverse angle. The woman blinks in total confusion. “Why are you telling me this?!? What do you want me to do about it?!?”

On the man, close up. His lips tremble as his eyes widen and he bursts into tears.

Cut to long shot showing the woman is manning a booth with a big sign that says in small letters “Coupon” and in massive letters “Redemption.”

Meanwhile the man throws himself at her desk, weeping and pounding his fist on it.

Yup, It’s The New Year Blog

After a long hiatus, it is time to once more foul the airwaves with the rather undramatic events of my life, dramatized with much narrative license so as to make myself sound more interesting.

But first off:

Why I Have Been Silent

Truth to tell, mostly because I didn’t have much to say, nothing much interesting was going on, and I was distracted with games. Lots of games. Tons of games. In fact I’m still playing games at the moment, the current one being the amazing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but I’ll save that for a bit a later. Suffice to say that I was going to make an entry at a regularly appointed time when blogger suddenly went through a spate of eating my posts (There was an entry I had typed out about how I felt David & Goliath was actually handled by Hassidic PR managers that spin doctored the entire affair, I was rather proud of that…) that got sucked into the ether of the ‘net and shall remain unwritten unless someone bugs me to do it again. I’ve always been a sucker for requests…

Anyway, after having a few such posts eaten, I got a little fed up with blogging for a while and decided to take a break, which got swallowed up into months as work, gaming, DVD viewing, movies and of course, the girlfriend all took up their appropriate hours and days. But here’s what you’ve been missing, which is, admittedly, not much.

The Impossible Has Happened

On October 19th, of 2004, I proposed to my girlfriend and she said yes, so for people that have known me since childhood, or, worse yet, highschool, I am now in a position to have never been so happy to have been wrong. There is at least ONE person on this planet that doesn’t vomit at the thought of spending the rest of her life with me.

No actual date has been set for a wedding, it’s one of those things we’ll probably just sort of do when we feel like it. However, after having lived together for over two years, it’s a safe bet that there won’t be any unpleasant surprises we’ll discover about each other that most couples only come across after they’re married and are forced to see each other everyday. We’ve been doing it for quite a while now and so far no major problems have cropped up.

As a special note, I’d like to add that to childhood friend Francis, I must remind you that I am a man of my word. We once made a bet that I would never get married, and if I ever did find someone crazy enough to do it, you would find yourself $1,000 richer on my wedding day. Well, I’ll pay up to be sure, but since we’re not exactly the richest couple in the world, you’ll have to collect on the bet sometime in distant future, but don’t worry, you’ll get it. That’s $1,000 I’m glad to give away.

On Work

Things professionally have been moving slowly but steadily. I still write reviews and other articles for the Singapore gaming magazine Hardware Zone. Some writing has been met favorably, such as my article on the history of Nintendo. Others have been met not so favorably, with one angry reader calling me a “Moronic Halo fanboy” for giving Halo 2 a perfect score. Oh well, can’t please everybody. I’d be interested to see, however, if the fellow who made such a comment would be willing to say it to my face with other people around, but that’s the ‘net for ya’…

On the Computer Animated series, things are gearing up. We’re working on some early production stuff–and no, I STILL can’t talk about what it is exactly–and for once, it looks like my skepticism about the project may be wrong and that it will actually see the light of day. We’re still going to need a ton of work before we have anything presentable, but it looks like 2005 is the year of the CGI cartoon. I’m curious about how it’ll all turn out. I always said I thought it would be neat to work on such a series and now that I am, I’m finding that my production experience in television over the last few years has actually proved marginally useful. Hopefully by next year there will be more talk about it on the internet and I can actually discuss here what’s been going on, thus dragging in a whole new legion of geeky readers who will want to throw in helpful suggestions on how to improve the show such as “Make it cooler!“

On Writing

Sadly, this has taken a turn for the not so great, but there is still hope.

The novels got turned down by Ace Science Fiction, on the grounds that while they were well written, they were a bit risky as a publishing venture because A) They were huge, B) The storylines felt a bit too “complex and metaphysical” for readers to readily accept.

