the pay for my nursing job really sucks. true, we will be having that increment of 3-7% (depending on your job rank) starting this month. but really... what sorta job requires you to work shifts, save lives, handle faecal matter, juggle lots of paperwork and do all of the above with good-manners and customer-oriented service complete with just a pathetic starting pay of $1,500 (not counting CPF)? ok lah, let's loosen up and not be so stringent. there's ward allowance and shift allowances as well. that adds up to another $200-$400 depending on shifts. afternoon shifts get you $2. night shifts should be more (i think 6). morning shifts earn you nothing extra. men who have served their National Service get a 10% increment. i hit about $1,800 every month. but believe me, every single nurse out there would be on strike if not for the fact that they care for the patients, plus it's Singapore. strike? the only strike they would know is prolly soccer bets

this is why, once i finish my 3 years bond with the current hospital, i am so gonna fuck off from healthcare for a while and maybe invest my creativity and customer service skills in something else more profitable like t-shirt design. it has always been my dream to design my own clothes. especially tees. the typical tee in Singapore is boring beyond words. most of them don't even have words printed! general stripy things with big splashes of paints or graffiti or some hip-hop shit that passes off for what the young people these days call 'street style'. i have nothing against street style or whatever fashion trend that the young adore, it's just that local t-shirt companies really need to try and put in some effort to come up with something more original.

it's difficult to find anything witty, punny and cheeky to wear in Singapore. true, we have New Urban Male and their thinly-veiled gay puns. but you realize that it's becoming more and more mainstream when even the straight people start wearing them (without understand the true meaning of some of these tees). nowadays i seldom see the gay people wearing NUM slogan-ed tees. it's the straight and the ignorant girls, it seems. what do the gay people wear? something tight. something without sleeves. something foreign. never local. maybe this is why i'm such a big fan of Threadless tees. it's cheap, it's foreign, it's snug-fitting and most importantly, people put brains and creativity into designing these tees. not that NUM doesn't. but it's mainstream, like i said.

so what's a gay guy to do when he can't have his own tee? just like life giving you lemons and making lemon-AID, you can MAKE your own tees too. i asked the boyfriend to doodle something on my trusty ol' notebook today. it's full of nursing notes and rubbishy sketches of cartoon men. and some personal thoughts on ex-crushes. the boyfriend looked through it and i was quite pai seh. cos they were very personal (eg. i checked up the starsign of this particular crush i had to see if libra and sagittarius were compaitable; they weren't). so for compensation, the boyfriend drew. and i think it looks pretty awesome. it really looks like stuff you can print on a t-shirt and yet look arty at the same time. plus it's gay, what with the hugest dick that a stick man could possibly have. i being the linguistic freak had to add in my salt and pepper's worth of words. NUM written at the corner is if New Urban Male decides to use the design for their own printing purposes. i have plenty of punny ideas in mind. but i can't draw that well. that's where the boyfriend comes in handy.

of course, that all comes later in the future. for now, i focus on avoiding the never-ending temptation to own a pair of cheap Giordano jeans. or a NUM tee.

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