Uncle Trap

Close Shaves

2011-01-30T17:14:00.002-05:00

There's a reason policies are set in place. Temptation is not a reason to ignore them. Quite the opposite, actually.

Iggy's Restaurant in Singapore

2009-01-03T06:52:00.008-05:00

After reading a number of reviews beatifying Iggy's, it seemed like time to check the place out in its current form. Cutting to the chase, the meal was pretty disappointing, with a couple of high points that were hardly spectacular, and a few decidedly bad low points. Iggy's is by no means a bad restaurant. In some respects, it is very good. But it is not the best restaurant in Asia. Probably not even the best in Singapore.

The restaurant itself is a nice space, with a bar and a few tables off to the side. Wood abounds and the lighting is at a perfect level. Too many places go too dim in a misguided attempt to create a romantic atmosphere. I have to say that I find nothing romantic about squinting at the menu. There was an odd and unsuccessful attempt to add some festive cheer by placing a strip of red paper with patterns cut into it on the tables, but that misstep aside, it is a comfortable, intimate space that lends itself to contemplation of innovative haute cuisine.

Service was generally decent, with a couple of errors. I find that it really helps when the waiters or busboys try to stand on the correct side of the diner when placing cutlery, plates, glasses and such on the table. This avoids the diner having a waiter's elbow in his or her face while the waiter stretches across to set down a glass. It is a minor thing, but one that improves the experience. In a restaurant like Iggy's, which purports to be the best restaurant in Singapore, and now Asia, and charges accordingly, this is definitely something to be considered.

Wine service was definitely off. The selection is quite good, with an emphasis on Burgundies of both persuasions. With the sommelier's assistance, I selected a decent bottle of 2000 Latricieres, which drank very well. We started with a few glasses of an acceptable Riesling, and after a couple of courses, the wine steward returned with the bottle of red. I looked at the label and nodded, and he took it away. I assumed that at this point, he would decant it. Alas, this was not to be. When the time came to start in on the red, the bottle was brought to the table, still filled with the good stuff. I had to request that they then decant the wine before serving. Considering that Iggy's is supposedly owned and run by an ex-sommelier, I do not see why something as simple as this could happen. Now, the wine did not absolutely need more air, it drank quite nicely, but decanting also removes sediment, besides the function of aerating the liquid. In addition, pouring from a lovely crystal decanter is just more pleasant-looking.

One last minor, personal peeve. When pouring from the requested decanter, the waiter shook the decanter at the end of each pour to get the lingering drop to fall into the glass. I understand that he was trying to get all the wine in, but it just bugs me. Makes me feel cheap for trying to squeeze every drop out of the bottle, and feeling cheap is the last thing you want in an expensive restaurant. Just wipe off the lip after each pour. No one will fault you for it, and it will not be an issue at all.

On to the food. That is the ultimate measure of a restaurant, after all. Photos courtesy of one of my dining companions.

Amuse-Bouche. The amuse was uni in a yuzu jelly, with cauliflower puree. This was not bad, but hardly the most innovative combination of flavours around. Restaurants in New York have been doing this for years. Still, the flavours were good, and there was success in ensuring the cauliflower puree was not bitter, as is the case in many vegetable purees, which would have ruined the whole thing.

Ikura. The first dish was ikura atop egg royale, with orange jelly and orange zest. This was fine. Nothing to shout about. The saltiness of the ikura was drowned out by the sweetness of the orange jelly.

Jabugo Iberico Bellotta. Iberico ham atop grilled watermelon, with tomato concasse and micro herbs. This was quite a disaster. Grilling the watermelon left it at Singapore room temperature and caused the texture of the flesh to soften. The overall effect was, to quote one of my dining companions, "warm and slimy". It is pretty important that those three words are never spoken in a restaurant. The intended effect of the classic pairing was also lost, since the watermelon was not sweet enough to play off against the tart saltiness of the ham. Terrible.

Foie Gras. The classic preparation of pan-fried foie gras on toast was executed well. The slightly more modern foie gras creme brulee was fine. It might just be me, but I've never been thrilled with foie gras creme brulees. Seems like a bit of a waste of the richness of the liver. But overall, an enjoyable dish.

Spanner Crab. A spanner crab meat souffle and rocket sprouts, with a shellfish bisque poured at the table. Quite bland. The souffle was ok, but lacking in the rich flavour that crab brings, whereas the broth was just very bland. Could do with a few lessons from Tru on how to make a hot shellfish dish in broth.

Cappellini. A choice was offered here of whether to go with a cappellini with zucchini, smoked mullet roe and shallot, or cappellini with poultry jus and 2g (stated clearly) of Alba white truffle. The entire table went with the white truffles. A good choice. These are probably among the last of the season, but the scent was at full bore. A properly execution of a classic dish. Is it really necessary to state clearly the amount of truffles given on the menu though? Again, this makes me feel cheap, and cheap is not a good feeling when I'm paying S$280 for dinner (food only, pre-tax, pre-tip).

Halibut. Pan-roasted halibut fillet, red curry-scented pumpkin puree, green mango salsa, roasted shallot oil, glacier lily and balsamic reduction. Poor cooking here. My piece of fish was overcooked on one edge, and correctly cooked on the other. Another diner's fish was just completely overcooked throughout. I do not think it is too much to ask for good execution of basic technique, when there were only 11 diners in the joint.

Challand Duck. Spicy herb-crusted Challand duck breast, braised red cabbage, Puy lentils, baby turnip. Excellent. The duck itself was nicely cooked, and the spices used on the skin provided a beautiful contrast to the standard expectations without being overpowering. The spices gave the meat a flavour reminiscent of curry. I am unable to provide a more informative descriptions here, but it was delicious. Not so sure about the turnip, but a minor quibble on a very good dish.

Pre-Dessert. I cannot recall what was in it exactly, but the berries were extremely bitter. Not a good palate cleanser, or a good anything, actually.

Chocolate. Christmas spiced chocolate dome, home-made gingerbread ice cream. This was quite good, if a bit rich. The ice cream was pretty heavy, coming off sticky and leaden. Chocolate was good. The presentation, well, I refrained from commenting at the dinner table, but brown streaks seem not so good on a plate.

Iggy's Lemon Tart was a surprise. These small mouthfuls literally popped and crackled in the mouth, like those sweets in my youth. I rather liked that it wakes the diner up at the end of a long meal, but it was very very crackly.

Overall, the food was not of the standard I had been lead to expect by the glowing reviews online. I admire the concept of a tiny restaurant serving interesting food, but it is important that the concepts are checked to actually work in a dish, and that the technique in the kitchen is up to snuff. Otherwise, the prices are exorbitant. The cost comes close to the French Laundry, and I assure you that the quality does not.

I have eaten at some of the best restaurants in the world, and this is not one worthy of the upper echelons of dining in major food destinations worldwide. If this is the best that Singapore has to offer in terms of European food, then diners are better off sticking with Asian cuisines. Singapore has some great Chinese and Indian restaurants that offer fine-dining experiences at a fraction of the price of Iggy's, and much more pleasure. To summarise, Iggy's is a mildly innovative restaurant without the foundational ability in the kitchen to back up its claims.

What's the deal here?

2008-01-31T00:08:00.000-05:00

210 pending requests. How do I know so many people?

Am I missing something here? Have I been sleepwalking and handing out business cards or something?

Maybe that's why I'm running out.

Chicken Hearts, Grand Slam Curry and Braised Octopus

2007-12-25T22:36:00.000-05:00

How often does everything you buy work out well? A pair of boots heavily discounted online that turn out to fit well. An expensive block of foie gras, beautifully tempered, skirting the line of good taste on the border of decadence. A cheap block of foie gras, gloriously bursting past that same line. Gorgeous hanger steaks, begging for nothing more than salt, pepper and a hot pan. Dark chocolate macadamia nut biscuits, hideously expensive, but oh so worth it. A dutch oven, delivered overnight, thick, iron, orange. Screaming, flying monkeys.

On a wholly unrelated note, is there some sort of rule that after the Lord of the Rings, there can be no other fantasy movies that are made well? Stardust was a weak version of itself. Although I actually rather enjoyed the fight scene between the princes and the witches. Seems like a well-realised depiction of combat between a fighter and a magic-user. The witches kept throwing spells at the princes, and the princes absorbed them, slogged through them, shrugged them off, until they got close enough to do the deal with physical weapons. Absolutely stupid change to the epilogue though. The entire point of the ending was that the star was cursed to live out her immortality as a mortal. Ah well, I suppose that is the author's prerogative. I can and do disagree though.

Bridge to Terabithia, on the other hand, turned out not to be a fantasy film at all. Instead, it is actually a fantastically charming movie about relationships between people, and the media by which these are constructed. Really quite excellent. The teen actress in it also has that quality rarely seen in young actors, a sort of magnetic glow that draws attention and sympathy. In older actors, this is also a rare quality, but more commonly seen. Julia Roberts is so charismatic that her face is invariably the focus of every frame of a movie that she is in. Quite remarkable, actually.

I think I'll go buy the Blu-Ray of BtT. Excellent movies deserve my custom.

2007-11-04T20:14:00.000-05:00

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

2007-09-16T22:30:00.000-04:00

Movies are mirrors of life. Perhaps not literally, but they reflect the themes, motivations and failures of humanity quite adequately. Why then, is my life occasionally a mirror of the movies. A lazy afternoon spent at a friend's place sets the scene for a coincidental meeting. And an hour struggling through a video game involving a rolling ball, leading into an agitated discussion of Indiana Jones lore, provides a reminder of why things once were. Now to recall why they were not. Before it all falls apart again.

Buy Low, Sell High

2007-09-08T20:04:00.001-04:00

I have to say I'm impressed. It has been a long time since a game has thoroughly kicked my ass, and had me loving it.

I speak, of course, of Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Now, I've never owned an Xbox, so I've never played any version of this game before, but I have heard about the difficulty of this game. Still, I underestimated it severely. Look at it this way. To get through one section of it, I died maybe 20 times. Not even because I was trying to figure out the trick to beating a boss or anything of the sort. This was a straightforward slugout with a wave after wave of routine bad guys. Yes, footsoldiers in a video game who will kill you quickly and messily if you let your focus slip for a second.

In some ways, this is both innovative and a throwback. Well, to be more precise, it is innovative in the sense that it's a throwback. Remember games like Contra, Lode Runner and R-Type? Those arcade classics from a decade or two ago that were deliberately hard as hell, so as to entice you into throwing more tokens at them in an effort to finally beat the damn things. Of course, some were better than others, and the best were those that demanded that you figure out exactly how they should be played at every juncture. You play a level, get killed 20 seconds into it, play it again, remembering to avoid that sneaky bad guy that pops up right there, only to get killed again 4 seconds on. And so it went. Burning tokens through a level moment by moment. Sure, a general lack of motor coordination probably hindered me as well, but anything that can cause distress and anger while drawing out a kind of intense focus is surely worth my time. Actually, that sounds a lot like coding, except a lot more fun.

Games nowadays are easy. Most allow you to just blow through with no real effort needed. When was the last time you died in the course of playing the main quest in an RPG? Added to that the proliferation of "Easy" modes, and there's no reason to ever have to expend any real concentration on a game. In many cases, all you have to do is sit back and enjoy. To a very real extent, that's what you do with Final Fantasy XII. You set up the gambits, then sit back and watch the scenery. There's a reason I can play most games slouched on my bed, one hand on the controller.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma, on the other hand, has me standing a foot from the screen, even though I'm using a wireless controller. Both hands are busy working every button on the controller as dozens of combinations are used in rapid succession. A soldier is popped up by a quick two button combo, Ryu, your hero, leaps after his prey to continue with a series of slashes, signified by four further button presses, but decides instead to spin and kick the enemy away, propelling himself slightly back to bring himself out of range of the enemy commander he just spied charging in, requiring a swift series of three different buttons. Not enough distance. The commander grabs Ryu, dumps him on the ground and runs him through. Ryu rolls away from the cluster of bad guys, leaping into another roll, this time in mid-air, decapitating a low-end soldier as he goes, then leaps off the wall he runs into, doing a backflip, right into another footsoldier, who promptly grabs him, slits his throat, kicks him in the back and sends him to the game over screen. Damn. Do you want to give up the way of the ninja? What the hell? Well, I've died a dozen times already, let's see what this is. Ok, the game is making fun of me for needing an easier difficulty mode.

Do I hate this game for this? No. I decide not to take the easy way out, labelled Ninja Dog. A dog? Now, I am fond of my stuffed dog, but this is not acceptable. I grind through a dozen more deaths until I barely beat that last commander with nothing left on my life bar. Ok, now to find a store to pay for healing. That's right, no freebies. Then it's on to more of the same, battling through a stream of bad guys, dying frequently, backtracking a lot to save as often as I can. Until I run into a boss. Die a lot more. Turn to a online strategy guide for a suggestion. Dodge and block his attacks until an opening appears, at which point you should hit him with hard combos? What kind of stupid strategy is that? Don't get hit, then hit him. That's like buy low, sell high.

Anyway, that's what this game does. It kicks your ass very hard very often, then when you think you've got figured it out, kicks it even harder. Then it offers you an easier way out, but humiliates you when you take it. Yeah, it's hard, and proud of it.

I hear the previous version was even harder. Very tempting.

Similarly, Virtua Tennis 3 has been offering me a tough game. It's easy enough through the career mode, until you get to the last tournament. then you lose the match without winning a single point. Stunned, you level your player to the maximum, then try again. This time, you win one point when the opponent hits a volley long. Load and try again. This time, all the stops are pulled out, and every tactic you've ever played or seen played against you is attempted over the course of the match. At one point, you have your opponent on the ropes. You win a game! And another! Then the opponent adapts, pulling you wide on the first ball, so you find yourself with the option of dashing for the net, the opposite end of the court or simply adjusting and hoping the ball comes back. Of course, he reads you and smacks the ball far far away from your despairing racquet. Somehow, every match from then on, the opponent learns, and you run out of tricks to try. And you're back to struggling to win a point.

It is nice to sometimes get pounded into the dirt. Sharpens the mind.

Today

2007-06-06T22:32:00.001-04:00

And what did I do? Work a twelve hour day, then head home to keep going.

Situation Comedy

2007-06-03T21:45:00.000-04:00

Sometimes my life somehow turns into a sitcom. Try to imagine a 25 year old chap, single, terrified of the very idea of marriage and children, somewhat obsessed with food, finding himself stuck with an eight year old girl and her infant brother on a Saturday night.

Our hero finds himself in this sorry situation by dint of a halfhearted and semi-reflexive offer to babysit when a friend complains about never being able to go out for dinner and drinks due to the presence of children, and the impossibility of locating a sitter on a Saturday night. Little did our protagonist know that the offer would be accepted. Clearly he does not know his friend that well after all.

So our friend gathers his wits where they have fallen after the surprising acceptance, and acquires a number of items to get through the night. He purchases a good deal of food, since kids all like food, right? Then he snatches up two DVDs, hot off the Netflix wagon, imprudently mixing idioms as he goes. And as a final touch, he confirms that the eight year old is fully capable of tending to the infant, and his role is merely to prevent the intervention of child services.

Armed with bags of items, our hero marches to his fate, confident that he is prepared. Little did he know what awaited him.

Dinner is made, and he is confident in the execution. Solid, reliable dishes that he knows how to make. Lamb shoulder cooked in white wine vinegar and spaghetti carbonara. The former is slowly cooked until tender and tangy in a blend of rosemary, anchovies, salt, garlic and vinegar. The latter is finished with raw eggs and the rendered fat of the bacon in place of cream. Both are good; he knows this. Alas, he does not know the tastes of children.

Apparently, eight year old girls do not enjoy lamb. To be more precise, they refuse to consume or even venture near lamb. Vinegar is also an effective deterrent against eight-year-olds. Raw eggs too find their place in the lineup of evil and offensive foods.

Desperate, our failed chef offers up pristine slices of aged prosciutto di Parma, but is derided for his poor taste in deigning to eat "raw" meat. Defeated, he must examine the larder and list the dishes he can conceive to create from the supplies at hand. After much negotiation, one suggestion finds favour. Buttered noodles.

Dried bowtie pasta is cooked in abundant water as salty as the sea, then drained and mixed with butter. If that sounds plain, perhaps that is because it is.

Having accomplished dinner in far more time that it should have taken, our hero hopes for a quiet progression of the remainder of the evening. The fates laugh.

Riotously.

After dealing with the needs of the infant, also reasonably described as quietly observing an eight year old child dealing with the needs of the infant, two discs of the first season of 24 are produced. Jack Bauer finds that he must make way for a remarkably unintelligent boardgame. A game where no decisions are ever made, barring how hard the dice should be thrown. A game where the penalties involve songs. A game which shall not be described in further detail.

The evening thus progresses in a painful time warp, where the seconds seem to slow, minutes dawdle and hours never arrive. Eventually, the eight year old falls asleep leaning on the arm of our hero. If this were truly a sitcom, perhaps our hero would be touched by the innocence of childhood. Instead, he becomes a bit annoyed as he contemplates the mechanics of moving an eight year old child from a sofa to a bed without waking her up. After a cry for help ensues, he alters his plan and subtly nudges the child awake to deal with the further needs of the infant.

Situation comedy rules stipulate that after an evening of interaction with children, the flintiest of hearts must be softened, and the desire for offspring must burst forth.

Our hero is tremendously relieved that his life is not, in truth, a sitcom.

2007-03-18T21:06:00.000-04:00

How bad can the healthcare in this country be? This is pretty ridiculous.

I spent three hours of my Sunday afternoon waiting to see a doctor, enduring a hyperactive child screaming and assaulting his grandfather, only for the damn doctor to tell me to go buy an over-the-counter medicine. Why is it that in Singapore, I can go to a clinic on a Sunday and wait fifteen minutes to be seen, but in this, the centre of democracy, capitalism and Western affluence, I can't get halfway decent healthcare? I don't even know where I can pay more for brisk service.

Singaporeans really don't seem to get how good they have it.

On a related note, why is it that women are conditioned to avoid paying for things? As a hypothetical example, if two people, one male and one female, go to see a movie, not even a date, just a bad flick on a weekend morning, the woman feels free to ask for some popcorn, then walks away to the restroom, assured in her assumption that it will be paid for?

I'm too tired and annoyed to rant.

Back, and ambivalent

2007-02-17T18:50:00.000-05:00

It's been a while, but the soup is still good, and the company is, well, nostalgic, if a bit older.

Now for the next bit, mopping up the leftovers.

Verily Annoyed

2007-02-09T23:30:00.000-05:00

I understand that the game lineup at launch is not always perfect. The more complex a system, the harder it is to program for, and I respect that. So I can deal with the lack of interesting games.

I paid the money, so I am clearly onboard with the price tag. I don't like it, but I can deal with it.

New technology often comes into bulky packages. And I'm vaguely familiar with the concept of chips getting too hot for their own good. So I can deal with the heat and the ridiculously heavy box.

A controller is a controller. If you want to type, get a keyboard. I understand that. So I can deal with the slooow entry of numbers to the system.

What I cannot deal with is data simply being lost from the hard drive. If the internal hard drive is supposed to replace the hassle of memory cards, then it had damn well better not get corrupted after 4 weeks of use. And 20 hours of level-grinding in Final Fantasy XII.

So I paid $600 (plus tax) for a heavy machine that has no good software, spews enough hot air that I can turn off the heat in my room, takes forever to enter any information on, and loses hours of game time on a whim.

I am annoyed.

Dissonance

2007-01-07T22:17:00.000-05:00

I somehow happened on a page of the archives of this very blog while I was surfing. Very melodramatic. A lot of rubbish about trying to find myself, or define myself, or how I construct my understanding and interaction with the world. I wonder how much of that I really believed at the time. I do know that I was prone to dance with the ideas, teasing out twists and intricacies that are more truly an expression of possibilities than the reality.

Of course, what is reality but one of a multitude of possibilities, many of which are picked of our own volition. For example, I could claim, as I have done, to be extremely enamoured of the way Lake Michigan gains just a hint of pink of the occasional evening. And by choosing to be fond of this sight, I would be.

It occurs to me now that it has been a long time since I observed a sunrise. Or simply sat watching something uncluttered by life. In those many hours alone in my room in Chicago, I often watched the sky and the lake. Both blue, quiet, clear. It has been far far too long since I admired the way the sky in this country can become completely unmarred by clouds and turn a gorgeous shade of blue, deeper than anything I have seen elsewhere.

