i strongly believe that God created the human body with sound-making in mind. be it moaning, groaning, screaming or shouting, you have to admit that many people find 'you have the right to remain silent' an exercise in futility. it's always more fun to have sounds around than to experience a silence that is so deafening it puts a library to shame. the same goes for flatulence. assuming that all farts are smelly, a silent one will never be as fun as a noisy one. especially those accompanied with watery sounds and varying rhythms resemblant to The Chopstick Waltz.

clapping, slapping and smacking: three more sounds that our body can make. back in the days of the regimental life, i used to know this fellow medic who had a tendency to tell one too many dirty jokes in a span of an office hour. i would have gotten very irritated with this guy if not for the fact that most of his dirty jokes were actually funny. one of the less funny ones (but still very much applicable to body sounds) revolved around the word 'Plok'. he was inspired by this when he had sex with a meena who was over-endowed with ample hips. 'PLOK is the sound that you get when a mat scrrrrrrooos a meena buncit seahl!' i didn't exactly think it was funny but apparently he did. to the point that he wanted to make it a 'thing' between us. whenever we bump into each other in the corridor, a typical greeting from him would be 'Eh plok! wassup dude?' to which i would reply with great irritation by grabbing his ass and literally try to plok the shit out of him.

body sounds and vocals aside, it's really true that some people just can't shut up. or at least they don't know when to shut up. thank goodness that being a loner for most parts of my life, i'm a great fan of silence. one of those moments that i know to shut up would be when friends suddenly start rallying people to follow them on a karaoke outing. this normally happens on weekends when the movies are too 'englishy' for their tastes (Little Miss Sunshine anyone?), when they are done with dinner, when their girlfriends/boyfriends are not around for any physical fun, when they are too broke to go shopping, etc. in other words, on weekends when they are bored to their wits' ends. this is when i try to show them disinterested body language and subtle looks of disappoint to emphasize my disapproval of money being thrown down the karaoke drain.

i seriously dislike karaoke. not just because it's tacky, it's boring, and prolly enjoy it as much as i do going to church. nope. this tremendous dislike for KTV stems from two reason actually. karaoke you see, tends to expose my incapability with the mother tongue. given that a large amount of song in the typical KTV repertoire are either in mandarin or behasa melayu/indoesia, there's not much left for me to enjoy in terms of singing. give and take, there are the occasional current pop tunes from Justin and The Simpson sisters, but a large majority of them english songs are prolly too retro (Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics) or too gay-friendly for my liking (Spice Girls, Madonna, Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics).

for some reason, one would be hard-pressed to find Coldplay or say Travis minus one tracks at your local k-box. and i say this with much dismay. there's nothing better than crooning to the melancholic tunes of The Scientist at the end of a hard day's work. i've always wanted to do that last bit in The Scientist whereby Chris Martin goes 'aaaaoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo' while holding a microphone. of course, my cheena friends don't really see it that way. most of the time, for social purposes, i end up picking what few chinese pop tunes that i know of. and it's not easy to sing them given my B4 standard of mandarin. it's almost like taking the 'O' levels Chinese Oral Examinations all over again, having to read word for word every single thing that appears on the KTV screen. sometimes i get the feeling that my cheena friends bring me along to karaoke outings just to see how this english-educated soul attempts the chinese karaokes. it never fails to crack them up apparently.

the other reason to back my ardent dislike for KTV remains with a monetary issue. a night out at the KTV can be quite expensive and this has been evidenced one too many time at the end of the KTV session. certain KTV parlors have hidden charges of snacks and hot towels that they serve in the middle of the session. and you don't even have to ask them to serve it, they do it out of their own accord. there was this one time when a group of five of us spent three hours at a KTV lounge and ended up with a $154 bill. it was scary. of course i prolly had a part to play in the expensive bill because i ordered several beers to help tide the session over. but that's the price to pay for dragging someone who isn't interested in karaoke to participate.

thus it was with ten days of annual leave on my hands that i was invited by several of my malay colleagues to a KTV session to start it off. not at the usual k-box, and neither at the copycat brand, Red Box, but rather, at some relatively unknown spot on the outskirts of town. actually it's not that unknown lah. it's behind Forum and just in front of Singapore's #1 mat-meena hangout, Hard Rock Cafe. and from what my colleagues tell me, this particular karaoke parlor is THE place for the mats to hang out when they are dying for some meena rrrrock and Siti Nurhaliza.



it's true that i can't sing the chinese pop tunes, but i seem to have this innate ability to do it better with malay pop tunes. give me a li'll bit of Peterpan or Radja and i'll be working the microphone like there's no tomorrow. somehow or other, when the words that i sing are romanized, i tend to fare better. of course, having spent thirteen months living with a bunch of mats in Brunei and being in two previous relationships with two malay guys helps too. somehow or other, i keep thinking that there's a mat somewhere within the recesses of my haram heart.

we spent the night attempting to conquer malay tunes with one of the colleague's fiance constantly plying us with beer and alcohol. beer, alcohol, malay. yeah. it's all very haram in there that night. and the great bit was that this particular fiances paid for the entire night's worth of KTV. a grand total of $184.34.

maybe karaoke ain't so bad after all eh?

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