jon's blog

how i pinked my blue self to Pangkeng and the colleagues (part two)

2009-06-01T10:18:00.000+08:00

there are many reasons why the gay community seem to love the X-men series of movies. the tight costumes that seem to be a staple with all our talented superheroes are a good place to start. Hugh Jackman and his biceps are an even better place to start. and i think i will start with that. recently, when the latest Wolverine movie was nearing its launch date, the train station near my workplace had this huge poster of Wolverine and his biceps. actually i would be more than gratified if it was just Hugh Jackman's biceps on the movie poster alone. but point is, it features Hugh Jackman on the front of the movie poster together with the rest of mutants featured in the movie (Sabertooth, Gambit, et cetera).

the poster in question lies right smack in front of the ticket barrier. so much so that whenever i wanted to tap my transit card to get through the barrier, i would usually fluster at the sight of Jackman and his 'come hither' look. well, it's not exactly 'come hither' per se given that Jackman is baring his claws and all, but i swear, the body says otherwise.

'What? Me?' i would say in my imaginary conversations with him on my permanent night shift days. of course, that would be the point when i walk right smack into the ticket barrier, realizing that i have been tapping my transit card on every other place on the barrier other than the card responder. 'I'm okay! I'm okay!' i would say to everyone else, especially to Wolverine.

truth be told however, the pertinent parallels between both the mutant and the gay community never cease to be a source of fascination for the latter. you have a group of seemingly talented individuals, gited even. these people are really good at whatever they are doing. successful, good-looking and most of the them perhaps well-chiselled. they seem like average joes on the surface. but in reality, they have a big secret to hide from the public. if the public knew them for what they really are, some may come to be ostracized. others may be willingly accepted, but perhaps with queer little looks on their faces.

this queer liitle awkward look is one that i've come to be familiar with in my years of telling people that i am gay. and i'm sure most gay people can relate to his. you tell someone that you think would embrace your sexuality with open arms, if not at least without the clenched fist. and the first thing they give you in this weird look on their face that speaks of many things - betrayal or perhaps digust.

the first person whom i ever came out to was a classmate whom i was infatuated with. he was funny and the class joker. and you know how class jokers crave attention. he ended up telling the whole class which really put me off for quite a while. i wasn't ostracized but i got the weird look for the rest of the year. the next person whom i came out to was an outspoken, plus-sized girl who was unabashed about her stand on human rights in its many forms. i really liked her because by just standing beside her for five minutes, you became cleverer already. she always had something good to say that you could accompany with a smirk. it could be a theory, a possiblity a rheteorical question. it helps that she's from the debate team. i told her after we graduated from secondary school in a letter, with which she later replied that given that i knew her stand on such issues, i should have told her so earlier. this encouraged me to tell more people.

and so i told my best friend from secondary school, Sunanthar. she gave me the weird look as well, but i guess she eventually came to embrace it given her studies and work in mass communications and media. the bunch of people that i hung out with in drama club during the nursing school days also came to know eventually. they saw how my ex-boyfriend and i would suspiciously hang around each other for no apparent reason (other than to have sex in school). it was all of this life experience with trying to out myself and slowly leaking the fact that i am gay, that i realized people generally don't take the news too well. well, not if you throw the whole stack of pink documents incriminating yourself out of the blue.

my parents are one such example. they didn't come to know about my sexuality through direct revelation from me. traces of porn that i left behind in the family computer back then, no interest in girls, my obsession for collecting porn in floppy disks (that was way before the existence of external hard disk drives) led them to suspicions. but what really gave me away was one fine day when they came home early one fine day during a Sunday rendezvous with my ex. what gave me away was that my boxers were worn inverted - the label could be seen prominent right under my navel. many years of reprimanding through the bible later, they eventually reached a certain tolerance. i don't tell them about my gay life and they don't ask me anything about it. don't ask, don't tell. as simple as that.

and so, it is through all this limited life experience that i've come up with a set of guidelines for myself when it comes to a social context and whether i should out myself:

1) i really do care about these people enough to want to let them know.