I think I must be warped. There are occasions when I feel the need to ascertain some things which should never need to be questioned. Yet I do question them. And it invariably leads to disappointment, for my expectations are never realistic. Expectations seem to be constructed, for me at least, from the stuff of my own commitment to the matter. I anticipate a mirror, and mostly imagine seeing a mirror. Yet when I do examine what lies before me more closely, there is nothing there but a mirror. A mirror is not reality, after all. What a mirror offers is merely the image of what you give it. So when I offer something to it, and look into the mirror, I imagine that I receive something similar. Except that things do not work out that way. On the rare occasion when I slip out of a self-delusional mood, and closer examination is made, the disparity between what I imagined, and thusly what I give, and what is returned seems always to be jarring. And so I attempt to decipher what exactly the problem is. Do I simply overestimate the quality of the exchange? Or is a remedy to be found in altering the nature of interaction. Perhaps it is like a dance. If you keep advancing, your partner must withdraw somewhat. So if you were to withdraw, the partner might then advance. So I withdraw, hoping to elicit aggression from the partner. Then it occurs to me. It is like a dance. And my partner must meet me, and withdrawing simply indicates a lack of desire to dance. And the only thing left to do is to smile and retreat graciously. Why make a scene, after all? Retire to some other area of the room, perhaps obtain a drink, and let the party continue.

A major regret is that I no longer have a view that elicits quiet in me, to counter the disquiet. The lake was almost always tranquil. An aura of calm blanketed it, at least from that distance. Even with boats and sails and whatnot on the surface, the tableau still resembled a painting of itself. Standing on the shore, with the waves crashing on the breakers, motion was clearly at the front of the mind. Yet casting my glance out beyond the immediate, I recall the stillness of the view from my windows, and then it is calm again. The surf is just noise. The essence remains unperturbed. Then there was the view from the bar atop the John Hancock building at night. Certainly it was of a city, bustling and frantic as any other city. But as a function of the distance, and the proximity, the buildings seemed static, permanent installations for our admiration. Stars arranged for our pleasure, almost within arm's reach, it seemed.

PS3!!!

2007-01-06T13:49:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it's good to be making your own money.

2006-12-31T00:25:00.000-05:00

I don't get it when people insist that things are just things, and don't mean anything. I refer specifically here to movie references to other movies. For example, Rocky Balboa was loaded with references to previous movies. In the first movie, Rocky said that he had never broken his nose before. Then in the first two rounds of the Creed fight, Rocky cracked that he couldn't believe that Creed broke his nose twice. I consider the shot of the nose bleed to be a reference. There are also more obvious ones, such as the run up the museum steps, which is in many of the movies. There's also "Yo Adrian, we did it", which ends the saga, where the first movie ends with "Yo Adrian, I did it." The shot of Marie running through the crowd at the end is the mirror of Adrian running through the crowd in the first movie. The fights in the first and last movies were both not about Rocky winning or trying to win, but to survive fifteen rounds without being knocked out, in order to recover his self-confidence.

And now, I rewatch the Runaway Bride, and I crack up at the negotiating scene, which is a beautiful rehash of the one in Pretty Woman, with the Gere and Roberts roles reversed in terms of physical position and monetary position, albeit retaining the direction of flow of cash. Then there's the dress shop, where Gere sticks up for Roberts' right to spend a lot of money on clothes. And of course, finishing on a balcony.

2006-12-29T22:47:00.000-05:00

I'm conflicted over this whole execution deal. I'm sure that most people on the planet are aware that it has been carried out. And a lot of people have opinions on the matter. Being in the United States, most people around me seem convinced that it is a good thing, and perhaps they are right. Still, what defines something to be good or not? Simply a personal judgement on the issue. And please don't give me that natural morality bullshit. If there is such a thing as natural morality, then every person on earth would be possessed of it, and no crime would be committed. Allowing for some people being born without this trait, punishing this minority for subsequent actions as a result of the lack thereof smacks to me of genetic profiling. Punishing someone because he or she did something that they are inclined to do, but society at large is not, is fairly similar to assaulting people for their race. These criminals, so to speak, are genetically inclined to commit crimes, so you punish them for this genetic disposition? Genocidal maniacs, the lot of you.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. I'm conflicted about this because there's a clash here between my usual common sense view of the judicial system and the entire concept of a reliable one. I believe that this person is most likely guilty of a great deal of murder, genocide and so on. From a personal point of view, a death sentence seems reasonable for his actions. Generally speaking, I am an advocate of dealing out punishment as efficiently as possible where warranted. I detest the concept of jury trials simply because there is no chance of neutral jurors. The big man theory of government works for me, and this includes the judicial branch. Have a judge, smart fellow naturally, figure out if the defendant is innocent or guilty, and dole out a sentence.

The problem in this particular case is that, well, for starters, any trial in which the outcome is a foregone conclusion cannot be fair. I don't think anybody had the slightest doubt that the verdict would be guilty and the sentence death. If the judge had ruled otherwise, there would be an uproar beyond imagination. This is nothing more than a mockery of a judicial process then. Why even bother? Just shoot the chap in that hole in the ground and be done with it.

So why was this a kangaroo court? Well, he was the former ruler of a country, who had been deposed by a foreign power, then captured and tried by the new government of his country, now dominated by his opponents. After a military coup, you don't expect fair and open trials. This had the same outcome. Tried by a government essentially composed of people who are at war with his own, the poor chap had no chance. Besides, given that he was the government at the time of the alleged crimes, even if he had given the orders, I don't see any rationale for considering those acts to be illegal. What's next? Trying every American president for the deaths of civilians during "precision" bombing of the many many countries that the US has bombed in the past hundred years or so? Even better, have the judge and jury at these trials be chosen from the families of the victims. Oh yeah. Definitely impartial.

2006-12-12T21:48:00.000-05:00

There are days when you spend the evening frantically multitasking, trying to remember all of the six things you have running at the same time. Then you realise that you could just run another script in the background, so you do. Dash off a quick query to check a number, then realise that everything has ground to a halt, replication dead. Panic, and try to retrieve your data just in case a serious crash occurs two days before the auction closes.

Then you scan a list of hundreds of names, and you realise that you know what the important ones are, what to look for, what the combinations mean. You start closing the windows one by one, until nothing is left, except for something that will just have to run overnight. Hand off one last pack, walk out of the office, head down, until somewhere in between the lobby and the carpark, a tune steals into your head, and you start humming it. By the time you reach your car, the song is on your lips, soft, but clear enough only to yourself. Then the radio comes on, and that exact song is playing. A smile flits across, and soon fingers are tapping and the volume is up, and the road is speeding by far faster than it ought to.

Then you walk into your apartment to find that Volkswagen has sent you an electric guitar, and all that seems appropriate to do is laugh and go to bed.

Perpetual Frown

2006-11-29T22:23:00.000-05:00

On occasion, I hear about someone I know deciding to ditch the usual careers that most people would kill to have, and go off to do something entirely unlikely to be lucrative or stable. Everybody knows someone like that. The chap who works and scrapes his way through university, then decides to forget about being an architect, and mortgages himself to the hilt to move to Aspen and become a ski instructor. These are the people whom your parents fear you will become. An utter lack of stability and earning power. Responsibility is the big word that is thrown at you, and it usually sticks, weighing on your shoulders as you carelessly mix metaphors in a blog post written on a weeknight after yet another grinding day of responsible work. Then with some people, it doesn't stick. It slides right off, and these are the people who become chefs and sculptors and apple growers.

The vast majority of the time, I truly admire these people. They are the ones who have been able to reject society's idea of what they are, and strike out to become their own idea of what they are. We are expected to be solid, productive members of society who will make the sole focus of our lives stable financial foundations for our assumed families. To that end, we struggle to find jobs that pay as well as we qualify for, with hours reasonable enough in the long term to get married and raise children, live in the suburbs where kids can run and play. Those few that are able to reject that, do manage to wring admiration from my dry heart.

I was going to rant on about the difference between idealism and laziness, but I find that I have not the spirit to rant. Instead, here is a thought.

My life has become dry. Life should be wet. So lush that you cannot but lust to grab at it, but too slippery to get a solid grip of. A mind is reflective of life. A mind should be overflowing with thoughts, spilling over the edge, inducing you to grab at them and throw them back into the mix, but the whole pile rises to an intimidating height, then falls away, as a school of fish scatters and disperses, only to reform in some other corner of the mind. That is what it is like to have a mind awash in itself. And now I am coming to know what it is to have a mind wrung out by weariness and a perpetual frown.

2006-11-18T01:06:00.000-05:00

On occasion, I wonder what might be if I had somehow died without realising it, and whatever action I was then undertaking was simply a hallucination. Deja vu as hell.

2006-10-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

I'm confused.

Singaporeans pay some of the lowest taxes I've seen. We have virtually no homeless people starving to death on the street. Education is pretty damn near free. There are no barriers to movement between social and economic classes. The average Singaporean is quite capable of surviving without resorting to crime.

And people are unhappy because they're discovering that employers prefer to hire workers with more relevant skills and are willing to work for lower pay? Is that supposed to be a surprise?

There is a reason that salaries tend to rise with age. Experience is supposed to trump a recent education at some stage. From the standpoint of an employer, I think it justified to expect that someone with twenty years of experience should have the wherewithal to outperform a fresh college graduate. And if the older person is unable to, it also seems quite justified to prefer the younger person.

As for the difference between survival and a reasonable lifestyle, that is simply delusional. A lifestyle that one cannot afford is clearly not reasonable. That should be obvious to any child who realises that his allowance is insufficient to purchase that second comic book. If you feel that you deserve a better lifestyle than that which you currently enjoy, then you might want to consider working to increase your compensation. If that turns out to be impossible, then perhaps you are being unrealistic.

I do realise that I have never been deprived. Even now, I make more than most, just 4 months out of college. Still, I do not have the lifestyle I think I deserve. I want a penthouse with a view of the White House, a helicopter to shuttle me to Paris for after-dinner cocktails, Cristal in my glass instead of Veuve. I don't have it. I know I don't deserve it at the moment. How do I know this? I cannot afford it. So I am working towards being able to afford it. And when I can, I will know that I deserve it.

C'est pas possible

2006-10-25T00:31:00.000-04:00

This is impossible. At 5% interest, a 30 year loan will involve something like $5000 monthly installments. That is completely beyond my means. I literally can't cover that, even if I spend zero dollars frivolously.

How did I get myself into this?

Not entirely

2006-10-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

A little while back, I was asked to write down my hobbies for a company facebook. Setting aside the absurdity of such a venture, it did get me wondering what my hobbies are. I don't make model ships, run marathons or take photographs, so nothing sprang to mind readily.

Perhaps a better way of going about this might be to think about not what I do on a regular basis, but what I enjoy doing. The simple thing that springs to mind is eating. I like to eat, as must be obvious. I believe that part of the formula for a happy life is to eat often and eat well, without excessive regard for things like calories and cholesterol. We all die at some point, so why not have a happy grease fire instead of a foul flame of dried twigs?

I like good restaurants. I have to admit that I am not a fan of extreme innovation, since it rarely tastes as good as the familiar done well. Experiments are all fine and good, but the objective of a restaurant, aside from the monetary aspect, is to feed people, and have them leave happier than when they arrived. In some cases, that might be accomplished by foie gras lollipops, but in all likelihood, a skillfully roasted duck beast will do the job much better. I do not wish that experimentation with food ceases, but that others suffer the brunt of the failures. I am content to be in the second wave of adopters.

Similarly, I am not a snob when it comes to food. All I ask is that it does well what it sets out to do. A light, crispy prata possesses the same value as a little pot of meltingly tender veal cheeks, although by that logic I would be hard pressed to explain my willingness to pay 50 times the price of a prata for that little pot. But the principle holds, that execution is crucial. Flair and refinement are secondary to the simple idea of a meal being cooked well. The finest ingredients in the most splendid setting cannot compensate for ineptitude in the kitchen.

Enough about eating. I weary of a random lecture about some topic that interests no one. How about a reflection instead on the reason I enjoy cooking? I am not good at it, by any means. I have no instinct for heat and flavours. When I cook, it resembles an operation, focusing on getting everything just right, rather than trying to make the end-product. The process consumes the result in my mind.

So why then do I get a kick out of it? Well, the simple answer is that I find it therapeutic, relaxing. Something to do with working with my hands, scalded as they are by bubbling oil. I spent two and a half years slogging through the mud for the army, and that has been quite enough outdoors activity for the rest of my life. So I cook. By forcing my mind into a mode where I simply strive to follow a predetermined procedure exactly, rather than attempt to adapt on the fly, I remove myself from an analytic role. I avoid implications and improvements. It is a way to let my brain relax, in a manner of speaking.

Alright, enough babbling.

Just a note. Observation is not a difficult thing. When I have seen a person play frisbee, it is not hard to see the lack of comfort with sports, but contrasting that with the obvious, if not huge, measure of athletic poise, coupled with the strange tendency of females of that particular ethnic group to participate in a certain way in some performances in college, a hypothesis that dance might be something that is done, and perhaps enjoyed, on occasion is not entirely unlikely.

Delaying

2006-10-01T10:29:00.000-04:00

Delayed gratification is something that seems to be the catchphrase for the purpose of education. We college graduates spend 16 years of our lives slogging away in school, wholly dependent on our parents, guardians or the state for our livelihood. We could have been out working during that time, earning money that could be frittered away in what is, as should be obvious, instant gratification. Instead, we get by on what our parents feel we should receive.

In some cases, of course, the amount that our parents afford us turns out to be more than than the disposable income that most of us earn straight out of college. With the first job comes rent, taxes, car payments, work clothes. At least for those of us who strike out on our own. While in college, there is an allowance, and very few pressing financial commitments. Even student loans are meant to be paid off years after commencement, and those who do work on campus, I must say, generally do not do work even approaching the mental demands of what I, a fresh graduate, am subject to in my job.

I suppose these cases could be considered the reverse. These pampered kids, and I am not necessarily excluding myself from this definition, were delaying an entry into the world of delayed gratification. I imagine that I could have found a job out of high school, and given that I am a pretty smart chap, I might be earning more than I am now. This is, of course, assuming that I am smart enough not to try and make it through the corporate ranks. There are even cases of people who have risen through the ranks of giant corporations, from the mail room to the board room. But why bother to take the hard way out? Stay in school as long as you can, spending whatever your parents deem fit to send you. Work is clearly so much more of a drag than college. Once work commences, disposable income drops, leisure time drops, fun levels drop. Of course, the idea is that after some decades of hard work, the pampered children of some well-to-do parent will achieve some financial strength of their own. But why rush into it? Delay working life. Delay delayed gratification.

But what prompted me to ramble for a few minutes above are the experiences of this weekend. Now, I have been familiar with the technique of braising well-worked muscles of meat animals to break down the connective tissue, thereby making it tender beyond belief, yet retaining the intense flavour not to be found in other cuts. That might seem to be a great example of delayed gratification. To prepare dinner at, say, 7, you begin the work at 3. The meat comes out and is seasoned generously with salt and pepper, and whatever other spices you deem appropriate. Then dice some carrots, onions, celery, whatever vegetables of the like you have onhand. Heat some oil in a pot to smoking, then brown the meat well, letting the surface caramelise, creating a pleasing taste to be had in, at this point, 3.5 hours time. Pull the meat out, and toss in the vegetables to brown lightly, then return the meat to the pot. Pour around the meat some sort of braising liquid. I generally use Merlot and chicken stock, but anything is fine, really. Even water will suffice, actually. Bring it to a simmer, then cover the pot and toss the lot in an oven at 350 for 3 hours. 3 hours later, about half an hour prior to serving, remove the meat from the pot and let it rest in a warm place. I usually just loosely wrap it in foil and sit it on top of the oven. The liquid you now strain into a saucepan and boil. Boil it to death, and you will see fat forming on the surface. Quite disgusting, actually. Skim it off. When it thickens and becomes a slightly viscous liquid, it's a sauce. Carve, plate, serve. 4 hours at least from start to finish, depending on your efficiency. Utterly worth it though.

A very few people who know me also know that I have another preparation that even more fully expresses the principle of delayed gratification. I refer here to scrambled eggs. I hear protests. Scrambled eggs are a couple minutes of work, no more. I agree. But my version is different. Well, it's actually a version from one of Ramsey's cookbooks.

First, you break your eggs into a cold pan, under which you light a very small flame. Break up the yolks and mix it up with a spoon, then pull your butter out of the freezer. (You do freeze your butter, don't you?) With a sharp knife, dice the butter finely, and dump some into the pan. Now stand right there and start stirring. After some time, when the mixture just starts colouring, pour in just a bit of milk and keep stirring. Pull the pan off the stove when it gets too hot, and let it cool somewhat before returning it to the fire. Keep adding milk and butter as the eggs cook, and at the end, you will have a pale yellow gooey pile of eggs on your plate. Season with pepper and salt. (Easy now) It's quite wonderful, really. But it takes about 30 to 45 minutes of standing before a stove and stirring a puddle of eggs that doesn't seem to be cooking. Which is why I don't do it very often. Patience is not one of my virtues.

Scrambled eggs? 45 minutes? You are insane! I hear the critics roar. Well, in my head, anyway. Wait until you read what I shall type next.

Now, pasta is something that most people are familiar with. Packages of dried noodles on a supermarket shelf. Fresh pasta is something else entirely. You begin with flour and eggs. The eggs are crucial, so get the absolute best you can lay your hands on. Dump the flour on a work surface in a mound, the easy part. Now, form a well in the middle of the mound and break your eggs into it. Using a fork, start incorporating the eggs into the flour. Try to keep the well shape by pushing the flour into the walls of the well. Eventually, a gooey mess will form. At this point, start kneading with your hands. Add more flour when necessary, and dust your work surface with the stuff to prevent sticking. When it's a dough, let it rest for maybe 20 minutes, then cut into portions and take a rolling pin to it. What you want is to roll it so thin that you can see right through it. This will take a while. When you have it at the appropriate thickness, use a sharp, dry knife, and cut it into the shapes you desire. You now have freshly made pasta. An alternative to rolling and cutting is to use a machine. Wimps.

Take a large pan, as large as you have, fill it with water and start boiling. Salt it generously. You want the water to taste like it came from the sea. Dump the pasta in and leave it there for 3 hours.

That wasn't a typo. That first batch of pasta you made was not for eating. It was for seasoning the water. By boiling the water with the pasta for hours, you get a richly flavoured water, very important. The better the water, the better the pasta will taste. Now make another batch of pasta. When ready to cook, pull whatever is convenient from the water, and dump in your new batch. Note that this stuff cooks really fast. Like 2 or 3 minutes. Once it floats, remove it. Please don't do something stupid at this point by straining it through a colander. That would waste that wonderful starchy water. Use tongs instead. Proceed to whatever preparation of pasta you favour, using a little bit of the cooking water to loosen the noodle when needed.

There you have it. A 4 to 5 hour ordeal, requiring little technical expertise, but lot of patience, to prepare a meal that is famed for being quick and easy. The improvement is huge, but so is the increase in time. That is what I mean by delayed gratification.

64000

2006-09-25T22:36:00.000-04:00

This whole working gig is a pain. Really, it is.

I like my job. I actually do. The work environment is uber-relaxed. The work is interesting, complex, difficult. To adopt a cliche, I feel challenged by it. Not because the markets are terribly complicated, though they're a touch involved, but because I have carte blanche to use whatever means necessary to achieve results. Which means I am constantly thinking of new ways to extract more information from the data available. Side projects are condoned and even expected, which is great. I build my own tools, spend time making my life easier, develop new ways to explore opportunity. It really is a fantastic place to learn and apply critical thinking skills.

Here's what I detest about work. I hate knowing that someone has absolute authority over you. Even in the army, I knew that I had recourse to civilian means if military authority became unreasonable. Here, if my boss doesn't like me, I could simply be fired. If my work isn't up to par, I don't get a bad grade, I get fired. That's annoying.

I can't slow down either. Unlike school, pausing to take a breather seems to be out of the question. Taking my time to do something is likely to cause me to fall behind in my schedule. Which is not acceptable. Results matter here, so I need to be faster, smarter, better than everybody else. Which I am, some of the time. But I'm not a programmer. I don't think that way. So in this situation, where all the data is in the databases, and I need to write scripts to extract what I want, I naturally am slower than many other people. I admit that coding has been a revelation. It is so powerful and flexible that I am completely frustrated by the limitations of Excel when I use it. Of particular annoyance, 64000 row limits. What kind of data processing am I supposed to do with 64000 rows? Also the tendency to reformat everything. Pisses me off very badly. Excel. Bah.

