Singaporean Sometimes

The last couple of days have been refreshingly different in small but worthwhile ways.

Friday: dinner at Newton hawker centre (where I haven’t been for years), with, er, seven guys (which I also don’t do too often. I usually stick to about four or five), followed by the immensely entertaining Rush Hour 2 (as cosmopolitan as I like to think of myself as being, I still enjoy watching a yellow man kicking white butt), and intermittent discussions about the sociological ramifications of the GEP. (Gifted Education Programme. All seven guys were from it. I got in but chose not to go. Obviously there was lots of room for discussion.)

Monday: night tennis fun with Ken. Despite my stint on my primary school mini-tennis team (downsized racquets, oversized spongy balls) and Ken’s recent buff sportiness, our tennis hour could perhaps be accurately described as a breathtaking showcase of incompetence, as much of our cross-court repartee acknowledged.

Ken: Okay, let’s set a goal for ourselves! Let’s try for a rally of five!
I serve into the net.
Ken: Okay, one! Let’s go for one!

Me, serving: Right, let’s focus on control!
Ken swings the racquet but misses the ball completely.
Me: Right, let’s also focus on aim!

Today: excursion with Luke and Yuping to Darkest Singapore to watch Moulin Rouge at Causeway Point (I admit that in a country with a total landspace of 640 square kilometres, nothing is very far, but Causeway Point is as far northwest as you can go in Singapore without having to visit Malaysia), because it was the only cinema left in Singapore that was still showing the movie.

The movie? Nice eye candy. Reasonable ear candy. Liked their cover of Roxanne. John Leguizamo’s always a treat to watch. But it left me completely unmoved at the end, so I’m wondering why so many people kept telling me how much they cried. I guess the fact that I feel absolutely no need to spew copious amounts of words in either praise or censure of it probably says the most of all, and something tells me this is actually the worst possible reaction a director like Baz Luhrman could have. It was worth the money, effort and time, but I like it the least out of the three Baz Luhrman films I’ve seen. (I liked Strictly Ballroom best, followed closely by Romeo and Juliet)

Friday night was the finals of the RJC (Raffles Junior College, my old school) Dramafest, an inter-faculty drama competition where each faculty has to write and produce an original play. The Orgers of CAP’97 decided it would be a good occasion to attempt a reunion.

[Perhaps I should explain the Orgers. At the 1997 Creative Arts Programme, we were a bunch of RJC students who loved the writing aspect of the programme but also loved sitting around flinging innuendoes, insults and assorted bitches at each other for hours. We started off as “the RJ group”. Then “the Orgy group” due to our nightly tendency to congregate in large numbers in small rooms and sprawl on beds. Finally, we amalgamated the two and became the Orgers.

On the second-last day of the camp, each writing workshop group was given a pageworth of space in the daily camp publication to do whatever they wanted with. What we eventually came up with was so filthy on so many levels that the entire thing got heavily censored and most of it never got published.

What did make it to publication, I think, was one of our group efforts at bad poetry:

Tequila Sunrise

Weevils desire only their own death, after all
As screwdrivers roll to never-ending halts
The chair shakes; I am afraid.
The ticking stalks through the grass.
I, in the centre of this vortex,
grasp the fragile life-bird and sing.
Her feathers are notes of hard hatred
And her beak is made of desolation
Her scream blows me off myself
through the facade of my Taka face
The pen is in my hand
I run unabashedly to the mouth
of the double-barrelled shotgun
that awaits.

Some weeks later, we were at an open-mike poetry reading at the Substation, and decided on a whim to do Tequila Sunrise, intending to bring some comic relief to the session. So there we were, declaiming the lines, complete with interpretive dance, and the audience sat there completely straight-faced and took everything seriously.

I’m not sure if it was an indictment of our failure to produce truly abysmal poetry or the generally pretentious climate of poetry reading sessions at the time, but whatever it was, it was hilarious, if a little embarassing.]

Back to Dramafest finals. It was typical, I guess. The Arts faculty play had people yelling about censorship and repression (although I must say the dance culminating in crucifixion symbolism was new), and the Medicine faculty play was workmanlike and coherent, but ultimately far less interesting to me than the organized chaos of the Arts production.

Is it just me or does almost every play I’ve seen in my life feature a line somewhere that goes “No matter how much everything changes, everything is still…(meaningful pause)…the same”, or variations on it?

After that we descended on Holland Village in droves as Rafflesians tend to do after college events, spent an extremely long time walking around trying to find a place that could accomodate the unwieldy size of our group, and finally settled down for murtabak (a South Indian dish which involves very stretchy dough, onions, and minced meat, and it’s dee-lish), bubble tea and teh ahlia (ginger tea).

After supper we popped in at Tangos, where other friends were drinking, to try and find more people to share the post-midnight cab fare with, and ended up talking about labia and clitoria (a flower we had to study for GCE Biology which unsurprisingly bore a striking resemblance to a…) and other similarly debauched things for twenty minutes before I finally decided I probably had to start for home if I wanted to be fully awake to judge the national debate finals the next day.