2) these people must have had prior exposure to some form of gay people.

3) if they have not had prior exposure, they must have had a lot of sex (i'm not sure why, but these people seem to take it better than most others).

4) no prudes.

5) no Christians.

6) not at work.

7) ostracized people seem to take it better as well. under-dogs and all that.

in case you think that i'm one of those weird people who write motivational sentences on post-it pads and stick them on my walls, let my clarify that these are guidelines that i keep in my head. i'm thinking that the homosexuality nature of having to hide so many things in life has really coloured my way of life. i keep everything in my head.

for fear of writing something in a pink pen that may poke a hole in my blue way of life.

Pangkeng and i have been working together for so long that there's nothing much about him that i don't know. or even if there's something about him that i don't know, it's most likely he thinks that it's not relevent to our friendship. now that i've got all my bases covered (phew!), let me just tell you that if you asked me a decade back who my best friend would be, the last person in mind would most definitely be a ganster/hooligan (an Ah Beng in local context) sort of chracters. our friendship seems to work for some strange reason. maybe it's becuase we are colleagues. or maybe we just seem to share the same interests - good food, cheap beer, great music - all in the pursuit of leisure. he inspired me to download and entire list of 90s music that we listened through our schooling days (boybands included) whilst i returned the favour with Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged). we bounce interests of each other and we benefit greatly from it.

when it comes to my private life though, i wasn't that inclined to share much about the colourful ex bits. well okay, i do. but i convert all the Johns to Joannas, reassign the orifices i stick my wad into, and generally change the masculine to feminine. at that particular point of time, i was dating an ex whom i did call Charissa. for some strange reason, i've always wanted to date any girl named Charissa. i'm thinking i owe this to watching too many episodes of The O.C. (ALA Marissa). but since i wouldn't even entertain the prospect of a girlfriend, i made with the calling of my ex, Charissa. this was apparently, ex. no. 5. Charissa, was someone that i would frequently tell Kegal Laughs, The Fiddy Cent Model and Pangkeng about during our course of work during the night shifts. it makes me sorely uncomfortable keeping secrets from friends, but i managed to convince myself that it was for a greater good. well, at least my greater good.

so you could imagine how i felt one fine day when The Fiddy Cent Model quickly hurried me to a cigarette break, bursting with news that was 'about Pangkeng and The Porcelain Cleavage (Pangkeng's long-time love interest who had vanished from the ward under administrative pretext). someone at the work place told Kegal Laughs who eventually told The Fiddy Cent Model that (allow me to take a breath)... The Porcelain Cleavage was sighted taking the elevator closest to the maternity ward with a breat pump (i typed breast bump by accident - insert frat boy laugh hur hur) in hand. this other colleague of ours took the same elevator as her and told her 'not to tell anyone what you saw'. i would like to say that she then proceeded to slide a slender finger across her neck with a menacing look on her face, but then, the Porcelain Cleavage just left it at that.

the girls obviously couldn't keep something as juicy as this to themselves. besides, the particular piece of news was of direct relevance to us, after all, it's Pangkeng's girl we're talking about. indeed, intense discussion were carried out throughout the course of that night shift. the facts were that there's a mother involved. there's a baby involved. and it doesn't take a genius to figure out the missing part of the equation - Who's the father? (cue dramatic and suspenseful music). that's one nagging question, the other would be - Is Pangkeng the father? (cue even more dramatic and suspense-laden music)

Pangkeng would have most definitely told me about Porcelain Cleavage's baby if he knew. and though i couldn't really confirm whether he knew, it was through logical assumption to guess that he was being kept in the dark about the whole thing. Porcelain Cleavage after all was seeing three prospective men at that point of time. though it was just a haunch, i had the feeling that Pangkeng wasn't the father.

just for the heck of it, we also came up with a timeline of sorts to give the events a certain chronological order and also to plan our budgets for birthday parties in the future. the only thing left was to figure out when the baby's birthday was. The Fiddy Cent Model had an ingenius idea for this. my hospital apparently, has an SAP application that keeps a census of all patients who have stayed or are currently residing in the hospital. a quick name search of Porcelain Cleavage's real name revealed - 'D/O Porcelain Cleavage' (daughter/of).