To top it off, I finish each day tired. So I wind up going to bed early. Which robs me of a large portion of life.

I'm sleepy, so I shall rant about excess some other time.

Uninspired

2006-09-10T22:34:00.000-04:00

I think I just had a pretty much empty weekend. Did a fair number of things, but nothing left a particularly deep impression. Since I don't post very much, here's a quick rundown of my life over the past 50 hours or so.

Friday evening, it became apparent that I was the only person in the office who was foolish enough to stick around late just before the weekend. I had made a late dinner appointment, so I figured I'd just stay at work a little later and head over straight. Clearly a mistake.

It turns out that I really do have a knack for picking restaurants. After a spot of research while waiting for a script to finish, I changed venues at the last minute, and it turned out quite superb. One of those great little places with very good food and no pretensions whatsoever. Those can be refreshing sometimes. Although they did kick us out at 11.30, which I thought was rude. The evening ended quite properly, nothing too exciting to report there. Things are actually becoming less interesting, shifting to a more friendly tone, despite the occasional surprise.

So I woke up on Saturday, determined to make something of the weekend. I thought I'd play a quick game of Katamari until I woke up properly. Big mistake. I wound up attacking that game all day, until I was rolling a 500 metre ball around, picking up islands and clouds as if they were thumbtacks. If that last sentence made no sense to you, then you're missing out on one of the most brilliantly ridiculous games ever made.

That little endeavour lasted me the entire day, up until about 11, when I decided to head out. Which wasn't the best decision I made all day. Decided to go to this lounge in Georgetown. Absolutely the creepiest nightspot I've ever seen. When we got there, the line was quite long, but good-looking enough, so I handed the bouncer a few notes to cut it. Once inside, I was overwhelmed. I figured out why the line outside was so pretty and under-dressed. The dance floor was filled with these women, almost all of whom I believe were under 25, busily posing and grinding. That's fine. I have no objection to pretty women showing themselves off. The men were a different story. Most of them were in suits, which is fine, and in their thirties and forties, which is the creepy bit. Imagine a bunch of 35 to 45 year old men lined up along a bar, leering at a crowd of young girls desperate to catch the eye of a potential sugar daddy. Ok, I've just described a large segment of Shanghai.

We left pretty quickly. It was just too weird to have 40 year olds tryign to chat up my companion while I was getting drinks at the bar. And so I have concluded, in a sweeping generalisation, that the clubs in DC are either ghetto, replications of frats or populated by men too old to be prowling in nightclubs.

So Saturday was a bust. Sunday had to be better, right? Well, in a limited way it was.

I awoke on Sunday, full of gumption and the desire to make breakfast burning in my heart. I drew up a menu in my head of scrambled eggs and sausage links, matched with good, strong espresso. Then I got out of bed. Three things became clear to me then. One, I had no milk or cream, so proper scrambled eggs were out of the question. Two, I had no sausage links in my fridge. Three, I haven't actually bought that espresso maker I dreamt that I did.

So I started eating cookies. Rather good cookies. Finished the whole box. While watching Yakitate: Japan! Didn't stop watching Yakitate. Went through the last of my stock of Orangina, thinking that the anime had sagged a lot after the first major arc. Kept watching. Discovered that I had meat on the absolute verge of rotting in my fridge, and cooked it quickly. Kept watching. Did laundry. Continued staring at screen.

With the last episode in striking distance, I finally stopped watching anime and started typing a thoroughly uninspired account of my weekend.

And now I shall prepare to get back to the grind. For all that my work is fascinating and challenging, with plenty of actual learning opportunities, it can be a grind at times. Such as the bit about getting up early every bloody day.

New Car Smell

2006-08-28T22:34:00.000-04:00

I think I'm a bit lacking in emotion. Well, that is a bit inaccurate. I am lacking in powerful emotion. I never get truly angry, and I am never genuinely happy. I am easily annoyed, but that is like a feather drifting in calm air. I may attempt to bear it aloft by huffing at it, but it will only rise so far, and no further. My temper is never caught by the wind and ripped into the sky. Instead it slips all too easily to the ground.

A similar problem exists with feeling happy. I tend to believe that there is a difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is easily sought and found. A pile of hot, crispy prata would certainly give me pleasure now. Will it make me happy? That's a harder question to answer. If the answer is yes, then it seems a bit sad that my happiness turns on a bit of fried dough.

Happiness implies something beyond mere pleasure. Consider the difference between visiting a prostitute and getting married to someone you genuinely love. I have not experienced the latter, but I imagine that the happiness derived from this most cliched of happiness-generating activities is of a different nature to the pleasure obtained from sexual contact with a prostitute, no matter how intense the pleasure involved.

One way of approaching the problem of what exactly constitutes happiness is to dive into the analytics, to break it down and consider the parts. I don't feel like doing that at the moment, so I shall digress. Severely.

I have discovered that I do not panic very easily either. A couple of nights ago, there was a moment when I smelt something that seemed like it might be a full tank of gas catching fire and the wind was snapped out of me. I tried to take a breath, but found that my lungs were not opening up. No air entered. So I reached for my chest, not to grab at it in hopes of somehow forcing air in, but to probe for parts moving independent of each other. The most obvious sign of a fracture is different areas of connected bone moving in differing directions. So I poked a bit, and found that aside from some pain on contact, nothing seemed to be severely fractured, so my lungs were unlikely to be collapsed. Another breath, again nothing. So I leaned back and tried to extend my torso, to ease up on the internal organs somewhat. Another attempt at breath, while continuing to probe my chest for any obvious injuries. Still nothing. Someone asking if I was alright, but I was a bit annoyed at her, so I reached for the door handle. Unfortunately, without oxygen, I was having some difficulty pushing the door open. Then air started to enter. Gasping would have been painful on abused lungs, so I opted for a more measured approach to refilling them.

Strangely enough, my car still has that new car smell, even on a dusty lot amongst other battered hunks of metal.

Shrug

2006-08-06T00:10:00.000-04:00

I frequently fail to understand some people. Well, that's not entirely true. It is not that I do not understand them, it is that I cannnot empathise with them. Why do they do the things they do? Why do they think the way they do? I know the reasons for these intellectually, but find that the reasons clash violently with my own concept of what should compose a human being's psyche.

To illustrate, allow me to narrate an incident when I was about ten or eleven. My primary school class was on a field trip to one of the refinery islands off the mainland, if it can be called that, of Singapore. I think it was the Shell refinery, but I could be mistaken. I recall sitting on the bus, staring out the window at the sky, utterly taken at the sheer beauty of the sky on that morning. The sky was a clear azure, possessed of the sort of clarity that is sorely missing from our everyday lives. We mix colours, try to make things better, faster, more interesting. In the end, we do nothing but confuse ourselves. We lose sight of the fact that simplicity can be perfect. When we look upon something that is unadorned, we dare not consider the notion that it should be left as it is. Instead, we try to improve it. Everything can be improved, nothing should be allowed to stay as it is. This attitude is a major driver of our concept of productivity, but surely there must be moments when you pause and remark to yourself that things were so much better before complexity blanketed life.

I certainly do. Even now, as I sip a wine, I think about the grape, the year, the producer, the terroir, the way the wine tastes forward and back, the progression as it breathes, the possibility of aging, the possible matches with food or cheese, the way the scent rises as I swirl it. I can remember a time when I would have smiled and sincerely appreciated an easily drinkable wine, no reservations over a screwcap or box. I can also envisage a time when a wine becomes a veritable encyclopedia of information on my tongue. To a very large extent, I enjoyed the boxed wine far more than I would a 1982 Lafite today. The sticky sweetness of a lychee martini was heaven then, whilst a 1974 Bordeaux today would not impress me with its age, but that someone would bother to keep it for over thirty years. Losing the capacity to be impressed is a terribly sad thing, and one I would not wish upon any person, even those I despise, for the despicable do need to be awed now and then.

Returning to the bus, I commented to someone that the sky was quite gorgeous that day. The sky was of a pure blue, and the clouds shone with a radiance that evoked little beyond thoughts of heaven, as it is depicted in popular culture. In return, I received a brief acknowledgement that the sky was quite good looking, but it was all too philosophical for him, then a shrug and return to some inane ten year old game.

I can understand the failure to think about clarity and purity. Perhaps I was simply deluded. I could not understand the shrug. A fatal resignation to the fact that some things were beyond him. I would have at least expected an attempt to think about what he felt he did not comprehend. Instead, a shrug.

I used to think that all people strove to be better than they are. That when they run up against a barrier, they at least contemplate some means of overcoming it, instead of merely shrugging and changing direction. The human spirit should be above that. We should strive and crave and lust for something better. Even if it is nothing more than a superior understanding of what is already before them.

Given that there was nothing particularly deep about the sky that morning, or any other morning, is it so offensive to allow appreciation of simple beauty to grow in one's breast for a moment before dismissing it?

2006-08-05T16:08:00.000-04:00

"I wasn't old enough to be young."
- Michael Frayn, Donkeys' Years

2006-07-30T20:04:00.000-04:00

I finally bought a car today. Not the most exciting choice, but I'll survive.

No more bus! I dance in jubilation.

The purchase, in cash, does bring my financial resources down to pretty much negative. And I keenly felt the danger of driving on the wrong side of the road today.

Still, no more bus!

HTM

2006-07-29T11:46:00.000-04:00

This is so weird.

I just woke up from a dream in which I was at Charlie Trotter's with my parents and brothers. Vivid enough that things were awkward as my parents realised how much the meal would cost, the tiny portions of each course, things like that. There was even a little argument over who would pay the bill. I was doing a comparison of the size of the bill and my salary, deciding that I could afford to pick up the cheque, but getting this idea swatted down by my dad, who wanted to retain his position as chief money dispenser. Now that I think about it, the entire dream was quite realistic, to the point where it mirrors what I would imagine an actual evening at Trotter's with my family would be like. It's fading now, but I could have given you a blow-by-blow account of each course and the conversations with the waiter over the three hour meal. I don't usually have such realistic dreams.

Well, ok, the last course was pizza from Milano's. That tipped me off that it was a dream. Although it's not inconceivable that one of the more avant-garde chefs might produce some interpretation of pizza as part of a hoity-toity meal. After all, Wolfgang Puck did make a career out of smoked salmon pizza. And yes, that was what was going through my mind in the dream.

I think the pizza was probably just a manifestation of too much pizza in real life, and a good dose of nostalgia. I recall Milano's as being among the first pizza delivery places in Singapore, which I rather liked. So I'm busy longing for the more relaxed days of college, and this reached back a bit too far and pulled a memory from an additional fifteen years back.

Which brings me to the topic of work. It bites. Have to wake up early every day, then actually work for 10, 12 hours. Not grunt work either. We get a lot done in those 10 hours. Tiring as hell. At least the company's making money. Should make for a decent bonus if I can stick it out long enough to warrant one. And if I don't lose ten million dollars and get fired.

Taking a walk

2006-07-23T20:46:00.000-04:00

I just read an article about a couple walking through Provence over two weeks. I have to say that it sounds like a tremendously cool experience. Think about it. Walking through the countryside, stopping in the afternoon to lay out a picnic of local wines, bread and cheeses, then taking a little nap under the warm Provencal sky. In the evenings, find a village hotel to rest your aching, blistery feet, then head to a little restaurant to sample the local fare. In the morning, have a stroll through the market, talking to the farmers about their produce and buying armfuls of happy cheese.

What an intimate way of experienciing a country!

I realise that there will be issues with the endeavour. Walking ten kiles a day is tiring stuff. There will be times when you would prefer to simply give up and take a bus to the next town. But there's the great bit. You should feel free to do so. It's not one of those eco-hike things. It's just making your way through a country at a coompletely leisurely pace.

Heh, if farmers still had horse-drawn carts, you might attempt to hitch a ride. In this day and age, you would probably have to settle for a van or pick-up.

What a lovely thought. Now I shall return my mind to the issue of congestion in the power transmission grids of Pennysylvania.

I need a car

2006-07-16T19:30:00.000-04:00

I can't believe it took 2 weeks to set up internet access. Ridiculous.

Also ridiculous that I have to learn a bunch of programming plus a bloody complicated market structure within the next week.

Even the rent I'm paying now is quite ridiculous. I'm in the suburbs. Why am I paying so much?

The quantity of fast food I'm consuming is pretty ridiculous too. Every lunch and dinner is bought from some fast food restaurant or other. I'm actually tempted to wake up earlier to make a packed lunch. At this rate, I'm going to die before my first paycheck is received.

2006-07-02T08:54:00.000-04:00

Ok, that's it for life as a dependent. Also no more Singapore for some time.

If only this didn't entail a twenty hour flight.

Not being paid enough

2006-06-22T08:52:00.000-04:00

I find it amusing that Gucci, Tiffany's, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Morton's and an apparently pretty good restaurant can be found in the building that my office is located in.

Then there's Bloomingdale's across the street, part of a massive shopping complex.

To top things off, a well-regarded French restaurant is within walking distance of my apartment.

List

2006-06-20T00:23:00.000-04:00

Parents do get on one's nerves sometimes. Certainly I look forward to seeing them after some months of separation, but there is a tendency for me to be viewed as a small child rather than an adult. Ok, I speak here of my father. My mom is ok, I guess, and not as overbearing as my dad.

I am a little confused by this characteristic of my relationship with my father. It seems reasonable to expect that his relationship with his parents would provide a model for his relationship with him, but that does not seem to be the case. My father has a position of strength in his relationship with his parents. He is quite independent from them, and pretty much holds his own counsel. Arguments rarely occur, since he always wins, or at least he always does what he wants to. He was given relative autonomy by his parents, and struck out on his own, forging a career and life path that might be approved of, but definitely not laid out by his parents.

In sharp contrast, he feels the need to tell me exactly what to do in every situation. I do not exaggerate. Just today, he has told me three times to sort out my clothes for dry-cleaning. I tell him a particular coat was cleaned just before I left Chicago, he refuses to believe me. Then he gets annoyed when I refuse to place that coat in the pile to be cleaned. See, I'm actually saving him the cost of cleaning a coat unnecessarily.

Another great example is packing. When I was packing to leave Chicago, a certain quantity had been put together before my parents arrived. Then they showed up, and proceeded to remove everything and repack it. Then he informed me that there was no way that I could have packed everything myself. I must say that I most certainly could have, and would have done so on a schedule that was convenient to myself, and not him. When my coats, worth a pretty penny, were being crushed into a piece of luggage that I saw no need to fill to bursting, I protested, pointing out that packing a cashmere coat into a bag so tightly that a full-grown man has to step on the bag into to close it might not be such a good idea. He proceeded to declare that the bag could still fit more stuff, and did so. I wonder if my coats will still fit when I get them back under my control. In the same period of time, four days before I was to leave Chicago, all my clothes were packed into various bags, without my supervision. The result was a shower delayed by an hour while I hunted through bags and boxes to piece together an outfit. Is it too much to ask that I be allowed to know where my socks are to be found?

Here's the thing. It is not as if my choices or behaviour is particularly offensive, but that they are not exactly the same as his. I am a very different person to him. If nothing else, I have a more broadly defined purpose to my life. I do not wish to lead a good life, for I have no idea what that means. He has a conception of what a good person should do. That includes a whole set of behaviours that I see no need to outline here. I find many of these to be irrelevant to myself. I am messy because I barely notice the mess. Since I do not even notice, why expend energy to fold clothes? Whatever can be placed on hangers is. Things like t-shirts worn to bed, I see no point at all in avoiding wrinkles on them. Honestly, I am not bothered by the dry air in Chicago. It just doesn't bother me. In fact, I find that humidifiers create an overly humid and stifling environment.

Ok, this is devolving into a list of grievances. I'll stop now.

I do not know

2006-06-18T16:10:00.000-04:00

Ok, I guess I should toss out one of those graduation posts. Everybody seems to be getting sentimental about leaving college, and I can see why. After all, it is unlikely that most of us will ever return to Chicago, or see the people here again. It is quite unlike Singapore or wherever you are originally from, where after graduation it is fairly certain that you will return to the scene of the crime and see your co-conspirators again, to drag a metaphor out too long.

There are people whom I would be surprised to run into again. People whom I sort of know, but not too well, yet rather like. It's always odd to run into them on campus. You smile and say hello. A conversation is struck up, often lasting for a good deal of time. You find them interesting, engaging, occasionally fascinating, but at the end of the conversation, which has dragged on far too long, causing you to miss a number of buses, you say something banal like 'I have to go.' and hurry off on your way, never even exchanging numbers or email or instant messaging identities. And minutes after the conversation has ended, you no longer even think about these people. I suppose such acquaintances are similar in their roles in my life as certain professors. They provide tremendously interesting moments in my everyday routine, but I would not consider them my friends.

This is in contrast to some people I would consider my friends. There are those friends with whom you do carry on great conversations, intellectual or otherwise. Then there are those whom you are comfortable enough with to not feel the need to fill every moment with speech. A companionable silence is severely underrated amongst the young. It is considered to be a sign that there is nothing left to talk about. I feel that this is a severe misconception. When I claim to enjoy the company of another person, I mean by this that the presence of this person puts me in a better mood. I enjoy being around this person. Whether this person has anything interesting to say at the moment is irrelevant. If I enjoy nothing more than the conversations I have with this person, then it is inaccurate to say that I enjoy her company. Rather, I find the conversation enjoyable.

Is this a difficult concept to grasp? I find surfing Wikipedia or reading an encyclopedia to be interesting. I am acquiring knowledge on a broad and shallow level, expanding the horizons, if not the depth, of my mind. I do not like the encyclopedia. I enjoy the contents of the books. If similar or superior content were to be found in another book, I would be quite glad to abandon the current version for an upgrade. That is the entire concept of Wikipedia, after all.

When I say that I like a person, it is not the content that I am fond of. Content can, after all, be exhausted. At some point, you will have learnt all that you care to learn from any given individual. Beyond that, there has to be something more to bind you in the relationship. Note that when I say relationship, I speak not merely of romantic relationships, but also platonic friendship relationships. Relations of blood are binding by social constraints, so I ignore them here.

So what is it that binds people, or more specifically me, in a relationship? As noted above, the content of conversations could not be it. A prime personal example would be one where the content of conversations is practically nil. With this person, we simply keep asking each other the same one word question, often appended with the name of the addressee, and the rest of the conversation is merely a series of riffs off the whatever comes to mind. I would not claim these to be deep or particularly interesting conversations, but I do enjoy them, for no reason other than that I enjoy the company of this person.

I do not have an answer for this question. Why do I like some people? I do not wish to be them. In fact, in many cases, they are quite the opposite of what I would like to be. Maybe some time in the future I will be able to figure this out, but not now. So I can only shrug and offer a banal 'Je ne sais pas.'

C'est tout

2006-06-12T14:01:00.000-04:00

I guess that's it for Chicago. It's been fun while it lasted.

Chatter

2006-06-10T02:35:00.000-04:00

There are times when nostalgia does seep into my consciousness, evoking a tension in my temples that might be construed as emotional distress. At these times, I try to just grin and toss off a casual remark. Then I bring my will to the fore, and it reasserts itself.

I have changed. I don't think it's in doubt. I have broadened my spectrum of enjoyment of food somewhat. I have become more demanding and critical, both of others and myself. Arrogance has mellowed somewhat into a a calmer self-assurance of superiority. I am more cautious, less willing to take a step further than I can sustain. I am more judgmental and disdainful of those who fall short of my estimation, which is almost everybody. I expect a great deal from others, but am less angry when they fail to deliver. I have adopted a less angry, more detached attitude to life. I pretend less. No longer do I fake approval when it means so little to me.

The people I have met have changed me. I wonder if I have changed them. But the bulk of the metamorphoses have resulted from a gradual loss of interest in many things, and a growing need for mental stimulation.

Oddly, the reverse has occurred in some arenas. I no longer feel the need to fill every moment of every interaction with mindless chatter and mildly amusing stories. Instead, with some people, silences are not uncomfortable, but part of what I desire from them. I can sit and enjoy a sunny afternoon on the lake without a word, or browse a bookstore quietly, or point out something amusing and smile without needing to make snide comments.

I have wasted something like $600 of free food and drink today. All because I went to Trotter's a week too late. Ah well, c'est la vie.

I find the word written on my paper fan to be of immense use. Very inspirational. I have a stone tablet with the same word on it. I shall hang it in a prominent place.

