it's 4 months and 3 weeks.

this week, i thought, i don't think i'll be able to last that long.
this week was once of the worst weeks ever. if our morale were the stock index, we would have plunged into a dire financial crisis. monday- 7 o'clock briefings. higher ups conclude that the reason for 42sar's spate of accidents is our lack of discipline. more standbys and safety checks promised. tuesday- everyone gets fucked. i get fucked. i sign extra for not putting up bos board. DU-LAN. wed- last minute CO parade. i get scolded again for not bringing 11b to cookhouse. thurs- soc cancelled because of rain. fri- vehicle drills. my section couldn't put up the camo net in time. F.K. pulls stunt.
i'm starting to laugh at everything. i think i'm going crazy. this afternoon, i said every word with a 'z' behind. like 'trophies' become 'trophz'. like 'whatz moviez is-z worthz watchingz.'

a guy got charged for putting extra weights in his field pack.

haha.

a guy got charged for threatening to commit suicide if the counsellor doesn't let him stay out.

haha.

a guy got charged for falling asleep in a helicopter.

hahaha.

my platoon sergeant: guys you have to make a few boards for next week's combat shoot. make sure the words are audible.

dominic: let's follow the jews! let's buy a few hdb flats and refuse to sell it. we can declare toa payoh an independent state!
me: don't you have to need a passport to buy groceries?
dominic: no, it will be a self contained state! ok.. maybe you need one to go orchard to buy prada.

and so on.

to make myself happy, self-delusional happy, i have tons of dvds to watch. now if only i could get people to eat cupcakes with me at the marmalade pantry.
and wow. the champions show is full of pretty people and a script that writes like the characters are in kindergarten. they talk stupid and they act childish. case in point:

jing wen (the girl): you are L.C.
guy: what's that?
jing wen: low class!
jing wen: your are a P.I.G.
guy: now, what's P.I.G.?
after 10secs, guy: pig?
jingwen: you are L.C.P.I.G.!

you have to watch it to believe it. it is downright hilarious.

i was told that we were going to a new club's opening somewhere near far east and that turned out to be thumper at goodwood park hotel, supposedly the new hangout place for celebrities. i had one of the more interesting clubbing nights. went in and found that the crowd was decidedly older.. like some models and older men, middle aged women, women who wanted you to kiss them if you wanted a chair.. went out to 7-11 to swig a barcadi breezer. back in, the band was playing latin music and an ah-ma was cha-chaing on the small dance floor. ordered a martell green tea which cost 15 bucks. thankfully there was no entrance charge. found out that it was thai hoe's birthday. saw irene ang lookalike. an indian guys sang the chinese song 'xiao wei'..the band played 'in the end' and the dj came and we danced for a while. there was a young guy in white shirt who danced like an energiser bunny (he bounces into the dancefloor) and did crazy stuff. his shirt was sweat drenched and he's presumably a regular who livens the party when it gets dull. later shook his hand. however he was topped by another older guy with a pony tail who specialises in experimental/ classical interpretation of whatever's playing. kept doing some matrix inspired backward bending and mime movements. couldn't stop laughing when they both got women to dance with. live band then came back with 'hey ya' and a string of hits. they're pretty spectacular. saw rachel lee lookalike. after we got out of the entrance this rather drunk woman claimed that she owns the club and declared all of us to be 15, 16 years old. said the min age was 25 and asked us to say 'thank you' to her. did so. then she asked us to say 'thank you auntie (her name, can't recall)'. what woman refers to herself as auntie? we just muttered something and walked away.

the CO night on tuesday was hot, hot, hot. there were 6 girls in bikini tops lap dancing some lucky guys in the audience, stripping off their shirts (the guys') and frolicking with the senior officers on stage, one of whom looked very uncomfortable when she jumped on him. it was utterly scandalous and very shameless. and we were expecting to watch another long boring war movie.