'Why is it that she still doesn't have a name?' Kegal Laughs asked.

another haunch in my gut, but it was pretty easy to figure this one out. 'she's a single mom,' i said with a million dollar smirk that said 'oh yeah! i got this one!'.

naming a child for most part, is always a two person thing. daddy bounces ideas off mom. mom would be there to veto most of the ludicrous names like Crystal (sounds like a prostitute), Chantel (sounds like a street worker) or Cherry (ditto). in the end, mom would come up with her own list of names, whitte them down to two and pick one. daddy merely just plays a supporting role with various nods of approval and look of disdain, by the time mommy's water bag bursts, the baby would be named. in this particular equation however, there isn't a daddy. so baby wasn't named. this entire naming thing was a theory, however. for all we know, babies in the system don't have their real names displayed. either way, it was a gut feeling that she was a single mom.

if you asked me, it was actually quite a burden keeping a piece of information that one's best mate should know. yet at the same time, i knew that it would really tear Pangkeng to bit to hear about it. but i figured that it was a matter of sooner or later. and anyways, better to hear it from good friends rather than colleagues. sooner or later, might as well be sooner right? it was thus that i started planning a dinner outing with a night of revelations thrown in.

the whole thing happened at a jazz bar. it was one of those places that was al fresco, had plenty of smoking tables, expats here and there with their foreign wives or local girlfriends, moderately-priced beer and of course, live jazz. it was humid, but the atmosphere was truly warm in terms of company. the staff were really efficient and in good company, it was really the place for an offloading of secrets.

Pangkeng and i met together before the girls. we had already prepared Pangkeng on that particular morning, stating that we had something important to reveal to him that particular night. the girls had a netball practice prior to the jazz bar dinner. so the boys decided to have dinner and drinks first. it was during that dinner and drinks that i decided to whip out a photo of Charissa and me and show it to Pangkeng. i didn't know why i did it. perhaps to cushion the blow that Pangkeng was about to receive later. or maybe i was bursting with my own telling.

i slid the polaroid of my ex and me across the table and said, 'this is the Charissa whom i've been talking about for so long.'

'fucking hell....' was the first thing Pangkeng said. i was crouched and cowering in a fetal position, half-expecting a punch in the face. but hearing Pangkeng, i knew that it was more or less a green light.

'anyways, i knew long ago already lor!' was the second thing Pangkeng said. he proceeded to explain about my blog, something which i have never ever brought up within a working context. apparently, a lot of people gay and non-gay read this blog. and it's somewhat poking a big pink hole in my professional life. not that anyone actually brings it up to me directly. but still, people know. whether this blog is a boon or a bane, i've yet to actually affirm that.

either way, it wasn't till about an hour later that the girls arrived and we broke the news about Procelain Cleavage to Pangkeng. suffice to say, his response was awfully quiet. like i said, hearing aobut a girl that he really likes becoming a single mom was something that would really tear him up. we kept asking questions to confirm certain truths and assumptions about the whole matter. but Pangkeng obviously didn't have his heart in it. he kept giving one-worded answers and responses. i'm not sure if the girls could tell because they kept pressing him with questions.

and that was when i decided to divert the whole topic so as to alleviate Pangkeng's burden. i whipped out my wallet once again and did the polaroid sliding across the table thing. 'This is Charissa...' i began.

the girls both lit a cigarette in response.

it's almost half a year now since the whole revelation and many things have happened. i broke off with Charissa. Pangkeng and Porcelain Cleavage are attached. baby Vera is now nearly a year old (just a fortnight away). Kegal Laughs is getting married (next week). and most importantly, the colleagues are pretty accepting when it comes to me. the strange thing about life is that all the secrets that you keep pretty much lead to assumptions in the minds of others.