I will miss the lot of them. I think I will, anyway. Yes, even you. I hope.

Chatter chatter chatter. If you read this a lot, then you need another hobby, but I shall produce something more coherent when I feel more coherent. Currently, I want to lazily free-associate. Of course, the less coherent you are, the more narrow free-association tends to be. Which appears to be the case here.

I shall gladly walk away from some people. Others, I may even weep over.

Slouching

2006-06-05T11:42:00.000-04:00

Finished possibly the last final of my life a few days ago, and am currently slouching towards graduation. I could ruminate on academic life, lost friends or other such nostalgic nonsense, but I won't. Don't feel like it. Maybe some other time. Instead, I'm going to geek out over a great old game I recently played through again. I refer here to Star Control II, or the open-source version, the Ur-Quan Masters.

It starts out fairly standard. You're a starship captain from a space colony, returning to find Earth under enslavement, along with every other race in nearby space. The game is essentially about forging alliances, manipulating politics and occasionally shooting the crap out of the slave masters. Most of the game is well constructed, with a fantastic melee segment. The ships each have wildly differing abilities and weaknesses, making for fascinating gameplay. For example, the slave masters, a race known as the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za, have a ship with a powerful medium-range blasting attack, plus the ability to send out little commandos who will attach themselves to the enemy ship and start shooting it to bits. In contrast, probably the single most effective ship against them is a speedy little craft with a pathetic forward shot and the ability to fire a very weak missile backwards. The latter craft is relatively quick, so you just swoop in and out, releasing a few missiles as you flee for your life. After a few rounds of this, a halfway skilled pilot will have worn the Ur-Quan ship down to nothing. Charmingly enough, the pilots of the latter ship are a race of complete cowards who crumble at the slightest threat. In fact, that's how you persuade them to join you. Eventually, they choose to permanently enclose themselves in a shield that prevents any traffic with the rest of space.

Which brings me to the most interesting part of the game, for me at least. The history and psychology of each race are well thought out, and it's difficult not to feel sympathy for your enemies, while occasionally being shocked at how immoral your character can be. Let's begin with the Ur-Quan. Some twenty thousand years ago, the Ur-Quan were a race of solitary hunters who had just begun to explore their solar system. Another race of aliens, the Taalo, came across them, and after some initial conflict, the Ur-Quan were able to control their natural hostility and became part of an alliance of alien races. In fact, the Ur-Quan were great explorers, charting and investigating thousands of unknown worlds. On one planet, they came across the Dynarri, a race of super-intelligent toad-like creatures who could mentally control others. The Dynarri promptly took control of the Ur-Quan, then the rest of the known alien races. The Taalo were immune to the mental compulsions, as opposed to the Ur-Quan, who were particularly susceptible. So the Dynarri compelled the Ur-Quan to exterminate the Taalo, who succumbed without a fight.

For the next two thousand years, the Ur-Quan were slaves to the Dynarri. The Ur-Quan were bioengineered into two races, the green scientists and administrators, and the black warriors and workers. Eventually, one green Ur-Quan discovered by accident that extreme pain would force the Dynarri to disconnect from his mind. So he waited until he was near a communications transmitter, then injected himself with an acidic poison. In the moments before his death, the excruciating pain freed his mind from the Dynarri, and he broadcast his discovery to the known galaxy. Ur-Quan began to inflict extreme pain upon themselves, and in the few precious moments of freedom, lashed out and killed as many Dynarri as they could find.

Eventually, the rebels developed a device, called the Excruciator, that would keep them in constant pain, just short of killing them outright. With every member of the race using this device, a war was fought over many years. When the rebels won, they decided that death would be too kind to the Dynarri, so they bioengineered them into non-sentient translators.

The problem then for the Ur-Quan was how to avoid ever being enslaved again. There was a disagreement here, and two factions formed. The green Ur-Quan, naming themselves for Kzer-Za, the Ur-Quan who had first discovered how to break free from the Dynarri, wanted to enslave every other race in the universe. By controlling all other sentient life, threats would be eliminated. The black Ur-Quan, led by an officer named Kohr-Ar, felt that complete extermination of all sentient life was a preferable solution. The disagreement grew, and a civil war was fought. The Kzer-Za won, but conceded that it was possible that they were wrong. So they told the Kohr-Ar to head in on direction of the galaxy, carrying out their doctrine of extermination, and the Kzer-Za would head in the other direction, enslaving all sentient races they met. When the two met again, another doctrinal conflict would be fought to decide who was right.

The game takes place when this second doctrinal conflict is ongoing. So aside from sympathising with the history of the Ur-Quan, you realise that the slave masters were fighting their brethren for the survival of all life in the galaxy. So the problem is whether you should continue to strive against them when they are advocating slavery over genocide.

In fact, slavery isn't really a terrible thing. The Ur-Quan Kzer-Za apparently do take care of the slave races. A choice is offered to be confined to the homeworld permanently, or to become warrior-slaves. The former option isn't actually such a terrible thing, since most people never make it into space anyway. So enslavement means nothing to most of these slaves. In fact, one alien race had lost their homeworld, and had spent decades looking for a suitable new one to no avail. It was the Ur-Quan who found one for them when they chose to be confined. The latter option seemed to allow relative autonomy. Slaves were not even used in the doctrinal war. In one case, the Ur-Quan prevented a race of battle thralls, as they are called, from devastating themselves via nuclear warfare. Further, all warfare between slaves is prohibited, resulting in a general peace.

Well, that's the central bit of history for the game. Go play it. It's free now. The developers released the source code into the public, so now there's an open-source version available on the internet.

Tru

2006-05-27T20:27:00.000-04:00

Ate at Tru couple of days ago. Hundreds of dollars of free food. Good free food too. In the interests of time, I'm only posting what I ate. There were different preparations for each course.

Amuse-Bouche.

Italian Black Pearl Osetra Caviar, Warm Potato Blini, House-Cured Wild Alaskan King Salmon. Paired with Oberhauser Leistenberg Riesling Kabinett Donnhoff Nahe 2004.

Lobster Crepe, Tomato Confit, Lemon Confit, Basil, Lobster Jus. Paired with Huia Sauvignon Blanc Marlborough 2005.

Roasted Asparagus Soup, Lemon Creme Fraiche. Paired with Muscat Grand Cru Saering Dirler 2003.

Farro Risotto, Fava Beans, Spring Peas, Ramps, Asparagus. Paired with Coteaux du Languedoc Rose de Saignee Bergerie de l'Hortus 2004.

Roasted Tasmanian Sea Trout, Mushrooms, Artichokes, Micro Sorrel, & Sauce Pistou. Paired with Pessac-Leognan Chateau de Fieuzal 2003.

Ok, Blogger seems to have given up the ghost. I'll post the rest later.

More Tru

2006-05-27T20:26:00.000-04:00

Roasted ELysian Fields Lamb Loin, Spring Vegetables, Salt-Poached Potatoes & Lamb Jus. Paired with Muga Prado Enea Gran Reserva Rioja 1996.

Cheese cart. Paired with Napanook by Dominus Estate Yountville 2002.

Desserts. Paired with Tokaji Aszu 5 Puttonyos Chateau Pajzos 1999.

Mignardises and Lollipops.

That's it. Took four and a half hours to get through that. I was absolutely stuffed by the time we got to dessert.

Observe a very stuffed me sucking on a lollipop.

A brief note

2006-05-07T23:35:00.000-04:00

Since I've been to a number of restaurants in Chicago in the last couple of years, I thought I'd offer a very brief note on some of the places that have stood out.

North Pond is a Lincoln Park restuarant with a fantastic setting. It's in a park, right on a pond. You actually have to walk a little way into the park before you even see it. The pond is pretty enough, with reflections of nearby buildings in the mostly still water, ducks gliding about, and all the greenery, or snowy goodness, of the park itself. The food is pretty good, though not spectacular. Quite standard seasonal American fare, though well-executed. I recall a poached duck's egg over a veal sweetbread roulade as being quite outstanding. Not too expensive either. Entrees run about $30, as I recall, and the wine list is quite reasonable. My waitress had a disconcerting habit of leaning over me a bit close, but was friendly and attentive enough. The room is comfortable, decorated in what I have heard described as an Arts and Crafts style. Overall, I like the place. Lovely setting, and generally a well-executed restaurant.

NoMI is another restaurant with a great setting. I would probably venture to say that it has the single best location for a restaurant in Chicago, in the Park Hyatt, eye-level with the spire of the Water Tower. The room is elegant in a nondescript way. Well, pretty much what you might expect from a restaurant in an expensive hotel. Some wood, white tablecloths, stuff like that. Generally a very nice setting. I would say that it makes a lot of sense for power lunching or impressing a date. The food is not bad, but I wouldn't go back for the food at those prices. I would go back for the room and the view at those prices. The service can be a little lacking though. The first time I was there, my party ordered the tasting menu with wine pairings. When the first wine was poured, the waiter didn't bother to tell us what the wine was. I commented on this to another member of my party, and the waiter promptly returned with the bottle and a description. I think it's reasonable to expect to be told what is being poured for you without having to ask.

Spring is great. The service is pretty good, and they make stiff manhattans. The food is quite impressive, at reasonable prices. To my recollection, entrees ran in the high teens to low twenties. The first time I was there, there was a foie gras appetiser, with some cream mixed into the foie gras, paired with honey and brioche. Simple, but quite fantastic. They called it their version of peanut butter and jelly. Skate was pretty great too.

I love Heat. Loads of flopping-fresh sashimi and sushi, and sake pairings. What's not to love? The cooked items were not as spectacular, but solid nonetheless. They even came up with a spicy tuna handroll that I adored, which is surprising considering that I've despised every other version I've tried. Expensive though. $45 to $100 for a fixed price menu, plus $50 for the booze.

one sixtyblue is one of my favourite places in the city. It turns out consistently excellent food, at prices that aren't low, but could certainly be higher. The room is dimly lit, service is attentive without being overbearing, and they have a bar that I would actually be happy to spend time in. Plus they have a warm cheese course that can be really fantastic. They seem to have a habit of bringing it out cold though. The pot is hot, but the cheese is cold or at room temperature. I don't really understand why this is. Perhaps the cheese was in the fridge beforehand? I've heard about this, and experienced it firsthand, several times. Other than that, it's a great restaurant that should be easier to find.

Everest is the perfect special-occasion restaurant. The room is elegant, but not sparkling new. Rather it has a nicely used feel to it. You have sculptures on the tables, art on the walls, and a view of the city from the 40th floor. I've heard lukewarm reviews of the service, but I've only had perfect experiences with it. Food is utterly fantastic, incorporating some ingredients that you wouldn't normally find on a four-star plate, but working beautifully in chef Joho's hands. Wines are among the best selections that I have had in the city. Not a cheap night out, but totally worth it.

Les Nomades is just great. The crowd is a lot older than most places, but the staff is ok with younger patrons. One of the waiters told me that I was the first person he had asked for ID from since he had started work there. The food is pretty classic French, and very very well-executed. I get mildly annoyed that I sometimes get forced to pick a vegetable course, but no big deal. Rack of lamb was easily the best preparation I've ever had, and the souffles were quite incredible. Service can be a bit too meticulous. I've had my cutlery nudged back into place after I move it slightly with my sleeve. Again, not a cheap evening, but worth it.

Ok, so those were some of the more memorable restaurants I've been to in Chicago. There are more, but I don't want to type anymore.

Lazy accusations

2006-05-05T02:56:00.000-04:00

I have to admit that I am becoming annoyed by Singaporeans who keep talking about the PAP as if it were this vastly incompetent political party that is engaging in unfair practices to maintain power.

If you want to criticise the PAP, go right ahead. I'm not particularly a supporter of them, nor of the opposition. What I find annoying is the assumption that the government is meant to provide a perfect environment for all citizens, and any unhappiness on the part of said citizens must be the fault of the government. If you are going to criticise, at least do so based on actual problems, instead of ignorant ranting.

Let's briefly touch on a few of the more common issues that I've been bombarded with recently.

It may be unfair that the PAP is using upgrading of lifts and flats and whatever as leverage in the elections, but whoever said that political parties cannot promise better benefits if they come into power? That is the benefit of being a PAP ward. You have a PAP MP who is able to easily secure lift upgrades for you. It's no different from a politician promising to cut taxes because he is able to influence legislature. Whatever a political party can deliver that the competition cannot, will be used as leverage. What else do you expect? By the way, it is impossible to anticipate what would be considered the norm 30 years from now. Just because today it seems reasonable to expect lift lobbies on every floor, doesn't mean that 30 years ago it was similarly reasonable. 30 years ago, Socialism also seemed like a good idea.

What's wrong with the ERP? If you don't want to pay, take another route. That's the whole idea. And as for the rise in public transportation prices, in what world do prices remain constant indefinitely? All prices rise. That's a fairly reliable rule of thumb. Might as well complain that $0.50 plates of hawker food are no longer available.

5% GST is damn low. Look at similar taxes in pretty much any other developed country. Same for income and corporate tax. Just because it used to be lower doesn't mean that it's high now. Ignorant hicks.

So our ministers are well-paid. What's the problem? The country can't afford a few million a year? American high officials, for example, receive far smaller salaries, but it is almost expected that they will receive increased compensation later from corporate sources that they supported while in office. We expect our ministers to stick around for life and remain spotlessly non-corrupt, so we pay more. Perhaps a bit too much more, but I don't think it's a big deal.

What on earth is wrong with sending popular senior figures of the political party to endorse and support the campaigns of others? Happens in every country. That's the entire point of belonging to a political party. You're not just voting for an individual, you're voting for the party.

Healthcare costs are pretty damn low in Singapore. The government subsidises heavily, and the whole system of CPF is designed to help you pay for what's needed. In the end, you pay a tiny fraction of the original cost. Again, just because it costs more than going to the movies does not make it expensive. Compare with any developed country that does not provide free healthcare or rely on taxes that are multiples of our own. Ignorant hicks.

People complain that the only jobs that are available are low paying. Maybe they are. But if nothing else is available, what's the issue? You think it's below you to be a security guard or chambermaid, but you don't qualify for a job that has higher social prestige. Really, you're just being whiny and unrealistic. You expect the government to magically produce cushy, well-compensated jobs when the entire region's economy is in the shitter. Take the damn jobs, pay your bills, and look for something better. Go look for something better. Don't wait for things to become better. If you think you can do better in another country, go ahead. Don't be surprised if you wind up a street bum. At least in Singapore, you can find a job as a janitor at a minimum. In most other countries, at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, you end up homeless. Plus, if you think the economy is in a mess, why on earth would the government raise CPF contributions again to increase the cost of doing business and reduce the amount in your pocket? Morons.

Why in the world would you want the people who govern you to be of the same level as the common people? I want the people in charge of my country to be smart. As smart, educated and worldly as you can find. I've got nothing against the guy who fixes my car, but I think the kid with a degree from Cambridge is probably smarter and better qualified to rule my country.

Lastly, we do live in a democracy. It just happens to be the case that we vote in a single party to parliament by an overwhelming majority every time we're given a chance. Don't like it? Vote for someone else. No one is going to alter your vote, or break your legs, or arrest you for malcontent. We created a single party democracy, then complain that we vote the single party in every five years. Singaporeans are just complaining about themselves.

Again, I'm not a PAP supporter in particular. I don't really care either way. There's a good chance that I'll never work in Singapore, so as long as the ba chor mee and chicken rice remain available when I'm on vacation, I really don't give a damn. I just think that there are plenty of things to criticise about the PAP if you care to think about it, so fabricating lazy accusations is simply not kosher.

In reference to sexual discrimination

2006-05-03T17:20:00.000-04:00

"Well, I didn't make the rules. I'm just on the winning team."
- Wilson (from Home Improvement)

2006-05-02T00:21:00.000-04:00

Do people really not notice when I'm annoyed? I swallow so many snarky comments every bloody day, but don't get any credit for that. Instead, when I do snarl something on occasion, it's made out to be part of a whole grumpy thing.

Ok, here's a clue. The next time you have an msn conversation with me, and I don't reply for a while to something you type, or do reply with a short, curt statement, and my status doesn't change to (Away) or the like, there's a good chance that you've annoyed me. Not 100% of the time. Just a pretty damn good chance. I probably haven't forgotten about the conversation. I do come from a generation of multi-taskers. But I do get annoyed and close the offending window.

Random ruminations on food

2006-04-30T23:42:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, it is the simplest things, executed beyond perfection, to heights that you never even imagined existed, that grab your attention. I refer here to a bread pudding that I had at TRU last night. Part of a dessert collection, as they refer to it, my first dessert course, after the palate cleanser, of course, included a frozen lemon pudding thing, and a little teacup of bread pudding. These seemed to be fairly unremarkable items, and I must say that the lemon custard was, while not unimpressive, certainly not impressive.

The bread pudding was another story. This was a confection with little of the bombastic taste that so many desserts rely on to wow the diner. Instead, it was light, to the point of almost seeming without taste. Now, I do not say that it was tasteless. Rather, the taste required you to look for it on your tongue. It tasted like any other bread pudding that I have ever tasted, but better. What came to mind as an analogy was the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny. Every other version of bread pudding I had ever tasted were shadows of this. There is a single true bread pudding, and while it is impossible to claim that this was the one, it was certainly a deeper shadow of the central bread pudding than any other I have had previously.

For some reason, it has just occurred to me how Platonic the Amber Chronicles are. I wonder why the obvious never struck me before.

On another food-related note, I recently had a thought about foie gras. There are two classic methods of preparing this food for consumption. The first is the chilled mousse, the second is a seared block. It occurs to me that these represent two extremes of a philosophy of food. A chilled foie gras mousse gives the person who eats it a certain purity of experience, in both texture and flavour. The mousse, being a mousse, should be consistently smooth and uninterrupted in the mouth. The sensation is similar to spreading butter over your tongue. The taste sensation is also quite singular and uncomplicated. There is a buttery smoothness to the taste that is oddly pure and smooth, for all its complexity. Overall, the experience is one of unity, smoothness, consistency.

Seared foie gras is quite completely different. The aforementioned texture and taste still exist, of course. To this is added a contrast. The seared surface is slightly crusty, resulting both in it being rather difficult to cut in an elegant manner, and in it sort of exploding in your mouth. The crust gives way to the butter of the inside bursting into your realm of sensation. The saltiness of the crust too cuts a sharp contrast to the almost sweet flavour of foie gras. Seared foie gras is, for me, a study in contrasts, and it is these contrasts that make it such a shocking pleasure to eat. Seared foie gras elicits eyes widened in pleasure and exclamations of joy. A good foie gras mousse, on the other hand, closes one's eyes in appreciation.

Crapshoot

2006-04-11T18:00:00.000-04:00

The idea of one's afterlife being determined by what one does in life bothers me. It seems quite unreasonable to judge a person by what he has done in life, particularly since there is no clear set of rules. Oh, there are rules, but these are set by other people. There does not seem to be a compelling reason for me to believe that what everybody else in society is telling me accurately reflects the standards by which I will be judged in the hereafter.

We are told from youth that there are a great number of rules that we must follow, if we desire to attain rewards and avoid punishment. I'm not going to bother now with the rules that govern social behaviour exclusively. I doubt that table manners will be a major factor in the judgement of my immortal soul. There are many rules regarding social behaviour that may be considered to involve morality as well. Going about slaughtering human beings on sight will get you arrested and thrown in prison. This particular consequence is an attempt by society to regulate its members and ensure that nobody runs around killing its productive citizens. Murder also may be considered to have moral consequences. It seems clear that we are taught that to kill another human is an immoral act. The more religious would call it a sin, or something to that effect. The question is, who decided that it is a sin to kill human beings?

Certainly it is clearly prohibited in the Bible, and many other religious texts, but these are suspect as representations of the word of God, or whichever deity is relevant. The authenticity of a historical text may be verified to some extent, but the authenticity of a religious text cannot. At least in our modern understanding of religion. Deities are transcendental beings, beyond the human experience. So most humans will never have a direct interaction with a deity. As such, any religious text must be taken on faith. Faith is tremendously problematic, and I'll get to it in a little bit.

I think it's fairly clear that innate moral objections to acts such murder are definitely not innate. Mass murderers and serial killers are human, despite what popular culture and overwrought family members of victims may claim, and they have no compunction over murder. Soldiers in war kill, and are able to justify their actions by pointing to a flag. Move back just a little bit in human history, and we find many paragons of virtue who would not blink at the wholesale slaughter of their enemies. The killing of another human being is not something that runs counter to innate human sentiment. Moral objections to such acts are cultural and social. We are told that certain acts are bad, and after a while, we start to believe it. Guilt is not something that we are born with.