This greatly amused me–and confounded me–since I had thought the plots were entirely too simplistic what with guys jumping 30 feet into the air shooting lasers out of their eyes and all, but it would seem that first Tor and now Ace Science Fiction have both felt that the story, while interesting and well told, is not mainstream enough to guarantee the sales they’d feel comfortable with.

Oh well, my agent continues to peddle the books and after comments like that (Nice read! Too weird!) I have a feeling they will eventually see the light of day once marketing trends swing the other way around and people are looking for something a little different again.

On Games

I have to admit, I may be losing some steam in the Star Wars Galaxies department. I haven’t regularly played it in a month or so, despite the fact that I got the Jump To Lightspeed expansion, which was very fun. Perhaps it’s my antisocial tendencies taking hold once more, but I’ve found myself of late really enjoying console and offline PC games. Vampire the Masquerade was a novel experience. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater may have the best ending for a video game I have seen to date. And trying to get 100% completion on Final Fantasy X-2 has reminded me of how much I love Square and RPGs in general. But the big kahuna, the one that may very well be the single best game the PS2 will ever see is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The sheer scope, brutality and relentlessly vicious humor of this game has elevated the game to near god like status in my eyes. One of the big draws of the GTA series in general has always been the idea of a big, living, breathing world that let you
be an amoral bastard who ran amuck and wreaked senseless death and destruction everywhere. Only GTA let you get a sniper rifle, park yourself at the top of a car park, wait for the lunch time crowd of business men and secretaries to start gathering, and blow them all to pieces.

San Andreas takes this to whole new levels. Now I can go to the airport, steal a Lear jet, fly over to the next city, say Los Venturas (ie, Vegas) jump out of the plane to skydive, then parachute onto the top of a building, pick people off with the sniper’s rifle, run from the cops, steal a bike, drive to an abandoned airfield, grab a jetpack, hop over to San Fierro (ie, San Francisco) grab something to eat from the local burger joint, then meet up with my girlfriend to take her dancing go back to her place for sex, then steal someone else’s car to beat up hookers before going back to the casinos to gamble or maybe shoot some pool.

It is, frankly, amazing what you can do in this game.

And that is the update of the rather mundane events of my life. Unfortunately, due to the fact that life is pretty okay right now, my world is monumentally boring, devoid of really good Gothy angst, but that’s the price you pay for waking up in the morning and being more or less okay with the world.

And YES, I will be updating the blog again more regularly, this won’t be another hit and run post that will sink into obscurity for a few more months…

Peter S. Beagle = Genius

So I made the mistake last night of watching the animated movie The Last Unicorn with the girlfriend.

Now I’ve seen this movie before, and often. But it was when I was a lot younger, and I think probably the last time I watched it was when I was 15 or something. High School anyway. Over the years I’ve learned a few interesting things about it. Like the fact that even though it was produced by an American company (The “Stick More Songs In It Than You Can Shake A Stick At Rankin-Bass JR.) it was actually animated by… wait for it… STUDIO GHIBLI! Well, they weren’t called Studio Gimli back then, but yes, the same guys that brought us MY Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away and my personal favorite Nausicaa And The Valley Of The Wind we also the ones who were responsbile for completely nailing the sadness and fraility in the eyes of the Unicorn/Amalthea.

Summary O’ Plot

Originally a novel written by Peter S. Beagle (Who then went on to adapt it for both stage and screen) The Last Unicorn, at least the animated version, is kind similar in its dialogue/acting choices to The Princess Bride in that even though it’s clearly a period fantasy setting, the dialogue often comes out as very modern with modern references sprinkled throughout (IE, a butterfly singing I’ll Be Home On The A-Train).

The story concerns one of the immortal unicorns, living her immortal life in the forest of her choosing and generally being blissful and ignorant of the occurrences in the outside world, until she overhears the conversation of a pair of hunters. One of the hunters proclaims that she is the last of the unicorns, all the others having disappeared mysteriously, and shouts out into the forest before they depart that he advises her to stay there and keep the forest perptually green and enchanted.

This of course, gets her attention and like most people who are told not to do something, she goes ahead and does it, seeking an answer to whether or not she truly is the last unicorn left.

I won’t go into much detail of the rest of the plot since this is one of those timeles stories that everyone should experience for themselves. But I will say that this is one of those few stories that is close to, if not completely, perfect.

