Some people just keep coming back for more, even when they’re told that they’re not welcome.
I don’t care about your sob stories. About your implications that no-one else can help you, that the project’s due in a few hours and that your final grade rests heavily upon its performance.
I don’t care about your promises of food and drink. They have never materialised and I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to do so. Yes, I’m no longer in NUS. Does this mean that your friendship with me is contingent on convenience? How strange that you don’t award me the same privilege.
What I do care about is that I’ve heard neither head nor tail from you between requests for help besides a random SMS advertising your new business. Get a clue lady. You obviously don’t understand what it means to be a friend.
I’m not a fucking charity. I’m not a fucking edit-robot. And you are definitely not. my. friend. So get the hell out of my life. I certainly won’t miss you. Go on, get going. Don’t let the screen door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.
Really lady, show some class. People might give you a chance or two if you get inebriated but if you get drunk everytime you come over and start spouting shit out of your pie-hole it gets old. Fast.
Also, bringing along two friends who were so far gone that they could neither walk straight nor figure out that an automatic ice machine is, y’know, automatic really didn’t help.
I hate it when people who haven’t made the effort to speak to me in months come up to me just before reading week and ask me to go through their final reports for them.
I like to stay informed. Near-obsessed enough for my condition to warrant a 5-syllable Latin name. It might be a perverse form of insecurity but I just am not comfortable not knowing what’s happening in the world around me.
Thus, I have found many sources for news. Printed mags aside, I also visit websites from which I get my morning (well, afternoon) fix when I’m fresh (well, usually groaning and grumpy) out of bed.
I go to the New York Times and the Huffington Post for updates on America. Election fever gripped me ever since the mid-term elections in 2006 and refused to let go. And, like it or not, America is one of the most important nations in the world and the politicking that goes on in Washington has far-reaching implications for the rest of the planet, even here in Singapore.
The International Herald Tribune and the British Broadcasting Company are important sites for an European perspective. The IHT in particular does a good job of covering news from all over the world. It’s based in Paris but owned by Americans. I have no idea how that actually works but it evidently does.
But recently, and I’m ashamed to admit it, I’ve been tuning in to streaming episodes of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the (Stephen) Colbert Report. I’m ashamed because it’s taken me so long to actually listen to these fine gentlemen.
They run these programs off Comedy Central. That’s right. These programs aren’t meant to be informative - no, they’re meant to make you laugh through the use of absurdity and satire.
But fuck me if these guys haven’t done a splendid job of bringing issues that matter up to (or should I say down to?) a level that the layperson can understand. They are masters of satire and have very little mercy; anything that should be ridiculed is ridiculed. And soundly, too. They have balls. They really do.
Jon and Stephen’s coverage of the American Elections all the way from the Democratic Primaries to the main event itself has worked wonders for Barack Obama. Yes, they’re obviously biased towards the guy and yes they are supposed to be comedy acts but the ways they’ve roasted McCain’s presidential bid aren’t funny just because they’re good at satire; it’s also funny because what they’ve brought up is often so, so true.
These two men, who aren’t supposed to be serious commentators, bring up time and time again serious issues like Abortion Rights, Intelligent Design and Gay Marriage and COMMENT on them constructively. More than that, they lambast how much of the mainstream media seems distracted from its task of watching the government. Fox news anchors drool each time McCain or the Republican party rings a bell and MSNBC and CNN seem to be more interested in entertaining audiences with the usage of holographic projections and 3D graphs that explode out of the ground than delivering real commentary.
I loved how Jon went all the way and accused Palin and her family of being a pack of grifters. He’sprobably right, too. She was recommended to buy three suits but instead went on a luxury label raid and spent not just on clothes for herself but for her entire family. Jesus, that lady boarded the plane back to Alaska with a Louis Vuitton duffel bag. And she’s supposed to be against pork barrel spending?! Caribou Barbie, anyone? Good thing she’s been tagged and released back into the tundra.
The prime example of course, would be Colbert’s LEGENDARY roasting of President George W Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s Dinner.
