Thou Shalt Not Say Anything About Anything

The following unspoken rules characterise most of the conversations I have had with the law students who have surrounded me since my return to Singapore. (Though obviously there are exceptions, who should know who they are.)

  • If asked what you did over the weekend (which is rare) it is acceptable to state the title of the movie you watched, or the club you went to. But be so bold as to actually venture an opinion of the activity you participated that goes beyond “Yah, not bad lah, quite fun” and all of a sudden you’re the weird one, because no one actually gives a shit what you think, especially when you do weird things that they’ve never heard of or considered doing.
  • Personal information beyond the most mundane facts eg. “I have a cat” or the most trite statements “It’s important to try and still have a life even though we’re working” is unnecessarily revelatory and must be kept top secret. If someone is asking you about yourself, answer in monosyllables. Perhaps they have an ulterior motive. If they continue to try to draw you out (the flaming cheek!) answer in banalities to bore them into submission.
  • Never give in. These upstarts must learn.

I am getting more socially awkward among these people by the day, because I don’t know how to behave. In England I behaved as confidently and talkatively as I felt like being on a given day. I met my best friend within freshers’ week, and within a month he told me things about himself he had never dared to confide in any other friend. In my public debating debut at the UCL Debating Society, I argued for the legalization of hardcore pornography, accused the other side of wanking under the table instead of listening to my team’s case, and rejected one guy’s incessant points of information by telling him he’d ejaculated quite enough. The club embraced me. In the pub, I let on that I was a practising Catholic. The club still embraced me. Throughout my time there I was an oddity, Chinese and female and Catholic in a club that was predominantly white and male and degenerate, but I never felt it.

But what worked so well for me in England seems to be anathema here, in my “homeland” where I should feel anything but an oddity. Confidence is overconfidence. Chattiness is met by reticence and suspicion. Before I went to England, I knew all this. I dealt with it by acting shyer than I really was, which seemed to make other people more comfortable with me. Since returning to Singapore, I’ve reverted to that old strategy, and I try to follow the rules when I actually know what they are, but it terrifies me. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize that I have become my disguise.

I really want to believe that all these people have great personalities which they just choose to keep hidden. Perhaps they have Personality Parties on the weekend, where they let it all hang out, and then button their stuffed shirts up for the week ahead, and I just haven’t been invited to these parties. Perhaps every dull statement made is actually code for “On the weekend I had a threesome and one of us was a goat.” But if so, why stay locked in this vicious cycle of conversational nothingness, where I say nothing because I think they’re boring and they say nothing because they think I’m boring?

Some days I wish I just had Tourette’s syndrome. That’d be a great excuse to break the fucking ice.

Marrrrrritime Law

One of the other lawyers was teaching me how to research a ship.

Lawyer X: Okay, so if you can’t find it in Lloyd’s Register or the online sources, that probably means it’s –
Me: PIRATES!
Lawyer X, looking at me strangely: – not a vessel involved in international trade.
Me: Ah, yes.

I think I need to curb my enthusiasm a bit more.

Meeting People Isn’t Easy

I envy people with great stories about meeting people they admire. Benny has his about meeting DJ Shadow in a London newsagent. Jordan at said the gramophone has this lovely two–part tale about his odyssey to see Cat Power at a festival somewhere in Switzerland (he didn’t actually know where in Switzerland, though, which is what makes the story even cooler).

I, on the other hand, am unable to interact with people I admire without appearing like a complete idiot. I chickened out of saying hello to Zadie Smith the time I saw her on Torrington Place on my way home from the supermarket. I stammered something excruciatingly inane to Malcolm McLaren when he came to speak at a UCL Debating Society event the time he was considering running for London Mayor. In front of Neil Gaiman my mind went blank, and it didn’t help that he was drawing me a rat because then all I could think was NEIL GAIMAN IS DRAWING ME A RAT OH MY GOD.

Even my brushes with almost unknown indie musicians descend into humiliation the moment I try to tell them (sincerely) that I like what they do. I am aided along this expressway to embarrassment by Alec, who either makes things worse or laughs at me.