spent this afternoon trying to fix my computer (again. futilely.) and watching music videos on the net. found a wong kar wai directed video for dj shadow's six days. very gorgeous. it stars chang chen and daniella graham. couldn't download it unfortunately.

read today that david mitchell's cloud atlas lost the man booker prize to a gay novel. cloud atlas is completely trippy, the way i like it. it's kind of like jonathan safran foer. the writer has such a good grasp of the language, the textures, the sights and sounds of different worlds that i am almost overwhelmed. a short summary of the 6 narratives that make up the book: a traveller writes a journal about colonization and enslavement in the 19th century; a struggling music composer finds his muse and has a torrid affair while finding the journal in the dusty library; a nosy reporter uncovers the dangerous truth behind a new nuclear power plant in 70s california; a book editor is taken hostage at an old folk's home; a clone in future korea attains sentience while grasping the reality of a "corpocracy"; the clone is now a goddess in hawaii years after civilisation. this is where i am now. the stories then appear backwards, resolving their threads and revealing a grand scheme of power, exploitation, oppression. like one reviewer said, i can't bear for the story to end.

i am going to jb tomorrow.

i think i took the longest time to figure out zhang zhen yue. years ago when i first heard of him i thought he was an artist who dabbles in electronic music and i thought, wow cool, and then later i thought he was an angst ridden rocker who writes anthem about social ills, and then i found out that he actually wrote all these sappy love songs. anyway, he's one of the few things i like about chinese music. he's versatile, doesn't sound over polished or over produced, isn't one of the prefabricated pretty face idols that taiwan churns out, and his ballads aren't the soaked-in-piano drenched-in-strings kind. the songs have feel good guitar riffs instead of overused unauthentic r&b beats. he doesn't mumble. i think he must be one of most underrated voices in chinese pop. his is the perfect voice to sing for all the disenchanted self deprecating youths out there.

last night, watched 2046. it is an art film, it is like 'in the mood for love'. beautiful women in beehive dos leaning against the wall crying, everyone smoking while looking conflicted. love is the overarching theme and the story is unabashedly romantic. contains too many layers to write about. but i got sick of the 'if you have a secret whisper it into the tree' tag line. disappointed that the scene in the picture at the top did not actually appear in the film.

then did the most touristy thing. went to the long bar at raffle hotel to have a singapore sling. there were peanut shells all over the floor so we had fun dumping them from the table. live band was too loud and the foreigners were enjoying themselves. not a good place to talk. could imagine black and white flashbacks of me in my past life supping there sometime in 1930.

managed to fix the other computer when i got home. it's back to square one again, having to get all the usual programs like realplayer and quicktime. thinking of upgrading it. excited about resfest.

a new lomo album, starring..
bingxun, me, theodore, bene, charlotte, karen, keith, me, zhenjin, xinyi, jack and gabriel.

totally knackered after 3 consecutive days of soc training. have never felt my legs hurt so much since say, the stair climbing training in jc or bmt. can't walk very well now. thus do not think i'll be able to go to the basketball session in school tomorrow morning. had the longest week since our OC banned us from nights off cuz we didn't get gold for ippt. everyone's condemned him. shall refer to him as F.K. from now on. F.K. said to me, 'chee wei, don't look so sad leh.' how could i not, when i have to wake up early every morning to do combat runs while some people are happily sleeping. on other hand, i had a good mid-morning to early-afternooon nap on thursday. guys are proposing going to m'sia next weekend. do not think it will materialise. even if it does, probably have driving then.

soup restaurant has the most wonderful dish- samsui garlic chicken. thick juicy slices of white chicken meat, sandwiched in a lettuce leaf, laced with the most aromatic garlic. it slays me. watched sky captain and the world of tomorrow. totally campy fun. soft focused characters battling evil robots in super planes. rather retro futuristic sets that took my breath away. laughed wildly at parts, like when they were naked in shangri-la.