He hurled thinly-veiled insult after insult to the President’s face, standing nary 3-feet away at the podium, for nearly 15 minutes. Then he turned onto the crowd and tore them and their industry apart for the remaining 10.
The crowd didn’t respond much. They just couldn’t; no one could believe that anyone would have enough audacity to roast the President of the United States of America face-to-face, live and on air. And his criticisms of both the President and the news industry probably hurt too much. Because they were true.
Colbert’s show’s ratings jumped 37% right after this was broadcast on c-span. Hell, I became a very big fan of his right after watching it.
Tucker Carlson of CNN fame invited Jon Stewart for an interview on Crossfire and, well, Jon simply destroyed Carlson on Carlson’s homeground.
Shortly after the interview, Crossfire was cancelled by CNN. In case it’s not obvious, Tucker Carlson is the middle-aged man with the polka-dot bowtie. Yes. Bowtie.
These two gents have wit and talent and balls the size of frickin’ Church Bells.
(Long bitching post ahead. Skip if you don’t like diatribes. Or read it if you want. I think my angry pieces are also my most entertaining.)
I hate being taken for granted. The idea that people keep in contact with me just so I can be whipped out and used like some fire extinguisher in an emergency is repugnant enough. The idea that some people consider me their friends just so they can actively mooch off me really, really pisses me off.
People like that don’t stay my friends once I find out. I’m very good at excising tumours.
Exam season is coming up and I’ve to date received 3 requests from people I have otherwise not even talked to the entire semester to edit their projects for them. (No Little Miss Fun, not talking about you here. Love you deep deep, would help you any day cause I know you’d do the same for me.)
Look, I’m not some editing tool that springs forth into action at your command. Thank you for implying that my standard of work is far enough above yours that you’d entrust me with 30% of your module grade but I really have better things to do than to look at the fetid, miasmic pile of defecation that you dare to call an essay.
They’re all the same: littered with run-on sentences, rife with typos and plethoric with enough grammatical mistakes to make a grammar-nazi gas 4 english textbooks before committing hara-kiri on the spot. Shit, you’d need to pay me just to look at this stuff. My time’s very valuable for one and, more pressingly, I’d need money to reverse the psychological damage I’d incur by reading your shit-heap of tortured words. Shrinks do not come cheap.
Then there is the matter of one of my CCA clubs. The members are pretty tightly knit and I usually feel quite at home in it. However, I’ve recently begun to get pretty irked with the motley group of them.
The problem? Birthdays.
Birthdays usually come together with Birthday presents, and the comm usually pools together to buy the birthday boy/girl a present.
In this committee, March and April seem to be popular months for being born. I’ve been beseiged by requests to pony up for presents ever since the beginning of March and it’s not letting up. People are receiving hair curlers, crumpler bags, sunglasses.. all sorts of expensive stuff. Each present I pool in for costs me anywhere between $5 to $10.
So where’s the problem? Well, here’s what I got from the whole comm for my birthday: a box of 6 donuts. Yeah, that’s right. With the $80 or so I’ve forked out so far this year, I could have bought enough donuts to sleep on. Furthermore, the Donuts and the attached card came a month late and were bought from the budget store at the bazaar outside LT27.
Yes, it’s really heartwarming how appreciated I am around here.
Fuck this for a lark. The birthday boy receiving his new $169 crumpler tomorrow remarked to me offhandedly that I didn’t get a real present because I didn’t throw a party like hair-curler girl. Bullshit, as if sunglasses-boy and him threw parties themselves.
This group of people includes those whom I’ve given a lot to in the past: for example, the certain someone whom is organising the crumpler buy received last minute flowers from me on Vday as appreciation for her work (and cause no one else seemed to remember her, which made me feel sad for her, a little). Yeah, I know I’m sounding selfish and ji jiao here but what’s the alternative? To always be the dumb shit giving and giving and giving and receiving nothing back in return? There has to be a limit to largesse.
Well, she can be sure she’ll never get anything from me again. Or anyone else in this comm for that matter.