I’m not talking about the animation which was done in the 80′s and so quite primitive by today’s standards. Or the obvious cuts that were made throughout the film, so obvious in fact that you can even hear the music jump where the cut was made. But the story and characters themselves are ones that I think lovers of story can respect, and all writers should take lessons from.

What struck me the most about it on this viewing was how multi-layered it was. While concessions such as comedy relief, some minor slapstick and the usual action sequences have been thrown in to keep younger viewers enthralled, there’s also an amazing amount of intelligence and heart in this story and these characters. No one is really stupid in this story, all of them drop at least one one-liner nugget of wisdom about life that can be endlessly quoted and thought upon, and all of them have very complex motivations that can be either understood and respected, or understood and pitied.

The acting is also completely amazing. Christopher Lee as King Haggard brings an authority and resonance to his character that makes it difficult not to fear him. Angela Lansbury puts in an amazing (And totally unrecognizable performance) as Mommy Fortuna, a deranged witch who comes off as a true psycopatch, Alan Arkin as Schmendrik gives an intelligent and melancholy turn to the character that perfectly nails his sad eyes.

But the two most outstanding performances in the story have to go Mia Farrow as the Unicorn, for the delicate turn of phrase that is both unearthly and achingly frail, and Tammy Grimes as the broken scullery maid who was content in her having lost hope until she saw the unicorn and realized perhaps she’d given up hope too soon.

Watching all these elements weave together in a cartoon of all things really made me wonder at how surprising art can be sometimes. I know many will disagree but for me this little animated feature made in the 80′s says some of the most important and significant things about life, ambition, love, imagination and desire that we often forget. From Schmendrik’s desire to become a true wizard, to Haggard’s obsession with keeping only things that make him happy around him, to Lear’s innocent love for Amalthea and Molly’s tragic rediscovery of hope when it is almost too late for her… All of them have moments where they say something about human nature that everyone would be a lot better remembering from time to time.

And of course the ending is the killer, and one that I’ve tried aping in my own writing. A happy ending of sorts, that comes at great cost to the people involved, and often does more harm to the heroes in exchange for doing the greater good for many.

So I got kind of kicked in the head again last night after watching it. And of course the girlfriend was monumentally depressed afterwards and could only say “It’s so sad. It’s so, SO SAD…” because this move was another one of those key influential moments on her emotional life, and she can’t watching it too often without becoming pyschologically damaged…

There Is Only One Thing That Could Possibly Bring Me Back Here

I can’t play with my Jedi.

Bleah.

I’m kind of astounded that I haven’t made a post here since last year, but it would seem that once I got access to Star Wars Galaxies and started “To Live The Greatest Saga Ever Told: Yours ™” it got its grubby little claws into me deeper than a Crack Monkey named Louis with Adamantium claws.

Yes. I have been playing SWG that long.

Yes. I got a Jedi character and get to play with a lightsaber. It took months to do it.

No. The girlfriend didn’t dump me. Amazingly, she even played it for a while.

But to recap everything that’s happened since nearly a year ago when the SWG madness began in quick succession. Oh, heck, let’s do a Q & A session…

Do you still have a job?

Incredibly, the answer is yes, I do. Although it’s not with the video game magazine that I was formerly with. Things got pretty ugly there, and so there’s no reason to drag names out and sling mud, suffice to say the short form is, they weren’t paying (An occurrence that seems to happen to me a lot despite the fact that for some reason people seem to think I’m a necessity…) and in desperation (And with the help of an enraged girlfriend) I held the magazine for ransom and wouldn’t hand it over until I got paid, then promptly quit once I got my rent money and they got their issue.

For the past little while I have been writing reviews now for competitor of that magazine. Anyone curious to see what kind of stuff I’ve been cranking out can find it here. There’s usually something put out by me here every week or so.

The other thing I’ve been doing is working on an animated series. I can’t say anymore than that really if I want to keep my job, but it’s ideal since it lets me stay out home, stay out of offices, avoid a tie and harrass my cats. It’s still in the initial stages with me doing the script and concept work, but presumably if it actually ever goes to air, then I can talk at length and ad nauseum about what is a decidedly odd ball project. When are you going to ask me about Star Wars Galaxies?