and it's these assumptions that lead to perhaps falling outs, grieviences and other moments of misery.

how i decided to out myself to cheer Pangkeng up (part one)

2009-05-18T10:18:00.003+08:00

(this story happened towards the end of 2008 and it has been hibernating, like many other stories that i have, for quite some time. i was waiting for the cat to be out of the bag, and since almost everything in this story is common knowledge now, it should and ought and will be told)

everybody loves a little gossip now and then. i mean, in all honesty, even the purest of heart loves to listen to the foulest of deeds.

turth be told, even if you are not a person who really indulges in the actual exchange of malicious information about others, and take great Scahdenfrude in doing so, one would naturally be most curious about it. why is she always so cranky in the morning? why does she always talk with her teeth clenched and dilated pupils? you mean he's the one who left the urine stains on the toiletbowl? you really think her husband left her for another man? with the exception of the last one, these are just some prime examples of gossip that are constantly being whispered in hushed tones around my workplace. the last one was just inspired by a piece of porn i watched recently - Private Man #7 - Desperate Househusbands (i am not making this up!).

ironically, gossip is sometimes really, a case of art imitating life. if you've watched enough American drama serials and work in a corporate environment, you would generally know how the exchange of gossip is being carried out. office rats in general, do it in the pantry, the photocopying room or mayhaps, the unisex toilets. soldiers do it in their barracks and the jungle and through a war. engineers do it beside their... oh, i don't know... power tools and pipes and humming industrial machines.

well, nurses however are of a slightly different breed. we most certainly don't have a photocopying room stacked full of toner and A4 paper (we survive on a lot of pre-printed pamphlets, forms and booklets). we don't have a pantry to call our own because the hospital decrees that it belongs to the patient (in fact, they call it 'The Patient's Pantry'). we do have a tea room though, that smells of something sour combined with an essence of death and decay (people of various cultures keeping foods in the fridge for too extensive a period of time... say, 2-3 days). what we do have, is a unisex toilet. you can often hear people trading secret from the corridor outside my work place's unisex toilet. and as a proud owner of masculine genitalia, i find that each time i enter the toilet, the women fall into a hushed silence or an exaggerated greeting. i highly doubt that it has to do with the size of my genitalia, come to think of it.

so other than the unisex toilets, where do nurses do it then? you see those curtains hanging beside your loved one's hospital bed? yeap, nurses do it behind closed curtains. while doing nursing-related procedures and routines, no less. i, for one, have personally listened to a colleague complaining about her husband while changing diapers for a patient. gossip, as you can see, is most certainly a dirty business in more ways than one.

from a guy's perspective, working in a female-orientated environment, one just can't help but be constantly bombarded by a barrage of information of what goes in the ward daily. the catfights, the medication errors, the major brouhahas, the moments of idiocy and a million little pieces of other gossipy paraphernalia - all usually traded in between shifts like a score card. i don't often get these bits of information because i'm always all frowny-faced and irritated at the start of my night shifts. Kegal Laughs and The Fiddy Cent Model are different though. on days when they are not menstruating, they are usually chirpy and fresh-faced, looking very much alive. so they always get all the gossip. not that it matters much to me, because all their gossip always ends up with me.

here's the thing about gossip that's really curious. gossip is somewhat like a curse. once someone hears a iece of gossip, the onus falls upon the receiver to technically tell someone else. it is an open secret that gossip has to be spread like wildfire or marmalade. everyone knows that it's usually wrong to do it, and yet, we still do. in a strange way, i think that i'm blessed in the sense that i don't find myself having the need to tell anyone else about whatever i hear at work. okay, maybe i do tell whatever i've learned at work to people outside of work. but in all honesty, gossip at work simple gives me a different perspective of what i perceive certain individuals to be. and yes, perhaps a little leverage over others.