So there is nothing encoded in us that tells us, in detail what to do. That would appear to be the best method for a deity to give people a set of rules, short of personally appearing and giving a briefing every now and then. If we know what we should, without any input from society, then chances we would go and do it. And if we choose not to, then we willingly decide to go against divine will. As things stand, we do not know. I personally have no idea if theft or adultery or murder is going to count against me in the afterlife, assuming that one exists. So the only reason I do not do these things is because of the social conditioning that I have been subject to my entire life. This is a good thing, don't get me wrong. I believe that restricting the behaviour of the masses is crucial to maintaining the kind of society I like. This does not aid me in deciding whether I will go to Heaven or Hell. If I believe that the Bible is accurate, then they will. But I cannot say with any real conviction that the Bible is definitely, without a doubt, completely accurate. What if the whole gig has been a scam by the Devil? Heretical, I know, but not impossible. After all, the documents upon which the Bible was based were not written by Christ himself. Humans wrote them. And we don't exactly have a great track record with resisting the machinations of demons. So perhaps the entire premise of much of Christian regulation of human behaviour has been wrong. Maybe we were encoded with the right thing to do all along, and we are supposed to be raping and stealing and fighting and all that. Maybe we have been manipulated into thinking that resisting the natural impulses to do what is divinely encoded into our souls is the way to ascend to Heaven, when in fact it is the exact opposite.

Now, I don't actually believe that the Bible was written as a joke. I don't. So don't send me emails highlighting your failure to read what I typed.

Without a known code to govern my behaviour, it seems unfair and unreasonable to either reward or punish me for actions that I did not know were approved of or not. While ignorance of the law is not an excuse, at least the information is freely available to anyone who cares to find out. In the matter of judging my life, I have no means of learning what the true code of conduct is. I can guess at which one of the offerings is right, if any at all. So what we have is a system where you are hauled into court for wrongdoings under a legal code that is only known to the judge. Sounds a bit arbitrary to me. Similarly, it seems unfair to receive a reward for accidentally stumbling into the right thing to do.

An identical problem arises with choosing a religion. Assuming that there is some deity or deities, and we are answerable to them, how do we know which one is real? Let's say that believing in the right god will get you into heaven, and believing in the wrong one will land you in hell. Hypothetically speaking, if the true god is some pagan god that has been eliminated by Christianity, then we're all going to hell. In a more contemporary consideration, if the true god is among the ones in current worship, then how does a person discover this? If a person does end up choosing a religion, then this chosen religion will most likely either be the one that his parents or friends believe in, or the one with the most persuasive recruiters.

In the former case, I would be condemned to eternal agony because I happened to be born in a family with the wrong religion. Seems to me that the problem there lies in the god, for placing me there, and not in myself, who has no choice in the matter.

In the latter case, the problem is that it is impossible to choose a belief. You cannot sit down and decide to believe something else, since you would then not truly believe it. So if you are persuaded and charmed by an emissary of a false god, and the recruiters for the true god are simply not capable, then you are condemned because of the competence, or incompetence of others. This is eminently unfair.

Of course, the reverse also applies for rewards.

So we find that our eternal afterlife is a complete crapshoot. Great.

2006-04-07T00:59:00.000-04:00

This is pretty remarkable.

I started reading Anna Karenina online this afternoon at about two. It's quite amazing what you can find online for free these days. Anyway, so I got into it, but thought that I would stop to head to class at about 3. I had somehow persuaded an unemployed friend of mine to read it at the same time as me, so we were chatting and discussing the book as we went. After a bit, I got a little hungry, so I got out of my chair to go grab something to eat, and realised that it was dark outside. Apparently, I had been reading until about 11 pm.

Bloody ridiculous.

Arbitrary, Moody, Unreasonable

2006-04-04T22:47:00.000-04:00

What are the ways I can parse these?

Alphabetical.

Rhythm of the ending consonant.

Separating common meanings to different ends.

Descending pitch to roll off the tongue pleasingly.

Least syllables in the middle.

Beginning vowels at the ends.

People don't understand. The above are the considerations I ran through in the two or three seconds of the breath I drew in as I composed the description. Layer as I might, people don't catch it. I find it intolerable at times. It seems that what I think of as perfectly logical completely fails to register as the same with others. Why do I detest people so much? Largely because so little thought goes into their interaction with me, in particular. I have never found someone who builds and reads conversation on a similar wavelength to me. Each conversation I do have with people is always a mere tiny portion of what strains at my tongue. Nothing I say has its intended effect, or is heard and understood as I mean it, so I so frequently cannot bring myself to bother. And when I grind things down to what is understandable, so little is left of the original intent that it might as well be someone else speaking. As it is. I push against the insides of me, but all that accomplishes is jabbing others. So I reach instead to push at the insides of my skull. At least in that realm, I avoid letting my shadows invade others. Safe. Schizophrenic? I suppose I'll learn that eventually. Maybe I am simply being arrogant. Hubris is a known flaw of humanity, after all. Perhaps it is not that others do not hear everything that is going on when I speak, but that nobody cares to hear it. That is a distinct possibility. After all, what am I but a person who feels no obligation to be nice to others. I am a nice guy, I think. I just don't find that a compulsion exists to be nice to people whom I do not want to be nice to. I do not care what others think of me, beyond that it is not strong enough to incite violence against my physical person, and so I see no reason for anyone to care what I think of them, beyond a reassurance that I will not in the foreseeable future pick up a sledgehammer and pound their skulls in. I lost all faith in the reliability of friendship a long time ago, yet still manage to lose a little more with each passing day. Independence is so underrated. When everything slides off your person with all the ease of barbed wire on bare skin, the only thing you lose is blood.

And that is what I wanted to say, but ground down to an observation of behaviour.

Sweet Dreams

2006-03-29T01:44:00.000-05:00

Last night, I dreamt that I was being tortured. The details elude me, as dreams do, but the general idea was a constant stream of beatings, deprivation, lots of trash talking. I recall that there was one particular torturer who took a fancy to abusing me. Actually, there was a lot of talking. He would taunt me as he damaged me. Just for fun, I suppose.

Then one day, there came news that we would be freed soon, that the torturers were evacuating. When the night before the evacuation came, my special friend showed up and started talking again. A litany of complaints about his superiors, and his sadness at losing the war or something. Again, the details slip from my grasp. Eventually I realised that this fellow was simply being a sentimental. One more torture session for the road. He started telling me that he was going to break some parts of me, enough that I would be left for dead when our rescuers arrived. Specifically, my left arm and shin, certainly a number of ribs, probably a hip. Slow and deliberate fractures. Try to imagine your arm being bent, slowly, to breaking point, then feeling your bones start to crack, to be pulled apart, centimetre by centimetre, a break taking minutes to occur, not a split-second. Then repeat that with as many bones as are convenient to the person doing the bending.

So as he was working on my arm for starters, he was informed that he would have to leave immediately. So I was left with the quick versions of the bone-breaking. Collapsed in a pile in a dark corner of my cell, the rescuers apparently did decide that I should be left for dead. My friends in the other cells, people I had called friends from before incarceration, were so glad to be out that they didn't give my broken form a glance as they shuffled out. No one bothered to check if I was alive. It seemed that the point was irrelevant.

I have cheerful dreams, huh?

2006-03-16T17:10:00.000-05:00

I keep finding evidence of the stupidity of people.

Liar

2006-03-14T01:44:00.000-05:00

I like movies. A great deal. I watch a fair number of them, and thoroughly enjoy the experience and the medium. I must also admit to being a bit of a soft spot for romantic movies. They seem to represent an ideal, of relationships, of serendipity, of people, that I can never realistically aspire to. Ok, action movies do that as well, but romances usually involve people doing things that the average joe could do, if joe could overcome his own resistance to the complete vulnerability that accompanies making a commitment as massive as seen in some movies.

So in the spirit of Valentine's Day, or its one month anniversary rather, I here present the two most wildly and insanely romantic movies I have ever seen. I offer a warning here that these most likely do not top most other lists like this, nor are they even particularly well-known films. They will never be studied in film classes, and in a few years, few indeed will remember them, beyond bored video store clerks browsing the dustiest shelves. They star actors with reputations, at least at the time, for inane and ridiculous performances in screwball slapstick comedies of the lowest grade. At least one does not pretend to be anything but a screwball slapstick comedy. The other has some vestiges of those roots, despite the clear attempt at a more serious portrayal by the actors involved. These movies are 50 First Dates, and Bubbly Boy.

50 First Dates is a movie about a woman, Drew Barrymore, who has an interesting form of amnesia, where she wakes up each day forgetting about the one that had gone before. In essence, she wakes up thinking that it is the same day every day. Her family tries to maintain this charade, constructing a world where she can relive the same day over and over forever. One day, Adam Sandler sees her and chats her up. Eventually he learns of her condition, but decides to try and help her come to grips with the situation. Of course, she forgets about this the next day. But he simply repeats his efforts, perfecting his daily approach. As he falls deeper in love with her, he resolves to make her fall in love with him afresh every day. Every day he greets her in the morning, explains the situation, then takes her on a new first date. Every date is the first, every conversation is the first, every kiss is the first. He marries her, and proceeds to spend the rest of his life courting her and making her fall in love with him again, every single day.

Now tell me that isn't the most bloody romantic thing, and I'll ask what's wrong with you.

Bubble Boy is a kind of adaptation of the Graduate. A boy without a working immune system grows up in a plastic bubble to keep the germs out. The girl living next door visits him often, flirts with him on occasion, then ups and leaves one day to get married. Our hero, Jake Gyllenhaal, broods a little bit, then decides to go after her and tell her of his love for her. So he constructs a little bubble for himself and sets off on a cross-country trip. After various ridiculous adventures, he finds her, opens his bubble, kisses her, and drops dead from infection. As movies go, of course, it turns out he has resistance, and doesn't die. But the point is that as far as he knew, to take that action, to kiss the girl he loves, would be his death. And he did it. No hesitation. So what we have here is a person who has never in his life been outside of his room, walking into the unknown, prepared to travel thousands of miles on foot if necessary, to kiss his love, knowing that it will certainly kill him.

Come on, what kind of cold-hearted beast are you? Just because it's a really stupid comedy doesn't make it any less romantic. And just because renting it probably won't score you any points with your girlfriend doesn't make it any less valuable. Alright, that does make it less valuable.

These aren't great movies by any means. Nothing stand out about them in terms of their creation. No great acting performances here. No brilliant script. I don't even know who the directors are. That doesn't detract from how awe-inspiring the kind of romance in those movies is. It's the kind that warms your heart, then makes you feel completely inferior, a useless and pathetic human being, for you know that you could never do the same. Could you calmly and unhesitatingly step forward into death for a girl who you do not even know loves you or not? Or decide to spend every single day being in love with a woman who wakes up definitely not in love with you? If you can, then you are a far better emotional being than I am. I also think that you are a liar.

Of course

2006-03-13T01:47:00.000-05:00

There's something about the sound of rain hitting a window pane that just soothes me. Not that I'm particularly keyed up at any time, but that sound of splashing and patter and drenching, just makes me want to sleep. If I had my way, it would rain every night, then dry up by the morning. The sun in the morning would be bright, warm, the kind of light you imagine hitting a town square in a small town in France as you sit on a cafe patio, sipping coffee and nothing-watching. Nothing-watching is what I shall from this point on call watching places where you would normally people-watch, except that there are no people there. It's like that town square. A little later, it'll be filled with tourists and locals trying to bilk the tourists. Before that happens, there's nobody milling about. All that's there are the buildings and the light. Light that's bright enough to warm the bones, but mild enough to avoid starting a sweat. By midday the light should wane somewhat. No more direct sun should be coming down. Still bright, just not. Late afternoon, it should feel like it's going to rain. The crispness and chill in the air that tells you that a thunderstorm is on the way. The kind of air that you suck in a lungful of, and feel it clearing the pain and soreness and tension and weariness in your head. For that one moment when that air first enters you, your problems disappear. Oh, they'll be back in the next breath, but for a single glorious second, you feel refreshed. What more can a man ask for? Especially one who feels so keenly the weight of being so aware of himself? The evening should not be warm. Not cold either, of course. What I want is an evening that has a clear sky, stars glittering like the diamonds they must be. The temperature is on a fine knife edge. Warm enough that no curses are issued, but cool enough to warrant an arm drawing a shoulder in. Late night is fine for that thunderstorm, after I'm off to bed, of course.

A parable

2006-03-02T23:25:00.000-05:00

A man and his son began a journey by mounting their donkey and setting off.

As they passed through the first village they came across, the townspeople stared and whispered and pointed. Eventually a young girl went up to them and said, "My mommy says that you should be ashamed of yourselves for overloading that poor donkey like that. The two of you are too heavy for that creature to carry."

The father said, "You are right. Son, you shall ride the donkey while I walk."

So they continued to the next village. Again, the townspeople were staring and whispering and pointing. An old man strode up to the pair and reprimanded the boy.

"Shame on you! You sit there on your donkey like some sort of indolent prince while your father walks."

The boy said, "He is right. Here, father, you ride the donkey while I walk."

When they got to the third village, yet again the townsfolk stared and whispered and pointed. This time, it was a middle-aged woman who yelled, "What's wrong with you? You ride that donkey while your son walks?"

The father said, "When we both ride, they say we burden the beast. When you ride, they say I am burdened. When I ride, they say you are burdened. We shall both walk. That should leave them nothing to say."

At the fourth village, no whispering was going on. Instead, there was laughter. A little boy walked up to them and said, "Why do you walk when you lead a perfectly good donkey? You must be the strangest people I have ever seen."

The moral of the story? Don't ride a donkey. Rent a car instead.

2006-02-26T06:29:00.000-05:00

Never accept mind-altering substances from someone you don't know. It's difficult to determine which way the alteration goes.

Instructions for a remarkable display of gluttony

2006-02-25T05:39:00.000-05:00

1) Go to some Korean barbeque spot and eat until you're full.

2) Order some more food and eat until your stomach is in actual pain from the amount of food in it.

3) Distract yourself for a few hours, perhaps by hitting a karaoke lounge and drinking a little.

4) Walk out into the cold air, cancel the cab you just called, and step into the 24 hour Korean barbeque restaurant next door for supper.

5) Order enough food to feed 4 starving people.

6) Eat until you feel queasy.

I can hardly believe I ate so damn much. It's bloody ridiculous. I think I'll swear off Korean barbeque for a little while. Maybe a year or two.

2006-02-18T21:42:00.000-05:00

An extraordinarily compelling reason not to have kids.

Tired

2006-02-18T01:10:00.000-05:00

Time to stop relinquishing the initiative. This is no longer acceptable. If it comes to that, then forget it.

Forget it.

2006-02-13T02:41:00.000-05:00

"I'd rather be a lamppost in Chicago than a billionaire in any other city."
William Hulbert

Point of No Return

2006-01-30T19:56:00.000-05:00

To truly learn the meaning of leaving yourself no way to return, discover that the coin machine is not working after you've loaded up the washing machines and poured in the detergent.

Dissatisfying

2006-01-29T13:12:00.000-05:00

When I woke up this morning, I lay in bed for a moment, watching the indistinct blotches of colour float across my field of vision. Then I turned my head to see my pillow, sharply in focus, and one thing became clear to me.

I will probably never be at home for Chinese New Year again.

Well, that statement is not exactly true. I will be at my home, wherever it is, for every Chinese New Year. I will not be in the home of my parents, with the family that is what family is to me now. I will likely never again taste that soup that my grandmother makes only on New Year's Eve, or grudgingly grab a few mandarin oranges to pay my respects to my elders, or wander about strange HDB estates to visit relatives I see exactly once a year.

This might be a frightening thought for many people. After all, this means a separation from one's roots. Your family becomes something less than it was. Chinese New Year, once a time when family is all-important, and every activity, thought, sight is designed to remind you of that, has now become a phone call home, a few minutes of bland, pointless, falsely cheery conversation. Then it is over. Both for you and for your family. You go back to your life, doing whatever it is you do. Most likely a night in front of the television, eating takeout. Perhaps Chinese takeout, in honour of the occasion. Your mother sighs, replaces the telephone receiver, then turns to her other children, or her husband, or whoever it is she celebrates the festival with, and heads out to do her thing. Your family is not depressed and gloomy when visiting or being visited simply because you are not about. On the contrary, they most likely find things to be almost exactly the same. Except that your mother has to collect the red packets on your behalf. Perhaps there is a sense of something lacking, but they continue on their merry way regardless. You are not essential to their celebrations.

That is for others. What bothers me the most is that the above does not apply to me. I do not find myself deeply disturbed that I will not share Chinese New Year with my family in future. I merely note it. I do not feel the need to try to substitute friends for family and put up some false pretense of cheeriness. It really is just another day for me. A weekend this year, so mildly more pleasing than most other days, but for no other reason.

Do I lack emotion? Perhaps my problem is cold blood. I feel no loss when I sit at home on Chinese New Year's Eve and eat takeout sushi while watching Saturday Night Live. In fact, I find it superior to jostling with hordes of people in the weak excuse for Chinatown that is to be found in Chicago, waiting for hours to be seated in spite of a reservation, then eating profoundly dissatisfying "Chinese" food that is prepared in a style that is not from my own heritage. I am not from Sze Chuan, nor do I have any relatives, to my knowledge, who are. That food is not my culture. No more than sushi or a prime rib. If that is the case, then why not choose an alternative that is better, on an objective level, than truly awful "Chinese" food?

I do not think that I lack feeling for my family. When my parents called, then messaged me, I barely bothered with the classic greetings, that much is true. Instead, I asked about the various medical conditions of my grandparents. That concerned me far more than some annual festival celebrating the coming of spring and the beginning of the planting season. What on earth has that to do with me? It concerns me that members of my family have health problems. It does not concern me that I am not consuming pineapple tarts and receiving money from virtual strangers.

Even so, I sometimes wonder what I really feel when I experience concern. I do not experience a surge of emotion, or even anything that I can really identify as emotion, really. I simply realise that the situation is something that I should be concerned about, make an assessment of how concerned I should be, then take the appropriate action and make the appropriate expression of concern. It all seems to be inspired far too much by my entirely rational side than any emotional side. I do not feel panic when I learn of somebody close to me being in trouble, but rather I think about the situation and begin processing all possibilities that I see. I think about how the situation should be best resolved, rather than expend energy simply thinking about the terrible possibilities. Does that make me lacking in emotion? I do not know. I simply know that this is the way I am. I let my mind grasp situations and handle them, rather than simply react to them.

I shall now stop and go tend to my braised pork ribs. They call to me.

Chocolate Cake

2006-01-02T01:06:00.000-05:00

Blogging on request. Huh. A little further west than the last time I did this, to my recollection, but here goes anyway.

Chocolate cakes can be odd things. The smaller and darker they are, the greater the effect they seem to have on girls. As if there's a complete loss of self-control whenever the scent of chocolate is in the air. The way I look at them, chocolate cakes are sort of like the frivolous aspect of pastries. They serve very little purpose in terms of nutritional value, and are certainly less serious than a pound cake, for instance. A chocolate cake is designed to be sweet, heavy, indulgent. Most versions involve sticky, gooey messes of cocoa derivations that constantly threaten to stain a cheek or shirt or dress. For this reason, I suppose, a chocolate cake would be inappropriate for any occasion that demands a certain level of decorum. For instance, a chocolate cake might be served as dessert after a meal with family or friends in a restaurant, or at a birthday party. Something like that. Whereas it would not be so appropriate for a business luncheon or formal dinner. Imagine trying to close a deal with an important client with chocolate stains on your tie. Hardly worth thinking about. So take note, all you eager little bankers and whatnots out there, no chocolate cake when still on the job.

A chocolate cake is viewed as a sort of indulgence, and this indulgence has become a standard, thereby losing its status as an indulgence. Look at any dessert menu in America, and you will see a chocolate confection of some kind. I recall when I was a child, and chocolate based confections were not nearly as common as they are today. Today, I would think nothing of a chocolate cake being brought out for dessert. When I was a far smaller creature than I am now, chocolate cake was a treat, a delight. Of course, if I had not viewed chocolate cake as such a delight, I might still be a far smaller creature than I am now.