Fantastic. How are you and the girlfriend?

We are fine. Things are still, much to my stunned disbelief, peachy keen between us and everything is smooth sailing. She has recently started going back to school (fine arts) and is picking up a cynicism for modern art interpretation that does me proud. It’s gratifying to know that I’m not the only one that believes a blank canvas with a tag explaining its meaning roughly the size of Mt. Rushmore is not necessarily genius artwork. When are you going to ask me about Star Wars Galaxies?

Hey, are you two married yet?

No, we’re not, but that’s a foregone conclusion at this point anyway. Quit putting ideas into her head. When are you going to ask me about Star Wars Galaxies?

How are the cats?

Zero and Uno are fine. Uno has grown fat with domestic bliss and Zero is just as paranoid about total strangers as ever. We recently rescued yet another hapless kitten! This one was a little black thing with a meow that sounded like a dying infant vulture. When asked what to name it, I replied “Uh… Ragamuffin?” which promptly got shortened to “Muffin” on the grounds that it was cuter and would make said kitten easier to adopt. After three days of having two miserable cats, some gal who worked with the Singapore Zoo adopted said kitten and the cats are once more back to their usual neurotic selves. We have also unofficially adopted a stray cat that is an orange tabby and so was, in a stroke of creative genius, named “Orange.” This one now hangs out near our building, meows once, quietly, when it sees us and runs up to us then promptly remains silent until its fed, we get bored and ditch it on the street till the next day. When are you going to ask me about Star Wars Galaxies?

Hey, didn’t you have a couple of novels pending publication?

Well, there’s some bad news…

Sadly, after a little over two years, the publishers who were considering it finally said NO. The books–according to my agent–are now in the hands of another publisher who hopefully doesn’t read at the rate of five sentences a day and will come a decision faster. Still waiting on that, and probably won’t get more confirmation for a couple of months yet. When are you going to ask me about Star Wars Galaxies?

So what else are-grk*…

Ah, I’m so glad you asked. Star Wars Galaxies… A chance to go back long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

For months I have been slowly navigating my way through that game, making friends, seeing some pretty spectacular things, participating in everything from big game hunts for Rancors to fighting against the dreaded Empire… all the time really just trying to figure out how to become a Jedi Knight and then going about doing it. After months, the wholly uninspired mystery was revealed; master a whole bunch of different professions within the game and once the ones on your “secret list” have all been completed, you get a new Force Sensitive Character that is all ready to swing a saber. I promptly went at it for several months and earlier this year finally attained my goal; a character that is strong with the force, pure of heart, full of justice, and able to kill anyone that looks at me funny with some carefully applied force lightning or a saber slash to the brain pan.

Since that time, things have been slowing down somewhat in the game since my Ultimate Goal was achieved, but the real reason I am posting now instead of playing is that due to some bizarre changes made to the game and its internet infrastructure recently, I can no longer play it. That is to say, when a change to the game is made, a patch must be downloaded and integrated with your existing game before play can resume. I don’t know whether it’s Sony Online Entertainment, my Internet Service Provider, or maybe even the building I live in, but for some reason, I can no longer download these patches, and thus, can no longer play.

If you are thinking that this is a like a Crack Addict who suddenly finds out his dealer has been arrested, you are not even remotely close to understanding my grief, but that’s a good start.

In a pathetic bid to ease the pain, I even resorted to trying to play another game, Lineage II, but after realizing that game is impossible to play unless you have an armada of bodyguards to protect you from all the player killers in the game, I quickly gave up on it after a couple of days of trying to play, only to get ganked the second I set foot outside of my starting area by other players with such witty retorts as “Die, fu*king noob! I pwnz j00!”

Not quite as dramatic as “Give into your hate and join the dark side!” but I guess we can’t all be literate. Unless you’re a glutton for punishment, or don’t mind being the pawn in someone’s deluded attempt to have a virtual dominance to make up for their lack in real life, I strongly advise against playing this game. It’s obviously for people who enjoy making others suffer, and I am squarely NOT in this category.