finally caught singapore idol. can understand why everybody hates jerry ong to the core. can't sing. THAT SMILE! THAT 'V' SIGN! disco night was uninspiring. olinda proves to be a real diva-in-the-making. taufik can sing. maia has really hot moves. i think those will be the top three.

saw the developed photos. absolutely mortified. how could a roll of 36 produce only 18 shots. there must be something wrong with my lomo camera, or with me. half of them turn up to be blank photos. tearing at the thought of those magical photos. among the many missed genius shots: two contrasting dragon lanterns, monkey lanterns, fish lanterns, zifang in front of escalator, sleeping buddha, car in the cte. really dejected now. do not think that there is a lomo career for me. the rest i'm gonna scan and post it soon.

tsk tsk. singaporeans are such compulsive bloggers. just click on the next blog button at the top and within 5 clicks you are sure to bump into a blog by a singaporean. or even two in a row. this must be the kiasu syndrome at work. even my brother and sister have one. and my sis is only in primary three. tell tale signs of a singaporean blog: a fanciful template.. don't know why foreigners aren't gaga over blog skins.. singlish which makes it unreadable.. a gimmicky pop up that says 'click yes to enter' or some shit.. and it's rather common to hear songs playing. ah.

and lor claims that he'll still go out with us!

we shall see...

i just found out that martha stewart will be released from prison in march- the same time as my ORD! well, that's one more person to countdown with. there's also news of a busted cocaine ring in singapore. so drama. you must be audacious to walk around with so much cocaine knowing that they will hang you if you're caught.

still haven't watched sky captain yet.

bought two more books. david mitchell's cloud atlas. i know david mitchell is a cool writer because 1) his previous book was titled number9dream 2) i found it at orchard library 2 years ago but never borrowed it and 3) this book begins with a diary of a 19th century guy in the fiji islands. i got q by luther blissett on an impulse. i have a thing for historical novels. they transport you back to a world which you've never seen before, where religion clashes (much like the world today) and new dicoveries shape the world. better still if some corset-ripping or breeches-dropping occur; people were already that liberated.

suddenly want to
a) study bioengineering
b) go to berkeley
c) look at old odac photos

I think that in my boredom yesterday I made a big mistake. I wanted to try out the debit card so I went to shop for a tshirt online. But it ended up costing more than it should because of the shipping costs. It's enough to put me off online shopping for now. Anyway the reason I'm usuing capital letters for the first time is that I read that if you respect the readers, you got to make the effort to press the shift button. But darn, it's sure hard work.

Millie: your Kelvin Tan just released four more weirdly titled albums. Just thought you'd like to know.

Morris: Your idea of using handphone as atm cards has just started in use in Japan. p/s Have you found Charmaine?

I'm going to buy new books to read. Maybe One Hundred Years in Solitude. I borrowed that a few years ago but didn't finish reading it. Recommend me some!

can't believe i'm spending so much time doing the new look for the blog. i am so addicted to blogging. help!

i went to the detention barracks to pick up a guy from my company who's been there for over a year and who's creepily enough, named ho chee wei. he lives near me and he just seemed damn happy to be out. can you imagine being locked up in one place for so long? among the things he heard in DB? that the passing mark for SOC is now 20 mins.
it must feel like the feeling you get when you overslept and thought that you had to catch up with the rest of the world amplified infinitely.
i just think freedom is often taken for granted. when he came out he had a bunch of letters which didn't get through to him because they were rejected. does stripping a person of his basic rights truly reform him? there was another guy who went in for a few weeks and came out totally different. he slept in bed all day and his attitude towards work changed for the worse. i now find deeper meaning in the yellow ribbon project.

schopenhauer: the pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. if the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

i was just starting my older computer and it was taking a record breaking 20 mins to start up windows when the screen started to twitch violently and i tried to adjust the settings but too late there were sparks inside the monitor and a burning smell and i was mildly afraid that it might catch fire then i unplugged it and changed the monitor and i restarted the computer and it tells me that it's busted cuz one of the windows file is corrupted and i have to find the setup disc to repair it but i don't have it so that's why

i. am. fucked.