Strangely enough, when you think about it, chocolate cakes are an odd type of indulgence. A decadent treat should be something that is far above the ordinary, and is considered superior to most other things in the same category. If not, there would be no reason to indulge in something when there is a less guilt-inducing alternative. Yet none of the memorable desserts that stand out in the limp sea of my mind have been chocolate cakes. I recall a fabulous lemon tart, all light and breeze upon my tongue. Chocolate ckes, to my recollection, have almost always been heavy things, reliant upon overpowering flavours to pummel your taste buds into submission. I suppose chocolate cakes are to pastry as perhaps barbeque ribs are to meats. Considered an indulgence, but lacking in any subtlety. Try to imagine a sublime barbeque rib. What might come to mind is a wave of flavour and texture. What is desired is accomplished, but hardly the best experience possible. The guilt that should accompany such indulgence is strangely stronger for the single dimension of pleasure. How can you feel guilty for eating a lemon tart that draws a smile out of your lips whenever it comes to mind?

But I have come to grow weary of pursuing that perfect pastry, with complexity and depth, leaving an indelible mark on the memory. Perhaps resorting to chocolate cakes to satisfy that sweet tooth, without worrying about finding extra dimensions to the taste sensation, would be be easier and ultimately more satisfying for not failing to meet lofty expectations. After all, how can you be disappointed when all you ask for is what you get? And if there is something beyond the transient blast of taste, that is a surprise, more likely an anomaly than anything else. Still, for the moment, having given up looking for the ultimate lemon tart, there is no rush to scrabble for chocolate cakes. I can hardly even bring myself to finish eating those cakes that do find their way onto my plate these days, let alone go about searching for dessert.

In case you still haven't cottoned on, I'm not talking, or typing, really, about chocolate cakes.

Things to raise a glass of Champagne to

2005-12-25T07:42:00.000-05:00

Trashy dance songs that inspire a wave of short-sighted nostalgia.

That same nostalgia raising a frission of fear that I may have screwed up something that might have actually been important.

The dozens of brilliant short stories I've read this year.

Another year, another edition of FM.

Family dinners and remarkably well-priced bottles of Veuve and St. Julien.

Shirts with interesting stitched details.

Losing teeth with every trip home.

That pounding, piercing headache that greets me every morning.

A bouquet of roses, working out nicely.

A panicked thought of carved wood.

Final Fantasy 12, a single player game.

PS3 finally having a release date.

A quiet holiday back home, achieved by avoiding publicity.

忍

Rain heavy enough that I could barely see the roads in the middle of the day.

Doctors and staff at NUH and St. Luke's.

Sneaky nurses.

Evil people.

Picking a topic.

Anti-social people.

Forced, uncomfortable, fearful, panicked, unclear, inaccurate clarifications.

And most of all, roti prata.

Too bad

2005-12-16T20:54:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I wonder if I set an impossible standard for others. Perhaps I simply expect too much from people, and when I'm disappointed, I have simply set myself up for it. I have wondered before if I am becoming an idealist, and I think the answer to that is becoming increasingly clear. I have idealised the behaviour of those I know to the extent that I am surprised by what I already know about them.

On many an occasion, I am tempted to snap at some people, to remind them to be polite, to do the right thing, to show some consideration. Then I stop myself, swallow my words, tell myself that I have no right to tell people how to behave or what to say. Even when I might be considered to have that right, by some vagary of social norms, I personally find it profoundly irritating when others try to tell me what to do with regards to an arbitrary standard of behaviour, so I endeavour to avoid doing just that to others. A case of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, I suppose. It seems to me to be an extremely reasonable way of going about your life.

I do not necessarily mean in the exact sense of the phrase, where you really act towards others in a way that you would want them to act towards you, but rather I mean that the same standards should be applied. For example, I am certainly not as pleasant to a waiter as I would expect him to be to me, but I treat him in a way that I feel is reasonable considering that I am a paying customer, and he is compensated to serve me. I respect him as a human being, but recognise that in that particular setting, he is an underling. Similarly, if I were a waiter, I would expect such an attitude from the customers. I see no reason for service staff to complain about being bossed around by fussy customers. That's their job. I would understand complaints about unreasonable abuse or physical demonstrations of displeasure. That is beyond the bounds of what is covered by professionalism.

I can barely stand it when I have to swallow hard and look away, but I do that because it is the way I believe I should lead my life. Then when I think about it, I realise that there is no reason that I should be upset, since I mostly already know what that person was going to say or do. I can sometimes read people pretty well, and most behaviour is well within the bounds of expectation. I can fairly effectively anticipate how people will react to many given situations. Most reactions are far from pleasant. Yet, I somehow assume that these same people will adhere to some ridiculous code of conduct that I make up for myself, even when this code clearly contradicts what I know will be done. Always, when I find myself surprised and repulsed by the actions of others, upon the slightest reflection, I can see no reason to be surprised. The repulsion remains.

Most people would say to this that this is the way the world works, that's life, too bad, get on with it, accept it and adapt.

I say that this is the way the world works, and it's a pity.

Ahhh

2005-11-30T00:05:00.000-05:00

The greatest example ever of the failure of modern science has now been unravelled.

2005-11-29T21:54:00.000-05:00

MIT produces something that could lead to the downfall of capitalism, and this is what NTU was working on?

More internal brain activity, eh?

2005-11-28T23:06:00.000-05:00

I'm going to avoid commenting on this one.

Temptation is the universe trying to tell you to do the right thing

2005-11-27T00:42:00.000-05:00

My last Thanksgiving in Chicago, eh? Pretty sedate, as it turned out. Did not get drunk, declined the opportunity to get drunk, stayed almost completely free of alcohol for a couple of days, avoided going anywhere horrendously expensive for once.

Although I do find myself missing the possibility. Not a good sign. Losing control. Will have to either stop or just push things through.

Some people I know get all emotional over the thought of a last anything in a particular place. I personally do not. I've thought about getting sentimental, but I really am not that kind of fellow. I'm more the sort who is occasionally seen as callous and cold because I don't display the sort of lingering emotion that is most commonly seen before graduations and at airports. I would be quite happy to take a cab to the airport from home, especially considering that my flights from Singapore always leave so damn early in the morning.

I will not complain about my parents sending me off, since it is a nice gesture. I shall also avoid any more complaints about people being nice to me, since I feel guilty about feeling bad about feeling guilty. Suffice it to say that I think I shall live a life quite happy if it should be relatively free of connections too close.

I do not like the idea of growing dependent on others for my happiness, contentment and peace of mind. I would be quite happy, I think, living in a lavish apartment by myself, with a maid to come in and clean, perhaps a chef to whip up something once or twice a week, a chaffeur for wherever I feel like going, and maybe a couple of friends who I can have drinks and dinner with on occasion. With regards to the last, I shall have to improve on what I have now. I'm beginning to, well, alright, I have pretty much lost all faith in most friendly relations I possess at the moment. In general, I seem to overestimate people, and the affection they might hold for me. In the rare case that I do not, I come to care less and less for their company. Can't be a good thing. I do not wish to feel obliged to be nice to people, and I recoil at the idea that anyone feels any sort of obligation to be my friend if they have no real liking or affection for me. I hate it when I can sense that some people think that they are friends with me, so they should be nice and spend time with me. It's like reflexively proclaiming a baby to be cute, even if it is the ugliest creature ever to appear upon the earth. Or pretending to appreciate a piece of art simply because it is expensive and hangs in a famous museum. I am trying to clip and cut away those people in whom I sense this obligation. Don't bother. I don't appreciate the effort. I would prefer an honest lukewarm acquaintance to a forced warm friendship. Honesty is a thing I appreciate greatly.

No energy can be a good thing

2005-11-24T13:18:00.000-05:00

There really is a reason I never bring people back to my place, wherever it is, after drinking. You wake up with people strewn all over the shop, and probably vomit on your floor, bed, laptop, in your closet, over your toilet. And people always seem to select the moment when you're not around to throw up. Why is that? Is it because even when you're completely smashed, there are still some reservations about completely embarrassing yourself in front of others? Of course, you're drunk, so it doesn't occur to you that it is equally embarrassing to be seen lying in a pool of vomit as creating it.

Anyway, here is evidence of why I don't like drunk people in my room.

Not me, thankfully, but my roommate's this morning. Thanksgiving hell. It's karma. What you inflict comes back and hits you back eventually.

Sometimes having no energy to go out can be a good thing.

A view and a library

2005-11-13T13:52:00.000-05:00

There must be worse ways to spend a Sunday morning.

I woke up this morning to the usual spotlight. The key difference was that I had left my glasses on the window ledge beside my bed, so I put them on and lay there for a while, gazing out my window. In this manner, my day began with a view of the utterly gorgeous sky. It's the sort of sky that penny novelists wax poetic over. It's clean, gentle, brilliantly blue. At the very periphery of my vision, there were some clouds hanging out further out over the lake. The blue of a clear, sunny sky really is the most amazing colour I have ever encountered. There's a sort of lazy warmth to it, but somehow also a startling clarity. I could stare at the sky forever on a sunny day.

Then I read a novel. The new one by Gaiman. Utter brilliance. The only complaint I might have of the man's novels is that he writes them so infrequently. What I admire is not the quality of the prose, for there are so many people who can produce a turn of phrase prettier than he. No, it is the weaving of stories, of fantasy that reveals a subtlety of imagination that goes beyond anything I can aspire to. Even as the fantastic is scribed, the humanity of the situation is retained. The question that fascinates is not how fantastic a world we might discover or create, it is how you would react when faced with this new world.

Zelazny's Amber chronicles imagined an utterly fascinating universe, with characters so strong that you could not help but imagine that they are archetypes. Each of the characters was so recognisable and familiar from the first moment you meet them, but you know that you would never meet someone quite like that. But everyone you meet is something like them. Therein lies the brilliance.

Gaiman's characters are different, in that these are people you know, people you are. The insecurities, awkwardness, aspirations. These are the stuff of reality as opposed to the conceptual personalities of Amber. Thinking about how these characters would react to an improbable situation is akin to projecting your own reactions. As reality is unwound and rewritten, how do you think about it?

Anyway, not looking to explain my literary preferences here.

I spent a few hours curled up on my couch, reading the new Gaiman novel, listening to old Chinese music and occasionally looking out at the lake. For just a little while, life was as perfect as it could be. I felt so right. This is what is meant by enjoying your own company. Alive, relaxed, happy. Maybe this is all I need out of life. I don't need the private jet and the personal assistants and the bodyguards and the cool restaurants and the castle. Well, maybe if the castle had a lake view and a library.

Surprising

2005-11-11T15:01:00.000-05:00

I guess I'm down one thing to complain about.

Six basic flavours?

2005-11-01T22:00:00.000-05:00

Somehow, it's a little bit sad.

Unacceptable

2005-10-30T22:09:00.000-05:00

This is very depressing.

Way too many uses of 'different'

2005-10-30T02:34:00.000-05:00

I have a lot to do, so this will be brief.

The last couple of Fridays, I went out on the lake. No particular reason. Someone wanted to do it, so I tagged along. Turns out it was an excellent idea.

When I was out there, freezing half to death from the icy slashes of wind, I looked at the city from the other side. And I was awed. For sheer size, I suppose New York would have Chicago beat. But the skyline in this city is so much more pleasingly put together. Each building is dripping with character, clashes proudly with every other, but somehow the whole is beautiful.

It's fairly obvious that Gotham City is based on Chicago, but I have to say that it's not a fair reflection. In Gotham City, the buildings are dark and foreboding, crumbling under their own myth, an embodiment of the festering corruption that taints the people in the buildings. You can feel so much more pride emanating from the buildings of Chicago. They may not be the largest in the world, or even America, but they are each unique. Ugly, perhaps. But placed together in context, the skyline looks like a comic book representation of an idealised urban centre. Not the Metropolis ideal, where it's bright and sunny and the huge skyscrapers catch and amplify the light. No, not that ideal. But a serious city. One where people go to work, not to chase a dream. Not a city teeming with life, but one with a calm, subdued manner.

The good thing about going out on the lake on consecutive weekends is that I saw it in light and night. In the day, the skyline is what I would present to an observer to show what a modern city should look like. At night, it is simply a gorgeous, comfortable view. It is the view that I want from my window at night.

When I was a kid, I remember watching some movie on television, about a doctor. The storyline is irrelevant, but what caught my imagination was a scene where Fox stood before the window of his apartment in the evening, with an incredible landscape of skyscrapers unfolded before him, dramatic and sharp. I decided then that I wanted that sort of view from my window.

When I first went to the John Hancock bar at night, I was stunned. The view was exactly what I had envisioned for my dream window. Buildings looming before you, dark, spotted with lights in their windows, outlined against other skyscrapers, razor sharp and clean. I could sit there and stare forever. Gorgeous.

In other news, I'm not sure anymore. I suppose that I used to be, but things change. But it seems a dramatic change when no one event is the trigger. I know others will point to some things and proclaim those the turning points, but I don't work like that. Maybe I work differently than I think. Maybe this is just different from before. Maybe I'm changing a bit, looking for something a little different.

In the end, my indicator is what I think of as I lie in the dark, waiting to fall asleep.

Love the news today

2005-10-17T16:25:00.000-04:00

Articles to make you marvel at the advance of science, and to applaud the level of civilisation we've attained.

The Point of No Return

2005-10-16T17:44:00.000-04:00

Recently, one particular scene from the Phantom of the Opera has been replaying in my head. Kind of like a song stuck in your head, except this one comes with video.

When the phantom emerges in the Don Juan scene, covered in the cloak, and begins to sing "The Point of No Return". That's the scene. The phantom approaching Christine, playing a man playing a scene, but really singing a dream, a fantasy. He cannot persuade Christine, so he coerces the entire theatre to put on a production, just so that he may sing about her giving in to him, and she is forced to sing to him. When he sits on the bench next to her, reaching for her, but holding back, then pulls away when she reaches back, his head droops just the slightest amount as he turns away, betraying the pain, the despair that he has already succumbed to. He knows that Christine has already chosen Raoul over him, and the playacting of the song is the closest he will ever come to Christine willingly choosing him.

Oh, lyrics.

PHANTOM: You have come here
In pursuit of your deepest urge
In pursuit of that wish which till now
Has been silent
Silent.

I have brought you
That our passions may fuse and merge
In your mind you’ve already succumbed to me, dropped all defenses
Completely succumbed to me
Now you are here with me
No second thoughts
You’ve decided
Decided.

Past the point of no return
No backward glances
Our games of make-believe are at an end.

Past all thought of “if” or “when”
No use resisting
Abandon thought and let the dream descend

What raging FIRE shall flood the soul
What rich desire unlocks its door
What sweet seduction lies before us?

Past the point of no return
The final threshold
What warm unspoken secrets
Will we learn
beyond the point of no return?

CHRISTINE: You have brought me
To that moment when words run dry
To that moment when speech disappears
Into silence
Silence.

I have come here,
Hardly knowing the reason why
In my mind I’ve already imagined
Our bodies entwining
Defenseless and silent,
Now I am here with you
No second thoughts
I’ve decided
Decided.

Past the point of no return
No going back now
Our passion-play has now at last begun.

Past all thought of right or wrong
One final question
How long should we two wait before we’re one?

When will the blood begin to race
The sleeping bud burst into bloom
When will the flames at last CONSUME us?

BOTH: Past the point of no return
The final threshold
The bridge is crossed now
So stand and watch it burn
We’ve passed the point of no return.

PHANTOM:(soft and sort of saddened) Say you’ll share with me
One love, one lifetime
Lead me, save me from my solitude

Say you want me
With you here
Beside you
Anywhere you go
Let me go too
Christine that’s all I ask of…
(Christine tears the mask, showing his face to the audience)

Come on, where else in popular culture have you encountered another character who is a complete maniac, murderous psycho, lacking in any sort of social charm or skill, ugly to boot, but is so completely sympathetic. When he lets the lovers go, people cry, because it's somehow the saddest possible outcome. After all that has happened, the phantom crumbles when the first sign of compassion is shown. He gives them the easy way out, and they take it.

Ok, that's my two cents worth on the play. I think it's kind of a cool piece. Forget about the movie version. Go to Broadway and watch it.

2005-10-04T17:08:00.000-04:00

Rrrrgh, so pissed off.

Too pissed off to sit and type.

Must stand and mutter angrily while pacing.

Maybe later.

Hypocrisy, favours and balance sheets.

Spin

2005-09-28T16:57:00.000-04:00

I really don't see how it's being arrogant to think that a recruitment is like any other transaction, and both parties should respect each other.

Or that a company that fails to do so has fallen in my esteem.

Or for that matter, to have a strong distaste for the obvious lack of honesty and reality in the schmoozing that seems so important to the job search.

As I get along in life, I realise that I really am a terribly honest and straightforward guy. Most of the time, I mean what I say, and say what I mean. Very much a cliche, but pretty true for me. There are times when I say that I lie a lot, but that is a more fundamental issue. For the immediate, and for what I am at the moment, honesty works.

Except that it apparently doesn't.

I don't want to spin things. I don't want to pretend to be anything. I don't want to pad and exaggerate and lie.

2005-09-23T21:51:00.000-04:00

Here's an experiment in posting pics. Never bothered to figure it out before.

Gays

2005-09-23T21:27:00.000-04:00

There's something I thought about a little while back, but pretty much slipped out of my mind until I was reminded of it last night.

Gay men and their defenders like to declare that there really is no reason for the average straight man to get all uptight and worried about their presence. After all, the same principles apply here as they do for relations and interaction between straight men and women. Straight guys do not find every women they meet to be attractive, nor do straight women gaze with lustful eyes upon every man they encounter. If you, as a straight man, do not find that you are being sexually harassed at every turn by countless hordes of women, there really appears to be no need to be overly worried about gay men lusting for your ass.

In other words, what makes you think gay men find you attractive? Why should you be any more uncomfortable interacting with gay men than with straight women? There's no need to flee to the most hidden corners of the gym dressing room to avoid being naked under the gaze of people you think are gay.

Ok, here's the thing. That's bullshit. The reasoning is correct. There is no reason to assume that homosexuals find you particularly attractive. Most men who think that they are the object of gay affection probably hold too high an opinion of themselves, and too low an opinion of the standards of homosexuals. It is ridiculous to constantly worry about gay men looking at your ass in the street.

However, simply think about the situation as similar to that between straight men and women. It is true that not all straight men and women find each other attractive, but even without actual attraction, there does exist a definite level of tension between the genders. Simply because there does exist the very real possibility of sexual relations occurring, barriers and distinctions are made. Men and women do not share dressing rooms, no matter the actual attraction between individuals. Or shall we designate three separate sets of dressing rooms, one for men, one for women, and a shared one for ugly men and women?

The very idea is preposterous, yet that is the natural conclusion of the argument deriding the lack of comfort some straight men have with gay men. I might not be worried about a particular gay man finding me attractive, but I would still not be comfortable undressing in front of him, simply because there is a possibility of it. I would not undress in front of an unfamiliar woman either, whether or not I think she might find me attractive. I would be rather upset if an ugly woman walked into the room and started changing before me.

If homosexuals are to be treated equally with the general population, then they should be regarded equally. Equal does not mean forced acceptance of whatever standards they choose to preach, but the applications of the same social norms to them as to every other person in society.

Tired, don’t want to go into detail.

Looking forward to nothing

2005-09-18T18:46:00.000-04:00

Finally, off to the US in a few more hours. Damn tiring summer, this one. Bloody exasperating too.

I tried to be patient, I really did. In fact, I think I did a better job than anyone else could be expected to. Is it really so hard to understand that I don't really care all that much about some things? Is it really impossible to listen to what I have to say, softly as I may speak? Why can't I just be left alone to think things through? I am capable of so many things, and this is the least of them. So leave me to think things through.

Other than irritation, a fairly unemotional summer. Or more precisely, a more emotionally chilled out summer. I felt nothing but the slightest of ripples, though by all reports, others felt quite a bit more. No more hidden messages, or suspicions of them. I made peace with some, had to declare war again swiftly on one of the same. I'm a nice chap, but please don't claim that I am something that I am not.

One moment of forgetfulness did bring the single moment of pain. A collection of photos, two faces close together, smiles slight and massive, unsuited to their frames. Pain, for a moment. You're worth much more than that, but what can I say? I don't know so many things, that I think it presumptuous to feel joy or sorrow on your behalf.

No more summers then. The last one is past, and nine more months of nothing loom.

Where's Spidey when you need him?

2005-09-17T18:11:00.000-04:00

Meet Electro.

I like food

2005-09-15T13:58:00.000-04:00

I'm not entirely certain if I qualify as a foodie. I have a sort of ambivalent relationship with a passion for food. Imagine that, a relationship with a feeling. How odd.