So, I’m in a socially difficult situation. These people are my friends and I do care for them. But it seems that we’re not on a two-way-street here. I mean, donuts?! I’ve got a good mind not to contribute to their presents, which is open as a choice if not a particularly socially acceptable one. But, goddammit, I happen to hold friendship in high regard and with my income the money -is- a trivial amount.
But damn me if I don’t feel like crap right now. Yes, I could be over-reacting and making a mountain out of a molehill but really… if I were truly valued as a friend, I wouldn’t have gotten a month-late box of clearance-sale donuts.
These days I wake up in the morning way before my alarm is due to go off. I can’t explain it; I’m normally a serial over-sleeper. Nowadays I just emerge from slumber by some infernal, unknown volition and drift into a limbo of half-awake lassitude, unable to dive back into the blissful oblivion of sleep and yet kept just inches away from breaking through the surface to true awakedness.
It’s distressing.
I’m beginning to dread going to bed at night just because I dread waking up in the morning; head full of fog and half-finished dreams, and the aching weariness that pounds away at my core with each and every heartbeat.
These days, I go to bed hoping that I won’t ever have to wake up again. Sleep is still my refuge. It’s the waking up and working through the day that’s painful.
Sleep is still my refuge, but it is one that is increasingly being annexed. And I don’t know what’s causing it. Or maybe I do.
I’m jaded. Life’s become pretty much meaningless. The only activity that gives me the joy and the lightness-of-being that has so far allowed me to spite the burdens placed on me by school and my job is dancing, but I wasn’t kidding when I made that post about my feet aching. The aching has progressed all the way up to my lower torso now, the familiar yet unwelcome ache of muscles worn out and in dire need of recuperation.
But I have no time to let them truly recover. I’ve gone and danced every night this week. That’s how fucked up I’ve felt. Dance is my therapy but its beginning to come with an ever-increasing physical cost.
If I were to stop dancing, if I had to stop dancing… I think I’d die.
In every single meaning of the word.
Shit, I’m not even sure what I’d live for now, besides dance. And even dance is beginning to cease to be a good reason. It’s not as if I have an overarching responsibility or destiny to fulfill before departing this mortal coil. I’m only against suicide cause it seems pointless; the price for admission to the ride of life has already been paid, and what’s the worst that can happen to you while you’re on it? Our lives are treks towards certain death, for all death is certain in itself.
I believe it’s what we accomplish during our brief time in this world that’s important, that defines a life. The temporal quantity of a life by itself says nothing about it’s quality, and when our lives do end, our deaths should also be as meaningful as possible. That’s what I’ve always wanted: a meaningful death.
But I’m beginning to consider the concept of upkeep; while the price of admission has already been paid, it’s pointless to go on just because of that sunk cost; whyfore stay on a ride if it ceases to be amusing and just becomes boring, or even painful? The canny investor knows that he ought to pull out while he can instead of throwing good money after bad.
I don’t want to have to wake up tomorrow. Or ever again. I’ve always felt this way - if only a little bit - but the thought’s constantly on my mind now.
They thirst for my blood. They smell my fear. They are COMING.
24th Nov - FST3102 Food Safety Assurance
30th Nov - LSM3261 Life, Form and Function
03rd Dec - SC2214 Sociology of Mass Media and Culture
04th Dec - LSM3212 Human Physiology: Cardiovascular System
Actually this could prove to be my slackest exam period yet. Only 4 of them to begin with (my management module is non-examinable) and they’re nicely spaced out. The Life, Form and Function module is also open-book. This is such a step down from the hell-on-wheels that was Year 2 where each and every module was a 6 eyed, razor-clawed, slavering beast that just wanted to get to know your internal organs more intimately vis-a-vis its fangs.
I’ve raved about Poets of the Fall before… and here I am doing it again!
I chanced upon their music video for their song Carnival of Rust (off their second album of the same name) and its a gorgeous little bit of Tim Burton-esque kit. There’s just so much symbolic imagery in the video and I’d say they nailed the theme and tone to exactly fit that of the song itself. Take a look for yourself:
While you’re at the youtube, check out their videos for Locking up the Sun and Lift too. Simply great. Lots of mainstream artistes could take a leaf from their book.
