The Sky Hasn’t Fallen Just Yet

This isn’t much of an update, but here goes anyway.

On Saturday evening, I noticed an outbreak of spots I didn’t remember having on Friday. For most people in my situation this would be clear evidence of chicken pox, but for someone like me who has lived my whole life with eczema (except for those four blessed alabaster years in England; now I think about it, I really should have given in to Alec’s miniskirt requests while they were still a viable option), it could just be a exceptionally bad skin day.
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I Don’t Feel Like Chicken Pox Tonight

I suppose a fall had to come some time.

Alec has come down very unexpectedly with the chicken pox, and the two people he spends the most time with in my family – my mum and I – are the ones who haven’t had it yet.

Yesterday my mum and I went on a frustrating trek to get post-exposure treatment for ourselves, where all but one of the doctors we went to weren’t aware that there was even such a thing as post-exposure prophylaxis for chicken-pox. (We knew this because my uncle used to work at the Communicable Disease Centre.)

Finally, in a clinic near work I found a doctor who was aware that vaccination could be used, but wasn’t sure about antiviral medication. I gave him the relevant materials which my uncle had emailed us, and after studying them he decided that the best treatment for me would be antivirals, although for someone with my level and time of exposure to the virus there’s no guarantee anything will work. Meanwhile, my uncle had decided that the best treatment for my mum would be vaccination. And then they found out that aborted foetuses are used in the vaccine, so she now refuses to take it, and will just wait and see if she gets the disease.

I’m worried about Alec, who is alone in his flat with no one around to check on him, and cut off from his job-seeking because he doesn’t have Internet access. I don’t want my mum to get chicken pox because she’s 62 and I’m worried about complications (which can be pretty bad for adults). I don’t want to get chicken pox because for the first time in a while I was actually planning to not have a shitty birthday this year, and now the uncertainty of it all means I can’t really plan anything until it will possibly be too late to plan anything. Also, any disruption in my pupillage may fuck up my trip to England in June and attendance at Tamara’s wedding. Also, there is the trifling matter of the entire swing dance camp Alec may have infected over the weekend, including two pregnant women and a 91-year-old. It’s possible they’re already immune, but he called the studio to warn them anyway.

Obviously there are bigger problems in the world than these, but that doesn’t make them any more fun to deal with right now. Which is why I could only manage a wry laugh when I found a new link to my site from sockparade this morning, with this commentary:

Supergirl.
Found by a pal when looking for Ayn Rand quotes. She doesn’t refer to herself as Supergirl or anything, that’s just what we called her until we knew her name was Michelle. She’s been to more countries and done more great things in her life than I could even think up. She has a ridiculously huge knowledge base of good music and good reads which makes anyone a cool cat in my book. Why do people from Singapore have such interesting lives? She doesn’t write as consistenly as Dooce but read this and you’ll be hooked.

I’m extremely flattered by the kind words, but I can’t say I’m feeling that super right now. :(

Lindy-Hop Ya Don’t Stop

The bad news is that I didn’t get to dance with Frankie Manning as I’d hoped to. He didn’t do the social dancing at night, which is fair enough given that during the day he continually amazed me with the dexterity and exertions he was still capable of. So if the man wanted to take it easy at night, I was happy to let him. Perhaps I still have a tiny chance at the Esplanade library tonight, where he’s giving a talk (is there anyone else who can give a talk entitled “91 Years of Lindy-Hop” except this man?), but only if there’ll actually be any dancing at the end of it. Anyway, I’m just grateful I got the opportunity to attend his classes – that alone was worth the price of admission.

The good news is that after lindy-hopping on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday (with Saturday and Sunday involving 6 hours of classes during the day, then social dancing on punishing concrete for several hours more), today my body is still mostly none the worse for wear. This is a nice change from post-wakeboarding Mondays when my body is a symphony of pain. Also, in the course of the camp I had the best slow dance and the most exhilarating fast dance I’ve ever had. Thank God the fast “dance” was only 45 seconds or so (during a class, with our hot Swedish teacher), or I don’t think I could have survived the entire thing.

So here’s to another fabulous weekend, and hopefully a lifetime more of lindy-hopping to go.

Frankie Goes To Sentosa!

There will be themes for the night parties at SEAjam this weekend. It is worrying that for Saturday night’s theme of “LOUD!” I immediately know what I will wear, and for Sunday’s theme of “Cooool” I’m clueless.

But sartorial choices are really unimportant in the context of my main goal for this weekend, which is to dance with this 90-year-old man. (To non-swingers: it’s the equivalent of taking writing classes from Nabokov.)

I’m so psyched!

‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Galangal

I couldn’t believe my ears. Someone I couldn’t see in a room nearby had just broken out into what sounded like a line from one of my most-played songs of last year. In almost exactly the same way I’d gabbled the line in countless mad solitary post-midnight subwoofing dances in my room, she was saying “Galang galang galang”, and even managing a fairly good approximation of MIA’s singsong.

My first excited thought was that there might actually be someone in the office who listened to non-mainstream music. Although over the years I’ve grown used to having almost no friends who listen to the same sort of music I do, it’s still really nice to meet someone who does. My second excited thought was that with my now-pathetic grasp of current music affairs, maybe I was just unaware that by now Galang is mainstream music and it’s a hit! Either possibility would be cool.