As many people who know me can attest, I can be quite passionate about good restaurants, great food, skilled chefs. I spend a good deal of time researching restaurants and learning about the chefs that run them. One of my more common opening questions on msn is to ask if the person on the other end of the keyboard wants to go to a cool restaurant. Note that this is not specific to an eatery, but to a group of them. This group is fairly arbitrarily defined, and mostly composed of places I have yet to visit.

I think I must be inclined toward the degustation method of sampling restaurants. Most places, I have little interest in prociding with repeat business. Once is usually enough, even if the food is good. For me to really want to go to a restaurant I have already been to again, there has to be something about the experience that stands out in a way that strikes me in a very particular manner. I dream about such places, I really do. It goes beyond the food, the service, the room. It is some amalgam of the three, but then again, not. There are restaurants with truly sublime food, the type that you cannot believe that you really are tasting. Take the first bite, and you stop, thinking that it is simply impossible that you are tasting what you are tasting. The second bite confirms the impossibility of it. Nothing could really taste quite as delightful, or rich, or quirky. The third bite, and you are down to earth again, marvelling that you had risen so far, but never reached new heights of your own. Eating someone else's food is like admiring a painting. You may observe and experience it, but it is never a part of you. You don't know what went into it, not really. Even if you were to watch the artist, all you would see is the act, not the thing.

Think of it as a play. The playwright, director, producer, actors and audience all experience the play differently. Who has the true understanding of it? No one, for each aspect is as true as it is impossible to find. Yet each aspect is as complete as it needs to be.

Pointless drivel aside, I find it very hard to define what exactly it is that will keep a restaurant on my list of places to go to. I adore Babbo in New York. I'm not really sure why. The food is fantastic, the room decent, the service acceptable. It is also tremendously overcrowded and impossible to get a table at earlier than 10.30 pm. What could it be that keeps me going back? I really do not know, for all of the above can be found in other restaurants. Similarly, Les Nomades is snooty, with pretty decent food and a very sedate room. I cannot imagine why I keep going back, except that I do. I enjoy my time in that place, more than in other restaurants, with better food, service and a prettier room.

Perhaps it is personality. Restaurants are like people. Some people you like, some you do not. Logic always fails to explain this. The people whom you cannot stay away from are often characterised by the most annoying habits. You find it profoundly irritating when they are too chirpy, or act petulant, or demand far too much from you. Yet you give in, pretending that everything's ok. Then those people who are exactly the sort you imagine yourself spending a lot of time hanging out with, turn out to have exactly zero chemistry with you. Yes, chemistry. Just like cities, restaurants have a certain energy about them that either works for you or not. Well, alright, works for me or not.

I have no interest in chefs personally, only their food and philosophy when it comes to creating a dining experience. There is a reason that I almost always order the tasting menu whenever I can. It is true that I would probably enjoy my food a lot more if I were to simply order entrees, plates and desserts that I know I will enjoy, but that seems to defeat the purpose of going to a restaurant in the first place. I don't need to know how perfectly a sous chef can execute a classic, I want to know how the executive chef thinks a meal should taste and look like. It is akin to the difference between reading contemporary fiction and science fiction. Contemporary fiction seems to me to be mostly about perspectives on life. Take events that we know occur about us all the time, and look at them differently. While that may be interesting, I find it much more so with science fiction. The science fiction writer creates a world. Perhaps not a world he thinks should be, but a world where there is a sort of internal logic, where given what he has decided as a parameter for the world, everything else is, to a certain extent, inevitable. A proper tasting menu has only one iteration for that moment. There is no other way in which the chef would have presented a culinary experience on that moment then in that way, those dishes in that order with those presentations. The inevitability of creativity. And it is in that inevitability that I can experience the work of the chef. My palate is his canvas, to slide into cliches. I become the creation, in that my experience is what is created.

No more, I am tired. I will explain the ambivalence some other time.

Bourgogne, Comte and the Simpsons

2005-09-11T18:30:00.000-04:00

I'll miss nights like these.

Defined by a wine, a cheese, a cartoon.

Or a view, an ashtray and gin tonics.

Perhaps beer, a cake and bridge over the river kwai.

How about manhattans, hedgehog carpaccio and a coat?

Maybe a box of wine, tuna fish and lots of rolling around.

Of course there are other nights.

Some I won't miss, but cannot forget.

Tickets, a drink, an email.

Margaritas, jetlag and a phone call.

Kobe steak, an expense account and a spilled glass of cristal.

A river, rain, tears.

Whisky, solitude, anger.

But sometimes a nnight can be defined by just one thing.

One thing can make a night to miss, a night not to miss.

A smile.

The touch on my lips.

Grasping my hand for just an instant.

Sometimes all that's needed for a perfect night is a phone call.

One call, and I will sleep with a smile.

But those I cannot stand to hear from call me so often, but those I want to call never do.

Tactics, I shall use them.

Keep my head, my heart, my wallet safe.

Perhaps the last shall fall.

A perfect restaurant

2005-09-06T15:08:00.000-04:00

A couple of days ago, I dreamt about my perfect restaurant. A place where you go to feel, just for a moment, that you really are special, and everything that is going on around you is wholly and completely about you.

I must admit that it was just that, a dream, and I cannot claim to remember the details perfectly. In fact, it continues to fade as I type, so it seems prudent to plunge into a description.

It is a cliche, much as all perfection must be. For anything to be without flaw, every aspect of it must be beyond doubt, beyond reproach, save for it being too much of itself.

I remember dimly a room where the walls are covered with wooden panels, warm, polished, without austerity. Lighting is strong enough to be clear, but warm, with that slight yellowish tinge to it that eliminates the harsh examination of light itself. It's not the sort of place you take a first date to, unless you don't give a damn about impressing her. The light's not low, the mood's not romantic, the people not chic. You wear a jacket and tie there, not to look good, not because there's a requirement for it, but because you're comfortable in your clothes, and it just seems appropriate. The waiters are tuxedoed, but not self-consciously elegant, nor markedly ill-at-ease, just perfectly comfortable.

The tables are few, mostly along the walls of the room, situated in those little alcoves formed by smooth leather banquettes. Not the cheap squeaky things that you find in so many cut-rate places, but the sort of leather cushions that you would be incredibly happy lounging upon on a sweltering summer afternoon, the air conditioning blasting away overhead, while you're stretched out and dozing, a book lying open across your belly, forgotten in the pleasure of complete nothingness.

Of course, those little seat alcoves are only for tables for two. Heaven forbid having to sidle along to get in and out of a seat sandwiched between others. A few tables for four are to be found at an angle along some walls, in the standard layout, a square with seats at each edge. A single setting for six can be spied, shuffled into the corner. This is not a room for boisterous socialising. Quiet conversation is assumed here, and the slightest suggestion of excessive noise is met with a warm offer from the maitre'd to relocate the party to another dining room, set off to the side. I must admit that I forget the details of this room.

Walk in, a doorman holding the portal open, and a host introduces himself before politely asking about names. If the name is not on the reservations list, the host refers the guest to another hostess who will assist the party in obtaining a table at a nearby restaurant.

A small lounge is off to the side for those waiting for the rest of their party. No bar here, a waiter asks about any refreshments the waiting guest might desire.

Progress to the main dining room, and feel absolutely no impact from the room. It is designed to be comfortable, pitched at the level exactly below your radar. You do not notice that it is dark, trendy, chic, warm, inviting, cold, austere. You notice nothing at all, except that the table is perfectly situated, not too near any other table, without being isolated. A drink is offered, no crass drinks menu here. Twenty types of mineral water are available, should the guest desire to choose. Otherwise, a bottle is chosen at the waiter's discretion. No charge for the water, of course. Bread, the freshest you could imagine. Only one type here, directly from the oven to the table. After a moment, the chef de cuisine approaches your table to discuss the menu. The number of courses here is entirely flexible, and prices for the menu are constant across the board. Asking about preferences and requests, the chef de cuisine composes a menu on the spot for each diner. Of course, most courses are repeated across the tables, but none of the diners has to know that. As far as each is concerned, a completely personalised menu has been crafted.

Perhaps a couple of little surprises are scattered in between the courses, amuse-bouches to keep people happy while waiting for the next course. Every course is brought to the table in tandem for each diner. No theatrics, just a quiet setting down of the dish, a description of the item and an explanation of the suggested method of consumption.

The flavours are not extreme, do not explode and dance upon the tongue. Instead, they enter the mouth unobstrusively, but grow in complexity as they slide across the tongue, awakening the palate gently. There is creativity, but not gratuitously. Classics are presented, perfectly made, the best version tasted since or ever. The only surprise is the perfection. Perfection and subtlety.

Desserts, on the other hand, are extravagant. Rich, bold, striking. You couldn't down a huge portion, but the modest serving is exclaimed and gushed over. A crescendo is reached, and allowed to pass ever so slightly, hinting to the diner that indeed, he neither needs nor wants anything more to eat.

Only the strongest espressos are served, but a cart of little treats is offered, just in case you didn't get the hint.

As you step out the door, a small package of freshly baked brioche is proffered to each diner. After making you sign that bill, helping you save a little money on breakfast seems the least the restaurant could do.

And that is the perfect restaurant I dreamt of.

Incidentally, the previous night, I dreamt of letting someone's soft soft cheek rest on the back of my hand. Then getting that same hand bitten by a dog.

Exercise is supposed to be good for you

2005-08-31T17:27:00.000-04:00

It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 muscles to frown.

Laying Blame

2005-08-03T00:01:00.000-04:00

In the past couple of weeks, two people have separately tried to apologise for things that I am long past assigning blame for. Taking pleasure in someone else's contrition, deserved or not, seems to me to be beneath me, or at least my self-image. I rarely apologise for anything I have done, especially if I do not feel that I have erred, and I do not see the need to accept apologies for affairs where no errors I care to think upon have been committed.

I do not claim to be faultless, but in many respects, my actions can hardly be seen as improper if all involved are perfectly clear going into things that said actions on my part were likely or certain. If a certain scenario is set up where my actions are easily predictable by those who set it up, I do not see how I can be blamed for taking those actions. It is entirely possible that these actions are unpleasant, lacking in social niceties, or otherwise unsatisfactory, but to assign blame is to castigate me for being who I am. That is an act of gross unfairness. If a mouse is placed into a cell with a piece of cheese, shall the experimenter fault the mouse for eating the cheese? Or more to the point, if an experiment is set up using this mouse, and the results are not exactly what the experimenter desired, how can the blame be placed upon the mouse? Perhaps blame can be placed upon the nature, upbringing, character and environment of the mouse, but to blame the mouse for doing what it did is pointless and childish. Gravity may be a painful lesson to learn, but only a very small child will blame gravity for a fall. A more appropriate location upon which to assign blame might be the choices made given the conditions.

In the case of a person, the conditions would be the pre-existing character, or personality if you prefer. If you know the personality of any given person, then it is possible to predict reactions and subsequent actions. If these predicted actions are unsatisfactory to you, then it would appear prudent to alter the inputs, so to speak. If all results are unsatisfactory, then adjust the inputs to the point where the negative effects are minimised. An alternative would of course be to avoid this situation altogether. Still, given that you know what's in store going in, the only real fault would be your own. In fact, if the results are better than expected, there is more blame available to be assigned then.

While this may seem like a nice way of justifying pretty much any action to yourself, I do apply this same method to my interactions with others. I admit that there are many times when I do become angry or irritated due to the actions of others. But this breaks down when I simply ask myself the question of whether I should have expected and anticipated the situation. In most cases, the answer is clearly yes. I knew what I was getting into, or I most certainly should have. The fault for any losses or wounds on my part must lie with myself.

Even in those cases where I could not have known beforehand the particular result I am dealing with, I find that things should certainly have been within my considered realm of possibilities. So the failure would be mine. I might not be guilty of knowingly inflicting damage upon myself, but a failure to be prepared is a similar failure, no less worthy of scorn. Should I fail in such a manner, then I most certainly deserve whatever I bring upon myself.

There is, of course, a set of circumstances where blame can be readily assigned. This is where a misrepresentation is made in a deliberate and deceitful manner. I refer here to those cases where a person seeks to deceive others with regards to their personality, and thus the actions to be expected from them. In large part, this can also be classified under the category of the expected, but I personally find deceit to be distasteful. Without information, or with distorted information, astute decisions can hardly be made. To engage in such deception is to attempt to warp the decisions of others. In such cases, the blame for any damage to occur cannot be assigned to the deceived, for the deceived can hardly be prepared for something that could not be known.

Without trying to sound like a SOSC reading, here is the gist of all this.

I am generally a very honest fellow. I have some problems deciding what I really want, but I am clear and unabashed about what I do know about myself. Should anyone care to ask, the truth is always readily available. The problem is that few indeed can bring themselves to believe the truth. The assumption is always that there is some sort of angle, some sort of agenda and deception being carried out. Bluntness can be subtle when directed at the sly. Suspicion and a failure to trust are the source of failure, certainly not a lack of honesty. I see little point in having to work so hard to create a fiction for no other reason than for it to be seen through. I seek not even that, but no more than the understanding of it. Not an easy thing. I cannot help but look for forked tongues myself.

What tortured me so in the past was the degree to which I had to pretend to agree with that which I felt to be in error. I gritted my teeth and nodded and made sympathetic noises when the most ridiculous things were said, or I would say what was clearly desired. The truth was pushed aside for others, the comfort of others placed above mine own. And when I could take it no more, and the truth came spilling forth, distorted as my truth was, it was just too much to handle. My disdain for some things came to the fore, and I stopped pretending. Clearly, the self that I was and am more comfortable with is too much effort for others to grasp and understand. I can forgive that, for I can hardly come to grips with it myself, but I cannot bend backwards to reach out to someone who is not willing to even try to reach back.

Unfortunately, now the time has come that I am not willing to make so significant an effort any more for so little. If others can demand so much of me, and I can fail to deliver, then I do not see why I cannot make similar levels of demands of others, and accept failure if that is the result.

2005-07-31T18:48:00.000-04:00

I'm not a very nice chap.

Tired

2005-07-20T09:40:00.000-04:00

Erm, woohoo. Back in Singapore at last, but things have failed to turn out quite as expected. For starters, I managed to leave my handphone in Chicago, so now I have no phone numbers. Of course, I don't have a number of my own anyway, so it isn't relevant. Still, I've been reduced to mooching about waiting for people to come online, since I can't call them. Rather sad, I think. And now that I do have a number again, I still don't have my phone book. Pretty much at a loss. Not in the mood to venture out to the wilds of Zouk or some such place to search for friends either. Too old for that sort of thing now. Trying to stay dry this summer anyway.

One part of my plan is coming along ths far. I have not touched anything unhealthy except in the way of food since I returned to Singapore. I think a couple of months of detox can't do any harm, except for the pounding headaches and constant lethargy. Other than that, it's going peachy. Of course, my dad had to go buy one of those wine chiller cellar things, so it's rather tempting. Also, several bottles of pretty decent whisky. I shall exercise willpower.

What is with girls asking me to sniff their fingertips in airplanes? I really don't get it. The first time it happened, it was weird enough, but I was polite enough to comply because the other party was acting like a child. Then last week, on the flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, this girl seated next to me came back from the washroom, then asked me to smell her fingers. Now, I'm pretty sure this sort of thing isn't too common, but it has happened twice to me. This time, I asked her why I would want to smell her fingers, and she said it was because the soap smelled nice. Now, this was the same reason I was given the last time, but I still didn't get it. I mean, do I go around offering my fingers to relative strangers to smell because I think the hand soap I just used was especially fragrant? Heck, I don't go around offering my neck up for smell tests after I apply cologne, even though most of the time I know that I apply too little for people to smell. That's true, by the way. When you can smell my cologne from more than a metre away, it means that I made a mistake and used too much. Anyway, the whole finger smell thing was just weirdness. At least the first time it happened, I sort of knew the girl in question. This time, I had been chatting with her for maybe an hour. I tell you, it was very awkward to lean over and smell some stranger's fingers, albeit fairly attractive, when there are two stewardesses hovering next to you trying set a tablecloth. Somehow managed to get complimented on how pretty my seatmate was by one of said stewardesses while I was having a quiet chat with her. Imagine my look of maligned innocence.

Ok, that was just a quick mutter from a pretty tired me. More on why I'm tired some other time.

Dust

2005-07-13T18:09:00.000-04:00

What happens when a heart is broken, not by a shattering blow, but by neglect, the dust collecting atop it until the mass of each insignificant dust mote joins with that of every other one, and the collective weight of the dust is simply too much to bear?

Perhaps the fierce strike is better, more merciful. The pain is far sharper, more acute, more concentrated in a single moment when a word, a phrase, an action cuts to the quick. The blow not only causes a break, but also stuns the recipient. Sometimes it is more the shock of the blow than the actual damage caused that is the deciding factor. It is common knowledge in boxing that a knockout punch is most often caused by the surprise of receiving an unseen punch to the head. The jab may not have crushed a grapefruit, but the jaw was not set as hard as a grapefruit, so it swings loose, the brains are rattled without warning, and the wiring is momentarily short-circuited. You search for reasons, for logic and understanding, but in that instant, nothing makes sense, for without warning, there is insufficient information to understand what is going on. And the feeble powers of the human mind cannot function without the proper preparation. A sharp strike, and everything falls apart, without any defence. For it is only by letting another into your guard that you may hope to prevail. Unless, of course, your reach really is that superior. Fortunately for most of us, few indeed possess such long arms.

But a quick knockout punch usually has little damage. Imagine a blow across the back of the head, hard enough to cause one to lose consciousness. Contrast that with gently beating a person about the head with a telephone book, say, for several hours. In the former case, a concussion may occur, but the force necessary to cause a loss of consciousness is not enough to cause serious damage. In the latter, the brains are bounced around for hours on end, and they become so scrambled that nothing works anymore. By the time the recipient loses consciousness, the pain and confusion will have reached levels beyond the comprehension of any person who will live after that.

The above example was taken from a novel, by the way. Post Mortem. Decent enough piece of crime fiction.

Anyway, the point is that a slow breaking of a heart is far more cruel. The recipient can see the heart slowly coming apart, and there is nothing to be done about it. You may try, but the dust collects and collects, and no amount of huffing will stop the inevitable. The dust may be sent flying by your breaths, but it will settle again. And in the end, the weight will be too much. The sluggishness of the process hurts most of all, for the damage is clear and unavoidable. It is felt, every moment of the process, and each individual mote of dust that settles atop the others is experienced and known. All the pain and damage is experienced. No shock occurs, for one knows all that happens as it happens. It is precisely because the increments are so small and seemingly insignificant that they are all too significant. There is time to contemplate one's downfall, to mull over what might have been, what alternatives might have been possible. The bearer of the weight of the killing dust will always think that there would have been a different outcome if only another course of action had been taken, or that there is still some hope of redeeming the situation. It is that hope and that regret that makes the slow breaking so much more painful than a quick, sharp blow. There was an alternative, but it was not taken. There is another way, but it cannot be fathomed. What crueler punishment is there than to know that hope exists, just beyond reach?

Ok, just so it's clear, this was not inspired by a personal experience, but from a series of conversations I have had with a few people recently. Reflections on other people, not on me, so do not message me and ask what's wrong. I'm just peachy, thank you. Don't reach, don't hope, don't suffer.

Family

2005-07-05T04:28:00.000-04:00

I just had the most ridiculous conversation. I was chatting with one of those China Chinese people, and I was asked why I didn't speak in Mandarin. The next question was whether I could speak Chinese at all. I assured her that I could speak Chinese, but nowhere near as fluently as English. This being the case, in addition to my being in the middle of New England, I quite naturally used English almost exclusively, even in my conversations with Chinese speakers. In fact, I saw no reason to deliberately switch languages when I am in an English-speaking country, since while the party I am speaking to may not possess perfect English language skills, my Chinese language skills are not perfect either, and so by default due to everyone else around us being unable to understand Chinese, any conversations should be held in English. Voila, a Pareto improvement. Don't you like that old fellow? Always useful in an argument.

Anyway, so she replies that it is a failing of mine that I do not speak perfect Chinese. In fact, I should make the utmost effort to ensure that my Chinese is up to the mark before making any attempt to perfect my English or any other foreign language.

My reply was that I saw no reason for prioritising Chinese over any other language. In fact, I personally feel that while it is useful to be able to speak and understand Chinese, it would be no less useful to have a grasp of French or German.