Oh well, the pining away for Tatooine continues…

PS: If any kind readers out there are technically inclined and familiar with the intricacies of Internet connections, I would greatly appreciate it if you could share some techno-wisdom with me, as Sony Online Entertainment has described my problem as “experiencing packet loss” and failed to further elaborate. Damn you, faceless multinational corporations that step on the little guy! Damn you to heeeeell!

Please let me play Jedi, oh please… I’m asking nicely. Good SOE. N
ice SOE. Let us have our precious back, we wants it, oh yeeees, we wants it…

Awwwww…

You know it must be love when the girlfriend plays Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance with you till 7 in the morning and keeps taking all the gold. But sometimes she splits a rejuvenation potion with you.

I’m a lucky guy…

No Footprints On The Sand

The reason for that being the girlfriend and I were feeling slightly cabin feverish, and so went out for a walk on the beach just in time to catch the sunrise. Naturally, we intepreted it in two radically different ways. She was just happy that it was the two of us on a relatively empty beach with the sky being lit up in the rosey hues of dawn, a clean stretch of sand ahead of us with nary a footprint to be seen. I preferred to think of it as we were the last human beings on Earth, the wreckage of various freighters strewn across the water as their crew horribly died of radiation poisoning, while the sky slowly burned with the radiation of North Korean Nuclear missile attacks that had started a nuclear conflagration around the region.

When she pointed out that the freighters still had their lights happily glowing away, I wittily responded, “Shuuuuuuut uuuuuuup!”

Not my most eloquent moment, I grant you.

We also saw a huge group of elderly Chinese people out for their daily bout of Matrix Calisthenics, ie, Tai Chi. The lingering after-effects of GTA: Vice City still held a firm grip on me and I once more, ’cause this is the kind’a romantic guy I am, felt compelled to romantically declare that it would be neat to wander into the middle of them with a molotov cocktail. I love the smell of burning geriatric in the mornin’… to paraphrase Apocalypse Now.

Which led to breakfast at the golden arches, chasing after stupid cats that wouldn’t let me pet them, and finally back here, where I have put away a few more pages of Serial Jen and bumped it up to six. Not bad for a few hours work. I’m pretty pleased with that. As usual, the characters have taken a life of their own and are probably not going to do what I tell them to. One of these days I need to write a story with an S & M masochist character so at least she’ll just say to me, “Tell me what to do, Master…”

That was supposed to be whole point of being a writer, that control thing. Man, even my characters don’t give me no respect…

Oogh

Last night I made the girlfriend cry. It was not for a good reason, and it wasn’t even for a bad reason, it’s just one of those things that seems to evolve naturally from a seemingly innocent point of conversation and suddenly starts opening up doors in the heart that should stay closed until a more approriate time.

Of late I have been waxing rebellious over at the William Gibson blog forum, because some local there, calling himself Big.Brother, started up a thread claiming to be an inhabitant of what Gibson, in an essay for Wired magazine called, Disneyland With A Death Penalty. Basically Wired gave him a free trip here about ten years ago, just to get his written impressions of the place. Since this Big.Brother seemed to have no compunction about blasting the place, I gleefully joined in. In a–in retrospect anyway, at the time I was totally caught off guard–not so surprising twist of fate, it turns out that the guy I attended film studies with at the U of A, who got me here and who I consequently stopped speaking to a couple of years later, was also tooling around on the forum (He’s a big Gibson fan himself and, like me, is very influenced by his writing, though I was influenced by it at 14, he was influenced by it at 28 or something), and started to take issue with all the slamming, though he responded to Big.Brother’s posts, not mine. I didn’t want to get into a flame war, and so never directly responded to his posts either, but the gist of it is, since he came here with useless history degree, white skin and the usual attitude that locals come to expect from caucasians, he found paradise. He called himself a writer, and thus instantly became one here, found a nice Chinese girl that gave him none of the attitude of the girls back home, and found a job and a people more willing to accept his genius than he ever could back home. So he was mighty offended with people who actually picked holes at what he referred to as his “private utopia”.