And then the next line of the conversation burst both my hopeful little bubbles. She walked out of the room, followed by her friend, who was insisting “No lah, the best tau huay is at Selegie Road!” And what, then, did my ostensible fellow MIA-lover say? She repeated what she’d said before, same rhythm, same singsong – “Geylang geylang geylang!”

I’m crushed, but I might as well get something out of this disappointment – if you have a view on where the best tau huay is, please share.

[Note: This post is better understood if you are a) a music geek or b) familiar with places in Singapore, and best understood if you’re both.]

Insert Cruiser Joke Here

More shipping lawyer fun – in the Lloyd’s Register today, I found a ship called GAYDAR!

[I text-messaged Sue immediately to share this wonderful news. She replied telling me to search Lawnet for an article called The Meaning Of Meaninglessness.]

The little ways we get through the days.

Struggling With The Basics

My weekends are so packed that it takes me the whole week to try and finish writing about them, and even then I don’t manage – I haven’t begun editing my pictures of Sungei Buloh (last week), or written about the non-touristy joys of the Albert Square/Fu Lou Shou Complex area (Chinese New Year Eve), let alone write about the weekend that’s just passed.

Beyond that backlog there are also the various inchoate posts I have about films I’ve been watching, music I’ve been listening to, and those infernal 2004 lists! (The top album and top song lists are still owing, and I’m actually still adamant on posting them, hopefully before 2006.) So at the moment, imagine blog entries about this weekend as faint shimmering mirages on the distant sands of a desert, and me the wild-eyed pucker-mouthed wanderer crawling towards them.

However, I can share this encounter with you quite quickly:

When lift doors opened at the Marine Parade library yesterday, a young couple who had been waiting outside barged in. The old lady who had been inside smiled a little bemusedly, holding the lift door open for them as they pushed by her. The guy was holding a large hardcover book – Society: The Basics.

Say My Name, Say My Name

This column breezily explores the inverse relationship between the quality of a band’s name and their ultimate success, a phenomenon which has always amused me. And of course, I’ve whiled away many a dull moment by wondering what I’d name my band, though I usually take it for granted that we’d be destined for failure and therefore feel free to be a bit loopy.

  • The Meaningless Plurals: No prizes for guessing which sorts of bands we’ll be satirizing. But we’ll also play the occasional Motown cover, with great tenderness.
  • The Google Sex Perverts: Not originally my idea. Jonathan, who was once the only South African reader of this site and is now possibly one of many South African non-readers of this site (because I haven’t heard from him for a while) came up with it in a hilarious comment thread on the previous incarnation of this site, and I’ve never forgotten it.
  • I Am Spartacus: Yes, our songs will all only have 3 words and be very repetitive. How’d you guess?
  • Boutros-Boutros Kweli: We will be the ultimate “positive hip-hop” supergroup. Common will beg to work with us and we’ll say “Phooey, you’re boring!” We’ll let Hi-Tek produce us, but he’ll have to change his name.
  • Frau Farbischener: An all-girl Franz Ferdinand tribute band.

What would you name your band?

Nowhere Mall

They don’t make them like Cuppage Plaza any more.

I haven’t met many people who share my penchant for forgotten places and faded glory, which is why I’m so glad I have the Orgers to do things like drink in the Mitre Hotel, explore Potong Pasir, and sing KTV in the saddest, dingiest shopping centre in Orchard Road with.

Don’s picture captures the listless, boarded-up feel of the place better than mine does, but I fell too much in love with the lifts and wanted to make them look beautiful.

Cuppage Plaza lifts, Singapore

Wakey Wakey

I have been meaning to write about wakeboarding for a while. Wakeboarding is lovely, though I certainly wasn’t feeling quite so affectionate towards it while grumpily driving to Punggol for our 8 a.m. start on Sunday morning. But once we were the only boat out, speeding over a vast calm expanse of water in sun which hadn’t turned scorching yet, with egrets in the distant shallows and an occasional gull, I realized just how much sense an early start makes.

Over the course of the morning, I was relieved to find that contrary to what my first attempt at wakeboarding indicated, I am not the world’s most spastic wakeboarder. After various absurdly comedic falls, I finally managed to get to a standing position and coast along happily behind the boat for a fair distance.

So, two lessons in, here are some things I have learned about wakeboarding:

  • Going for longer sessions with fewer people on the boat is worth the extra expense. You will learn faster and fewer people will witness your initial spasticity. But like Baz said, wear sunscreen.
  • If you are short-sighted, and decide not to wear your contact lenses for fear of sewage-derived eye infections from the Punggol water, you risk missing everyone else’s madly exaggerated instructions from the boat, such as when they jump around like monkeys to tell you to stop squatting and bloody stand up, or when they assume twisted hunchback poses to tell you that you look like a twisted hunchback.
  • Falling onto your left boob hurts, even when it’s onto water.
  • When removing one’s lifejacket upon returning to the boat, check first to see that your right boob has not slipped out of your bikini. Thank goodness the only other girl on the boat was the only person who saw.
  • Wakeboarding is hazardous to boobs.