But it is the language of my ancestors, my dear China girl cries. I have a responsibility to know the language and to know it well. Every Chinese person should be able to speak Chinese well, for we should take pride in what our ancestors have achieved.

I ended the conversation here, for I was weary of it, but I would like to note that this is an utterly ridiculous argument. To start with, I have great doubts over how many of my ancestors spoke Mandarin. I do not know if Mandarin was spoken on Hainan, but in Canton, Caozhou and wherever else it is that my ancestors hailed from, I am fairly certain that a good number of them had no Mandarin skills. In fact, both my grandmothers do not speak it. So by that criteria alone, I have no ancestral obligation to speak Mandarin. If anything, I should be learning more Teochew and Hainanese and whatever else is relevant.

Also consider that it is highly unlikely that the Mandarin of today is anything like the language spoken by those who did speak its precursor. Simply observe the written language. I certainly could not read the Chinese characters of a mere thousand years ago. While the spoken word does not parallel the written exactly, it is nevertheless an indication of how much a language can change in a fairly short period of time. English is less than a millennium in age, yet the conventions are now considered to be inflexible and absolute in some quarters. Chances are that even if no other dialects are to be found in the ancestral bloodline of a person, after tracing the line back a hundred generations or so, any conversation would be impossible, simply because the language is nothing alike. Am I to attempt to discover what changes have occurred in the language since its inception and deconstruct the current lingo in order to speak as my ancestors did? It is as ridiculous as it sounds.

Taking the idea further, one must realise that tracing things back far enough, we all share an ancestor. Should then all the peoples of the world make a concerted effort to discover the primeval language spoken by that savage common ancestor and use it? We would be reduced to grunting and gesticulating a great deal, I suspect. The human race was once nothing more than a collection of animals, do not forget. In fact, we still are. It would be foolish to take inordinae pride in any accomplishments of a culture or nation.

Allow me to explain. If I were to look at the first Chinese astronaut and proclaim that I felt pride swell in my chest because he has accomplished something for my race, then I am saying the exact same thing as taking pride in a dog learning to perform tricks. I am not related to this astronaut by any way except by a ancestor many generations above me. Why should I take any personal pride in him and his accomplishments? The dog is also related to me by a common ancestor, albeit many more generations up than the one I share with the astronaut. It is only a matter of numbers that separates my feeling pride when a Chinese man accomplishes the extraordinary, and feeling the same pride when some animal manages something equally beyond its usual capabilities. It is the deluded who takes pride in the Chinese culture, or the English tradition, or the achievements of the human race. I have little more identification with any other Chinese person than I do with a fly. It is all a matter of numbers of generations to trace back. Simply because it is beyond conception or memory means nothing. To use those as excuses is to admit one's own limitations as a thinking being. How can we marvel at the discrimination between human races decades past if we apply the exact same standards to the larger race we find ourselves in?

Therein lies my impassivity to prejudice and discrimination. I have no problem with my own possession of it, or with being the object of it, for it is simply impossible to eliminate. We naturally discriminate against most of the larger family of life on earth, for it is near impossible to find sympathy for the housefly, or the earthworm, or the oak tree, or the bacteria on our skins. And if we cannot apply the same rules to all the members of this massive extended family we find ourselves in, why should we take care to apply them to any single group in particular?

Work in Progress

2005-06-26T15:57:00.000-04:00

"The difference between animals and robots is robots get stuck while animals squirm their way through."
- Joseph Ayers

Sometimes it is worth wondering why humans get stuck so often. We are supposed to be the supreme species on earth, superior to any other animal. Yet we find ourselves confounded by the simplest things you could imagine. When we are confronted by problems, the first thing we do is stop. Well, that is certainly my reaction. I always pause before ploughing ahead. It just seems more prudent.

Ok, long spiel planned, but I'm tired, and I feel like reading more Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Cannot believe I'm spending time reading an ancient Chinese novel. Pretty good stuff though. I'll write the rest of the above later.

Maybe I should be more suaku

2005-06-20T21:28:00.000-04:00

Hmmm, this may be a good development. For the first time in a while, I'm not thinking about things that I can't change. Perhaps being busy is a good thing. Consecutive fifteen hour days do have the convenient side effect of leaving you too tired to think about too much. Of course, when you supplement that with maybe three hours of compulsory anime viewing per day, the hours of sleep left over are remarkably dreamless.

I guess this is what people mean when they say it's important to keep busy. When I lounged about and did absolutely nothing, as I have for most of my college career, so many things swirled in my head that I had to find outlets for them. So I resorted to proxies sometimes, which was not very nice for all involved. And things got messier since independent complications arise because I tried to use unrelated people and things to deal with existing complications.

Hmmm, I doubt anybody will have the faintest idea what I just wrote about. Explanations, clarifications, analysis? Naw. It would take all the fun out of it for the bored. As I told someone recently, I think I'll just sensationalise and blow up out of proportion every single thing from now on, just to please the gossipmongers and voyeurs out there. Hey, why not, right?

I recently heard an utterly hilarious explanation for singlehood. I'm not going to elaborate here, but the gist is, good girls dig suaku guys. If you're too confident, ambitious or sophisticated, the kind of girls you'd want to marry won't be attracted to you. What can I say to that? I can't say I've actually been attracted to, or found attracted to me, the classic marrying type of girl. In fact, I don't even know very many of those. So if there are any girls out there who are pretty, but not too hot, can cook, clean, have impeccable fashion sense built on budget clothing, can manage finances brilliantly on a shoestring, be sweet and attentive, not too attention-seeking, and will bear a large number of smart, healthy children, give me a call. I promise to act as suaku as I can manage. Or actually, I might cage you and charge entry for the public to view a rare creature, long thought to be extinct.

The idea here, if you don't get it, is that I cannot even conceive of a girl who meets all the items on my wishlist. As such, anybody I do end up dating will inevitably fall short of my ideal. So to avoid subjecting anyone to something like that, I don't think being too serious about these things is a good idea.

The thing is, I'm naturally a very critical person. Given anything at all, I can tear it apart. I'm pretty good at it too. Plus I rather enjoy taking something apart and seeing the flaws. Which can be a problem when you walk through life seeing the flaws in everything and everyone. How can you enjoy anything if everything is screwed up?

Ok, just quickly ambling through my currently rather uneventful mind. Not much else going on. No existential musings, no agonised ruminations on the meaning of anything. Just pointless, shallow surface thoughts.

A week ago

2005-06-14T15:02:00.000-04:00

I cannot believe it. A week ago I was in Paris, cultural capital of the world, home to the sophisticates and all that jazz. Now, I'm in the tiniest town I have ever lived in. I can literally walk across the entire town in ten minutes. Which I actually did last night. I've never lived in a city with less than 3 million people in it before. This is going to be quite a challenge.

I should have known when I arrived, and promptly found myself in a taxi with a driver who looked straight out of Wrong Turn, that Eliza Dushku movie. Unfortunately, he did not remind me of the teenagers, who were, as all teenagers are in Hollywood movies, very attractive, but of the hicks who ran about trying to kill people with chainsaws and kitchen knives and whatnot. Seriously. Old man, long, straggly white beard, plaid shirt and jeans, red trucker's hat on the head. Can you get any more cliched? Then there are the accents, which are quite amazing. Still think the Boston accent is far less comprehensible though.

I cannot even think of anything to type about this town, tiny as it is. It's not a town, it's smaller than Choa Chu Kang. Of course, they still managed to charge exorbitant rates for hotels. I had to cross a river and a state line to get a room for less than $150. Of course, even though the hotel was two whole towns away from the school, it was still ten minutes by cab. Mindboggling.

Oh, a rather bizarre and quite irritating thing happened on Sunday. I called a cab from the lobby of the overpriced hotel to go to my slightly less overpriced hotel. So the cab shows up and parks across the street. My brow got a little furrowed at this point, but I can only shrug and cross the street, dragging my luggage behind me. Then when I got to within ten feet of the vehicle, the driver suddenly drives off. I'm left standing there, luggage in hand, slack-jawed. I release a markedly unsatisfying stream of curses, then haul my luggage across the street again to talk to the equally bemused parking attendant at the hotel who called the cab for me. I did eventually get a taxi, but seriously, what the hell? Did he not like my face? Maybe he objects to Lacoste shirts. Or perhaps he suspected that I was concealing a dirty nuke in my Samsonite, which would explain his dramatic swerve and escape.

Bloody idiot. Piss me off.

Classes here are damn heavy. Six hours a day. Hardly reasonable. In two days here, I will have exceeded my weekly allotment in Chicago. Then there are the readings and homework at night. I just spent a good half hour drawing out a spreadsheet. Why couldn't I have built the damn thing on Excel? Because he wants us to get used to planning on paper first. Curiously, for this assignment, I used Excel to plan, then wrote it out on paper. Professors seem pretty decent though. If nothing else, I guess I will learn something from this. Beats crunching numbers in a bank for summer.

Also another interesting development that I will keep under wraps for now. I'll try to avoid getting too excited about it. Emotions are liars anyway. Just ask Descartes.

Ode

2005-06-08T20:15:00.000-04:00

"There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other."
- Ernest Hemingway

As some of the more astute might have surmised, I actually rather like this city. Not too many cities can claim that from me. Small as it is compared to the metropolitan behemoths, never in my weeks in this city have I stopped discovering more about the city. Even today, I found a lovely little bistro, with fantastic food and a wonderful view. I walked past it a million times without venturing in, and on my last day, I find that it is brilliant.

What is it about Paris that makes it such a fulfilment of its own image? After all, it seems almost impossible that any one place can encompass so much. Yet it does. Perhaps it is how personal it is. Paris can be anything you want it to be. It can be the city of Haussman, with immense, straight boulevards, glittering monuments marking the junctions, gorgeous landscaping in gardens scattered all over the city. This version of the city is overwhelming. A person can spend days simply marvelling at the perfection of the city. Nowhere else have I seen a city that is designed to be so beautiful on such an immense scale.

Or perhaps you prefer the Paris of intense debauchery. Clubs and bars of every description abound, catering to any and all tastes in a way that would shock the most jaded traveller. Ten restaurants in Paris hold the coveted three Michelin stars, and even if you find those to be somewhat out of your wallet's reach, great little bistros and brasseries abound, with good food to be found at almost any price level. Of course, more money never hurts, and some of the lushest hotels in the world are here. I must say that the Four Seasons in Paris is the nicest one I have seen yet. The way it fires so far over the top is quite endearing. Wine is cheap and plentiful, but you can always find the finest tipples in the world, at a premium, of course. An evening at a wine bar is one of the best you can hope to have.

There is, of course, also the Paris of history and culture. There must be dozens of monuments in this city, each telling a stirring tale of bravado, ideals or the immensity of history. Museums are everywhere, many of them truly excellent. It is hardly possible that a human being cannot find something of interest in the myriad exhibitions in Paris. Better yet, observe the streets and see history reflected in every twist, every straight avenue, every snaking pathway. Operas, concerts, independent artists, fashion designers, Paris hosts them all in style. What's not to love?

What then is my Paris? Almost impossible to answer, that question is. If every person's Paris is different, then no trite words of mine can make a reader understand what I see. Still, I shall try. My Paris is what I experience when I sit in a cafe on a lazy afternoon, coffee before me, facing the street, watching individuals impossible to typecast as Parisians, but equally impossible to describe as anything else, walk past, as my newspaper lies forgotten in my hand. It is what I see when I sit in the parvis of Notre-Dame at night, feeling the cool breeze as an old man plays the guitar beside me. It is the four piece band that sets up on a bridge on Sundays to play some excellent music for pennies. It is the waiter taking immense pleasure from my compliment on a fantastic meal in a tiny bistro. It is idling by the river on a sunny day, feeling the light penetrate me. It is the dog under the bar counter yelping as I accidentally step on a paw. It is grabbing a beer to go and sitting on a bench just because. It is all of these things and more, everything I have seen, done, experienced in this city. My Paris, as surely as it is anyone else's Paris.

And now, as I pack my clothes, I cannot help but wonder how my Paris will change as I return over the years. Living here, even for a short few weeks, is so different from being a tourist. I want to stay. That is a rare emotion for me. I have so little attachment to places. But I want to stay, and keep discovering Paris.

As Hemingway so aptly puts it, there is never any ending to Paris. Except there is for me. And it comes in 13 hours.

I knew it!

2005-06-07T17:08:00.000-04:00

Turns out love and trust really are biological urges.

I'm not sure whether to feel vindicated or horrified.

One day in Paris

2005-06-07T14:50:00.000-04:00

Hmmm, that wasn't too bad. For those not in the know, my birthday was fairly recent. I don't generally bother with it, and most of my friends don't even know when it is. In fact, I had actually forgotten about it until my mom reminded me.

Ok, this is going to be a complete mindless travelogue. Nothing deep or thought-provoking here.

So, anyway, this one was alright. I got as a present the most utterly hilarious thing I have ever seen. Sometimes that girl gets me. Too bad it's only sometimes though. I also managed to start off the day right, getting slightly drunk and talking loudly about old movies in the middle of the night, irritating the hell out of my neighbours. Then I decided to stop work for the day, and headed off to see a little of touristy Paris.

I hopped off to the Louvre, raining though it was. The place was kind of humid, but not as crowded as I thought it would be, so it's all good. Managed to totally fall in love with Fra Angelico. The fellow was a genius. Seriously, I need to learn more about him and his work. Well, mostly his work. I don't really care about long dead artists who were (I think) monks. But as a professor once told me, two hours is about as much of a museum as anyone can take at one go. I lasted three hours, but I was completely out on my feet near the end.

Headed off to have one last late lunch at my favourite brasserie in Paris. I totally love that place. The food is old fashioned, and not exactly mind-blowing, but very reliable and comforting. Nothing to really distract you from a newspaper or a book or a conversation. Sartre and Camus used to go there for dinner and argue for hours. Maybe I sat in the same seat as Sartre once did. I am a sucker for such things.

I took a walk to the Pantheon after that, and was fairly underwhelmed at first. I think I've been in Paris too long. Monuments no longer impress me. The Pantheon is a fairly impressive piece of architecture, big and imposing, but nothing special. Foucault's experiment was kinda cool though. Leon, by the way, not Michel. The pendulum that proved the world spins on an axis. Is that cool or what?

It was when I descended to the crypt that I totally geeked out. I walked in, looked around, and saw a statue of Voltaire. Then I realised that Voltaire's tomb was right there! Turned around, and saw Rousseau's tomb directly opposite! Come on, is that cool or what? Then I went a little deeper in, and saw Pierre and Marie Curie's remains, and saw the room that the coffins of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola shared. Now this was the kind of touristy Paris I could get used to.

Climbed the stairs after that to the top of the building and managed the best views of Paris I've seen so far. Not the highest spot in Paris, but perfectly situated. You can see Sacre-Couer set beautifully against the hill, a decent shot of the Tour Eiffel, and Notre-Dame, the first time I've seen it from above. Tout Paris was laid out pleasingly about me, and I was calm and chill for the first time in a long long while.

After paying tribute to the heroes of modern France, I slipped over to the church of Sainte-Genevieve. I may not be a Catholic, but I paused to pray (not to the saint) before the coffin of Genevieve, the exact same spot where Pope John Paul II had, then lighted a candle to the patron saint of Paris for the people I've gotten to know in her city.

Rounded off the day with a gorging on seafood. Some of the finest oysters I've ever sampled had me at a loss for words and reduced to cursing incoherently. La Coupole. Excellent place for the cold seafood done so well in Europe. Try their special Number 1 oysters. Even better than their non-special Number 00 oysters. Pretty good crabs and wakles too. Even had a pretty good bottle of wine, which, unfortunately, got mostly forgotten in the assault upon the shellfish.

Oh, btw, continued my journey to visit the resting places of great men in Paris today. Went to see Napoleon's tomb. Very impressive place. I tell you, that is the way to be buried. Build an entire cool-looking church, with a gigantic golden altar, and an immense coffin in the middle of a circular depression, relief carvings of your deeds all about, statues of angels surrounding you, the place names of your famous victories inscribed in the floor. Then charge admission to come see it. I still don't know why Napoleon needs seven layers of coffins though. Maybe it's to protect him from the ornery relatives interred in the same building.

Ok, done with this mindless ramble. Bloody tired now. Going to find some food and wine, then chill for the night.

One, Two, Three

2005-06-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine asked me a little while back what I would wish for if I were offered three wishes. I really couldn't come up with anything that I really wanted then, but after a little thought, I think I have it.

First, I want to know what happens after I die. Is there a heaven and a hell? Is the division of souls made by some sort of sin counter? If so, then what exactly constitutes a sin, and what constitutes a good deed? After all, since we on earth have no means of knowing absolutely what is a sin and what is not, how can we be held accountable for failing to follow rules we were not made aware of? If this line of reasoning holds, then God must be unreasonable. If sins are held against us, then we will be punished for doing something we did not know was wrong. If they are not, and the doctrine of predestination holds, then no matter what we say, think or do, we have no influence over our eventual destination at all. If Mother Teresa was predestined to go to hell, then all her good works were for nothing, since things have already been decided, regardless of her intentions and actions. The good of heart can go to hell, and the truly may end up in heaven. Predestination is a horrible sort of thing to believe in. Of course, my views on predestination have been laid out before on this blog, I believe, and I will not go into them again. Maybe the way out is that if we are meant to go to heaven, then God would have made us so that we will inevitably perform more good deeds than sins. Similarly, the evil were predestined to go to hell, so they are crafted to be evil. In this way, both sides can be satisfied. Naturally, it must be said that the evil likely do not believe that they are evil. Every person sets out to do what he or she feels is the right thing. Hitler believed that he was doing the world a favour by engaging in ethnic cleansing. The whole genocide thing was perfectly justified in terms of the big picture. Even a simple hatred is justified, for if one hates another, the other is seen as evil, and one remains on the side of good.

And what if there is no afterlife? What then? Do we simply stop? Perhaps we become souls floating about the universe. That wouldn't be so bad. I could find out a lot of stuff that way. But if there is no afterlife, then where does consciousness come from? I can sort of understand how the physical body comes to be, since that is explainable in terms of the matter, but how about consciousness? How do I think about things? I cannot find my way out of the notion of some sort of supreme being that exists beyond our understanding. There has to be something at the beginning of the chain of creation. Further up, I assume is something completely beyond my conceptualisation, so I will not bother to try. Of course, even if there is a supreme being, that does not automatically mean that there is an afterlife for us. Perhaps we only exist in the here and now.

In any case, knowing will solve so many of my issues. Probably won't make me more satisfied, but I will be a lot less curious.

Second, I would like to be quite a bit less smart. I think a lot of my issues come from having too much excess power lying around. So I end up thinking about all sorts of pointless things. If I were average, I would probably be quite happy to study hard to get good grades, work hard to get promotions and pay raises, save money to get married and raise kids, then die happy, fulfilled by life. Instead, I think about these things, and find that there really is no point to it. Grades don't really matter all that much to me, other than keeping the world off my back. I don't really give a damn about a career. What is the point in achieving in a career? What does that give you? Respect? I don't need that sort of validation. I know who and what I am. I know what I am capable of. I do not need some external indicator of it. Money? Is that it? I don't want success, I just want stuff. My dream career would be to hit the lottery. Then I can go out and get all the stuff i want without having to work for it. I do not experience a sense of achievement when I accomplish something, so why should I try to accomplish anything? Kids. Who needs them? I certainly don't. Companionship for old age? What a pathetic thing to say. I don't want to be a lonely old man, so I'm going to raise some humans to keep me company. Might as well keep a dog or two. And I don't think it's a good idea for me to get married anyway. I only seem to really get along with unhappy people, and a marriage of two unhappy people doesn't seem likely to succeed.

See? If I just didn't think about it, then I would be fine. I would soldier on with life, trying my best to achieve the petty goals set out before me by society. Instead, I'm stuck between doing what is demanded of me, and giving up completely. Trapped, I tell you.

Third, I wish I could forget that I don't believe in happy endings.

Manners

2005-06-01T18:08:00.000-04:00

"Good manners make any man a pleasure to be with. Ask any woman."
- Peter Mayle

Sometimes

2005-06-01T13:55:00.000-04:00

I sometimes wonder why I even bother. I really shouldn't. After all, what do I care?

Problem is, sometimes, I do.

So unload on me when you feel like it, sponge off me when you need to, ignore me when it suits you, take from me when you want to.

Just don't bother to worry about things going both ways.

Bah, I'm tired.

And hungry.

I think I'll go find something to eat.