Take, for example, the time we went to the Arts Cafe for a Ladybug Transistor gig, and were extremely impressed by the (unadvertised) opening act, Bart Davenport. Emboldened by alcohol, we approached him later to buy his CD. Alec, whose memory for names leaves much to be desired, had forgotten the guy’s name but inexplicably decided to try and address him as something anyway.

Glancing quickly at the CDs on the merchandise table as he extended his hand in greeting, my favourite Alzheimer’s patient saw “BART DAVENPORT” but only the first four letters of the surname registered. Hence – “Dave!” said Alec enthusiastically to Bart Davenport, “Great performance Dave, I really enjoyed it!” etc. and with every “Dave!” more and more bits of my composure crumbled into a little mortified pile on the floor. Luckily, “Dave” was so sloshed that I’m not even sure he noticed he was talking to a pair of nimrods, and thank God for that.

I accomplished the next indignity all by myself, and this still smarts so much I’m not even going to name the band. It was the first time we went to the Water Rats, and I was really impressed by one of the opening bands. They looked really young – they were wearing the sort of clothes I associate with teens who desperately want to scream their indieness to the world – but they had catchy songs, strong vocals and lots of energy. Sadly, only about 15 people were watching them, and most of the people who weren’t us looked like their friends from school. This upset me a bit, as it always does when people don’t get the appreciation I think they deserve, or the credit they’re due. I thought they had real promise, and I was hoping they weren’t discouraged by the tiny audience. I wanted to tell them I thought they were great. I didn’t want them to give up on music.

So later on, when I was on the way to the bar to get my third Snakebite (you see the problem already) and saw the band hanging around, of course I went up to them and started a conversation.

Me: Hey, I really enjoyed your set.
Band (different members each time, we’ll just call them Band): Thanks very much!
Me: You sound great, how long has your band been around?
Band: About three or four years.
Me: Cool, no wonder you sound so good. If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you guys?
Band, giving me the first of many strange looks: Late twenties, mostly.

(This is where it all started to go pear-shaped for me. Late twenties??! Their dressing screamed 17!)

Me, thrown off now, clearly gobsmacked: Oh, right, right.
Band: You look surprised.
Me: Oh, er, no, I, uh, thought you looked a bit younger than that.
Band: Oh, really?
Me, gabbling stupidly while I tried and failed to move on: Oh, er, it’s nothing, I must have been mistaken. I was, uh, just noticing the people watching just now looked really young, I thought maybe they might have been your mates. (Inner monologue: What the fuck are you saying, Michelle? WALK AWAY NOW.)
Band, giving me the second of many strange looks: No, we don’t know them.
Me: Oh, right. Heh. Hmm. But anyway, you guys sounded really great!
Band, smiling tentatively: Thanks, we’re glad you enjoyed it.
Me, clearly possessed by some demon of dorkness: Do you have a good sound guy, or is the venue sound system just really good? (Inner monologue: WHAT THE FUCK??! WHAT THE FUCK?! Ground, swallow me up now, I mean motherfucking NOW!)
Band, giving me the fuckteenth strange look: Well, the venue system’s pretty good.
Me, now completely in bits: Right, right. Okay, gotta go deliver the drinks. Best of luck and all! (Walking away rapidly, not daring to look back.)

So I walked back into the other room, plonked the drinks down, grabbed Alec and started banging my head repeatedly on his chest.

Every day I thank every deity that could possibly exist in this world and the next that I haven’t met Sonic Youth or Salman Rushdie yet, and I hope I never do.

Sometimes I Get That Not-So-Fresh Feeling

We found out from a Singapore guidebook that the Sultan Mosque was designed by an Irishman named Denis Santry. This delighted me.

“So, in Denis Santry’s salad days, when he was a young wild man living on his own, what did they call his little flat?” I asked Alec.

“What?” asked Alec, in a voice already steely with pain and resignation.

“The SANTRY PAD!”

I’m so witty.