This, to say the least, invoked the wrath of Big.Brother who called his posts deluded and myopic, but then he doesn’t know the guy is white. Since then, a flame-war has been simmering between the two as Big.Brother and “Ebo” (The name of the main character from his first abandoned novel, actually it’s Eboman) started trading posts and snippets from other websites either praising or damning Singapore, proving that other countries have the same problems that Singapore does, so leave this island paradise alone.

What does all this have to do with the girlfriend?

What started it all was when Ebo made an effort to play peacemaker and said something to the effect of, “The only problem that Singapore has is rude cellular phone users.”

In retaliation, Big.Brother posted a hot spanking new story (Still, unsurprisingly, not covered by the press) about 6 protesters being arrested by the police for attempting an anti-war demonstration. In addition, they were interrogated and it was found that the source of their motivation was an SMS message urging people to demonstrate. Doubtless whoever made that initial SMS is already detained. Here’s the story.

I mentioned this to the girlfriend and she was quite incensed. So incensed in fact, that she needed to rant about it on her own blog. Then she read Gibson’s article, and she got very upset indeed.

I have always hated this place from the perspective of someone who is used to a certain vibrancy, texture and freedom, who is pissed that I am denied that here. I’d never really come face to face with someone who’s emotions equalled my own, but came from being intelligent enough to realize that she’d never even had a taste of what I had enjoyed and was incensed about no longer having.

I really got a sense of just how much she hates this place tonight. She said a lot of striking things, the most memorable images for me all centering around her feelings of betrayal about this place. She grew up here, constantly being fed by the propaganda machine of how important, worldly and sophisticated Singapore is. And she was really disheartened when reality set in. She likened it a couple of ways. Like when you’re one of the rich kids at schools, and all the other kids say stuff like, “My dad comes from a family of 6 generations of weatlh.” “My dad made his money as high powered lawyer, putting criminals away in celebrated cases.” “My dad is the CEO of a company that produces polymers found in every electrical appliance.” And when it’s your turn, you say, “My dad won the lottery.”

But what really drove the point home for her was when she had a chance to travel and found herself away from the machine for a while. All that talk of Singapore’s significance in the region and in the world evaporated in the face of real places that were more concerned with things other than having a World Class Airport. No one cared whether an airport was world class or not, and if it was, they didn’t see why it should be important. All the reassurances of the importance of Singapore were suddenly, acutely absent and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. She said it was like having a braggart father, that was always coming home talking about how important his job was, what a contribution he made to the company that day, how it was so tough being the head of his division, and when she finally got out of the house and visited the office, he was just a pencil-pushing, mid-level bureaucrat with a cubicle by the watercooler, occasionally mentioned whenever more toner was needed for the photocpy machine.

It bothers her that Singapore needs to praise itself so ardently because it really just emphasizes to her how insecure it is. And it really bugs her that she’s from this country and that stigma will always follow her to some degree, that she’s from a country that is in love with its own airport.

So she was talking about all this, pausing, starting, and having to stop again when the tears came. I think I watched decades of frustration just come pouring out tonight, and for her, this attempt to snuff out freedom of expression is just one more nail in the coffin, since it runs counter to Singapore’s sudden need to have radical, innovative thinkers… provided they don’t shake things up and just make lots of money. The fact that Ebo actually defends this point of view and deems it necessary for order (He ascribes to the As Long As The Electricity Works and The Streets Are Clean, I’ll Tolerate Anything ethos) is just another signal to her that people are essentially materialist animals that will do anything as long you keep their bellies full and give them a compliant, adoring, warm body to fuck. Well, that and she’s even less impressed with white people than she was before. A guy that couldn’t hack it in the Real World and retreated here to let his skin do all the talking rates very low in her estimation. The fact that her own country eagerly embraces such individuals and rewards them for their “cheat,” just downright depresses her.

But it was still an enlightening and even kind of touching experience to see just how deeply she feels about all this. If I respected her before, it’s just gone up a couple of orders of magnitude after last night’s conversation.

The Guilty Party

For anyone who’s interested or cares, here’s the blog of the one who just bit me.

Psychotic girlfriend Blog

Ouch! Awww…

Hey, my girlfriend just bit me in the ear.

IT MUST BE LOVE! Or lurve. Something like that.

Next time: Girly Sex & Monkey Sex and the difference between the two. Maybe.