(perhaps it's just comeuppance for having season 1 of arrested development, room on fire, bloody extended soundtracks for the oc and gilmore girls on the hard disk.)

..my friends and i have decided that saf has invented lingo and stock phrases that are highly unique and deserve to be applauded. in fact they stick to the mind so much that if i should ever see a pavilion or any structure which looks remotely like a shelter i would call it a 'training shed'. other examples include sme (person)- subject matter expert. indent (verb)- meaning to order something, like food. 'consume your rations', 'mount up the tonner', 'whole lot fall in'. and of course 'telt your maps'.

so i was going to write about how sad my life is but i decided to scrape it cuz i don't want any sympathetic comments of the 'you're not so bad-cheer up' variety.

it turns out that whenever you put morris, xinyi and me together at one dining table the conversation will inevitably turn towards our lack of relationships. it's almost as if we are already 30 and our biological clocks are ticking louder and louder. we would wonder why everyone else around us is getting attached, how a friend who gets attached will gradually fade away from our radars, and how sad we would be when there is no single friend to go out with. in fact we take turns to sink each other into a deeper state of misery. we would worry about never getting married, us moving into the dreaded 'never been kissed' territory, and lament that one will automatically be happy if one has found love.

almost like a reflex action, i went home and promptly had diarrhoea and vomitted my whole dinner.

it was a horrible end to an originally good weekend on which i went to the lantern festival at shuanglin temple in toa payoh, ripped jason mraz's cd, and watched the motorcycle diaries (loved the b&w shots). urgh.

i found this editorial from IS so funny i'm gonna type the whole thing out. i know it'll be dumb but i'm doing it anyway.

shit. it's a lot of words. excuse the spelling errors.

WAKE UP CALL
singapore- In the wake of several commuters falling into the path of oncoming mrt trains, the land transport authority LTA has done a survey to discover why such incidents occur. "we felt an empirical study was needed to discover why some commuters behave with such apparent lack of personal responsibility," says an lta spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, referring to the 224 persons wandering onto train tracks since the mrt system started in 1991.

the findings, based on a survey of 10000 commuters over the past two weeks, include a surprising possible cause: fatigue due to sleep deprivation and overwork. an overwhelming 94 percent of commuters say they enter mrt stations at the start of a work or school day already feeling tired and drowsy, with 83 percent nodding off during a train ride at least twice a week. a quarter even claim to reach stages of deep slumber when vivid dreaming occurs, despite in an upright position. "people who are hardly awake usually can't tell if they're on the platform or the tracks, or even how they got there," says the lta spokesperson.

commuters most at risk of mishap are:
sleep deprived or chronically fatigued commuters
shift workers, especially production line operators
tertiary students facing imminent examinations
executive involved in project or client-based work
employees conditioned to chronic overtime work
those who commute in the early morning, on warm afternoons, or late at night
those under medication that increases drowsiness
parents of newborn children or ailing elderly folk
those travelling on long, boring routes through satellite towns
intoxicated commuters

to prevent such accidents, the ministry of home affairs and the lta are launching the "stay awake singapore!" campaign (SAS!), starting from oct 1. fun and innovative measures include handouts of high caffiene beverages to sleepy looking commuters. these drinks will be exempted from the "don't drink on the mrt" rule. also to be introduced is the "ride with a buddy: system, where pairs of fatigued commuters take turns to stay awake on the station platforms and in the trains. a third initiative at station platforms is motion sensors, installed along existion yellow marker lines. except when there is a train at the station, the sensors will impart small electric shocks to any object intercepting the invisible barrier, thus preventing potentially disastrous falls onto the tracks whilst simultaneously giving straying commuters an exhilarating "wake-up" jolt.

phew. thank goodness for those pri 4 speed typing lessons. you'll probably find it just a little funny, but i was laughing at every other sentences, which is a warning sign of depression. will be back with super depressing mid life crisis rant later.