On the bus to the symposium on Wednesday morning, I got strange looks. I’m not sure if it was the way corners of my mouth tend to curl uncontrollably while reading the Economist (which I often find ha-ha funny – gems from that particular issue included “Yet, for the first few months in office, Mr Bush managed to focus relentlessly – sometimes even comically – on his campaign promises. Thus his tax cut was trumpeted as an answer first to an overheating economy, then to a sagging one and finally to higher energy prices. It sounded silly, but he got his tax cut.”) and trying not to chuckle audibly, or the fact that I abandoned the Economist for The Muppet Show when it started showing on the TV (yes, we have TVs in buses in Singapore), and then couldn’t help a suppressed giggle when Kermit got surrounded by a group of cheeses who wanted to perform various numbers on the show, such as the Cheddarnooga Choo-Choo.

After the symposium I rushed to RJC for the Creative Writing Club’s annual Afternoon of Poetry and Music, which always tends to turn itself into a CAP reunion of sorts, which is good in a way, but has the potential to turn everything into too much of a masturbatory clique if taken too far. So I tried circulating, cocktail reception style. I suppose it was just my bad luck that the first person I talked to who I didn’t already know then followed me around for the rest of it, trying to make conversation that I honestly wasn’t that interested in listening to, because he bored me, and I then had to seek refuge in people who I knew. I chastised Yi-Sheng for dying his hair, not to mention actually starting to comb it, and for wearing a proper shirt and trousers. I felt this burgeoning attention to appearance marked an unwelcome break from his previous genius-poet image, where he went around in uncool clothes and ignored hair.

Dinner was in Holland Village with most of Council 2001, and Terry, and then us oldies went to Orchard Road in a failed attempt to watch Save The Last Dance, which was sold out. We ended up in the Borders bistro where Luke started drawing me on the (paper) tablecloth. Don then drew Luke, Zakir drew Don, and I drew Zakir. I still have problems drawing lips. It’s always the lips that scupper it all, dammit. Zakir looked reasonably like Zakir until I got to the lips, and then he looked like Marilyn Monroe with short hair and specs.

Phew. A googleworth of thoughts have been building up in my head over the past couple of days with little opportunity for release, with the result that they’ve been boinging off each other and my already frail grey matter in classic Brownian motion. My eyes are getting a little glazed, and I’ve been surreptitiously checking my ears every now and then for leakage.

Let’s start with today, which is as good a place as any, and which was impressively productive. I judged three debates, gave three adjudication speeches, and slipped out between the second and third debate to Funan Centre with my sister, where we bought Handsprings. I now own yet another gadget I don’t reaaaaaaally need, but shamelessly lust after anyway. Yay. :)

The debates were preliminary rounds in the national JC debating championships, and I have to say that the competition’s either undergone an considerable increase in quality, or the debating gods were smiling on me, because I didn’t get a single debate that made me contemplate suicide or pray for spontaneous combustion. Scrutinizing my notes on the way home, I was amazed to find a marked absence of the “??!!!“s, “STUPID“s and “OH, PUH-LEASE“s that used to feature regularly in my scribbled comments (these, of course, manifest themselves less offensively in my formal adjudication speeches).

I spent Wednesday and Thursday at a symposium for tertiary students, attending at the behest of my future employers and current sponsors of my university education. It was basically two days of talking about Singapore in the region, Singapore in the global economy, Singapore society, Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.

Do I sound bored to you? I was, but not because I find the subject of Singapore intrinsically boring. I think it’s a fascinating study in politics, governance, development and economics that doesn’t seem to have been replicated anywhere else I can think of in modern times.

I was bored, I guess, because it just seemed like the same thing over and over again, which any Singaporean with half a brain who doesn’t live in a media vacuum would know about: the challenges facing Singapore, the need to stay competitive, the need to innovate. The same old questions from the assembled students: how free is the press, what use is political activism when nothing changes in response to it, yadda yadda yadda.

There are a couple of scattered things I want to write about, some loosely connected to the symposium, some not. But right now, I want to have lunch with Ken and go to the library. Maybe later.

I like well mixed weekends. Saturday morning was spent reading the latest Economist, pulling white hairs out of my father’s head, and downloading MP3s, Saturday afternoon was spent helping my mother, and dinner was with the family.

Satisfied that I’d fulfilled the requisite “time at home/with family” requirement for nag-free living in the household, I then left for drinks at the Liquid Room with old classmates May, incredibly toned Willy (dirty mind, quell thyself) and Stan, and then Zouk, where we spent most of our time in Velvet Underground (soulful house/acid jazz) with periodic excursions to Phuture (breakbeats, my favourite room in Zouk) at my pleading.

Sunday was quietly but pleasantly spent, with chai dao kuey (literal translation: carrot cake, but it’s not carrot cake. It’s complicated. But yummy.) for lunch, ironing and The Sportswriter in the afternoon, mass in the evening, and dinner at Ah Hoi’s Kitchen, which I proclaimed the best dinner I’d had since coming home – there was crispy fried baby squid, honey glazed ginger chicken, chilli kangkung (it’s a vegetable) and lots of durians for dessert. I may have my gripes about Singapore, but damn, it’s a food paradise.