Mother Of All Guilt Trips

Michelle: Okay, so I’m going out for dinner, and probably to a club after that. It’s my friend’s birthday, so I guess I’ll be back pretty late.
Mum: Do you know, I watched that Missing show on TV yesterday, and it was about this girl your age who left home for work one day and never came back!
Michelle: What do you want me to do, never go out?
Mum: I’m just saying, if anything ever happens to you, I will curl up and die.
Michelle: You have two other children lah.
Mum: Did I ever tell you about my friend? She had three daughters. Then one of them died. Then another one got some intestinal problem and died. A year later, my friend found a lump in her breast. But because she had no will to live on, she refused to do anything about it, and she died too.
Michelle, throwing hands in air: STOP IT MUM!!

There’s No Scrabble Like Sexy Scrabble

The rules of Sexy Scrabble are that every word you make has to be sexual, or at least suggestive, or as a matter of last resort, of general vulgarity. Approval of words is obviously not obtained by referring to the official Scrabble dictionary, but is solely subject to the opinion of the vile rabble with whom you are playing.

And so it was that we converged on Yish’s house two Saturdays ago to forget that we were actually mature sophisticated well-educated 24-year-olds, and, at least for an evening, to be puerile 17-year-olds again.

The major insight we gained from the experience was that for a good game of Sexy Scrabble, ordinary Scrabble rules must be very liberally interpreted, if applied at all, and the English language must be forced into all manner of compromising positions.

In our first game, adding letters to words already on the board to make some sort of phrase or sentence was permitted. In this way, Yish was permitted to transform DICK into DICKME. My later attempt to make VINDICKME was, however, rejected. My outrage at this was somewhat mollified when my later proposal to adapt MANGA into MANGAZE was accepted. Through a similar process, the slightly more surreal sequence of TWIGGY -> BADTWIGGY -> RIMBADTWIGGY -> PRIMBADTWIGGY -> IMPRIMBADTWIGGY was obtained.

The traditional approach of not revealing your intended words to the other players also gave way in pursuit of the common good. When Jianyi tried to use an A on the board to make JAW, Fay insisted that she needed it for her FANNY. When we all agreed that the presence of FANNY on the board was of vital importance, Jianyi had no choice but to produce JAWSEMEN instead, which was mutated by others later on to INJAWSEMEN and FOULINJAWSEMEN.

In our second game, we decided to try something a little classier. In this spirit, Yish started us off with BEGET, and I followed with AROUSE. This new classy version of sexy Scrabble soon proved to be dead boring and was soon abandoned in favour of transforming LOVER to TOELOVER, and RANDY to ISORANDY to OMISORANDY, which seemed like a good place to call it a night.

our bawdy board

Going Native

Me: So before I bought the camera, we walked around all the different shops selling it to compare prices, and see who would throw in more extra stuff.
Alec: Like a free travel bag?
Me: No!
Alec, stifling laughter: Or, say, a free radio alarm clock?
Me: NO! Relevant stuff like CompactFlash memory cards!
Alec, chortling out loud: But wouldn’t you prefer a free calculator watch?
Me: RRRROWR.

Even given the fact that Alec reads Talking Cock more than I do, the scary extent to which he is in touch with the Singaporean psyche still suggests he has not actually been in Ireland these past few months, but has instead been living a secret existence in a 3-room flat in Toa Payoh.

These Boots Were Made For Alt-Country

Word to Adidas for using Calexico’s very lovely song Pepita as the background to their ad featuring big sports names running with Muhammed Ali. I’d have used Quattro instead, because it always makes me think of being borne across a vast expanse of night clouds at exhilarating speed with my bare feet skimming their cool damp surfaces, and that seems to be a fairly nice mental picture to have associated with sports shoes, given that my usual mental picture associated with sports shoes involves heat rash and a general longing for death. But Pepita’s cool too.

Even More Un-PC Than Me

I was discussing upcoming holiday plans with Alec, specifically the Eastern Europe part of the trip. We were considering the cost viability of a railpass by trying to see if all the places we wanted to see were actually on good train routes.

Alec: Well, we all know you can definitely get to Auschwitz by train!
Me: ……
Alec: ……
Me: Okay, next topic of conversation.