another thing about myself that i discovered about gossip is that for some strange reason, people just tend to tell me things. not at work of course, where i'm mostly as irritated and angry as the bull on the Red Bull logo. but on a social level, i realized that all i have to do is put on a look of aloofness, light up a cigarette and give occasional grunts and nods of affirmation, and people just naturally dole out the fat. what made me come to this conclusion was actually an overnight session with a sex buddy in a local chain of cheap 'transit rate' (2 hours for $30, $10 for each hour thereafter) motels. no glowing neon lights of coconut trees and bikini women, but they do have ESPN, HBO and a free toothbrush. this sex buddy of mine no longer keeps contact with me. okay, he does, but somehow i don't find myself that keen for random sex these days.

anyways, sex buddy and me are usually the $50 sort ($30 + 2 hours x $10). we have sex, smoke cigarettes, consume maybe a vowel (not A, O or U) or two, watch a bit of cable or whatever's showing on TV, discuss about our lives and then proceed on to have more sex. it's usually during the in-betweens that we start sharing stuff and catching up on each other's happenings. and the thing about this particular sex buddy is that he's pretty well-informed about the gay community. he knows which famous guy is bonking with which other toyboy, which famous singer prior to becoming famous was actually for rent, which famous actor is gay and has had plastic surgery done and many other pieces of gossip that can really indict people in the eyes of the law.

it was one fine day though (or more appropriately, one fine night), many months ago, that i decided to ask him out of curiosity, 'Why do you tell me these things? i mean, it's not like i am very familiar with the gay circle and it's actually highly scandalous stuff that you are telling me.'

he did this funny head action that they he always does. it looks like a cross between the ghost in Ju-On (Korean horror movie) and someone thinking really pensive thoughts. actually, i do have the word - 'cocked', as in he 'cocked' his head. but frankly speaking, i don't really like to use the word 'cock' because i mainly use it only when i'm having sex, as in, 'suck on my (insert word)' or 'sit on my (insert word)'. but for general understanding, he did cock his head, which actually makes a pretty good substitute for 'blowjob'. hur hur. but i digress.

'well, i'm thinking that you actually give people that certain sense of trustworthiness. i can't exactly place a finger on it. but you are not exactly affected by the mainstream,' he paused for a moment and now he cocked his head to the other side. if you see the number of times he cocks his head the entire night, you would think that he would need a cervical collar just to keep the neck in proper place. 'this counter-culture nature of yours just sorta makes you immune to this... well, inherent need for gay people to gossip.'

i remember thinking at that point of time whether this was true. i also remember thinking of having sex again.

'so, in other words, i make a good receptacle for gossip?'

'hmmm... *cock*,' he pondered, '*cock*, yes i would say so'.

'well...' i took a last puff of my menthol lights and extinguished it into the all-too-familiar porcelain that cup that i always used as a make-shift ash tray in this particular chain of motels. 'allow me to see whether you make a good receptacle for this as well then...'

*cock*

a colleague of ours (Kegal Laughs, Pangkeng, The Fiddy Cent Model) whom Pangkeng really loves to bits was sent to the administrative department under orders of senior management. well, at least that was the official story that the supervisors let leak to us. and with enough exposure in the working world, one would know that a colleague would never be suddenly 'upped' from a workplace without any rhyme or reason. but at that point of time, i didn't really think on it (camera zooms forward slightly), pray on it (camera zoom) or sleep on it (last camera zoom), to quote from Boston Legal.

now Pangkeng likes a lot of girls. in fact, he treats every woman with a certain sense of respect that many people just can't see. the respect in question of course, is apparently coated with a lot of lewd jokes and name-calling. for example, he calls a 62-year old Patient-care Assistant with arthritis and heart problems, 'Hot Mama'. he initiated the 'squeeze-your-boobs-for-us' campaign whereby if we night shift boys get bored at work, we get Kegal Laughs and The Fiddy Cent Model to squeeze their boobs for laughs. in actual truth, it's all in the name of harmless fun and he means well. this girl though, she's apparently different.

she's the type of girl that you find in those sappy Taiwanese dramas about love and romance and metrosexuals acted by suspiciously gay men. she's definitely pretty. she's always decked in shorts and a v-neck. and she's very blessed with gigantic boobs, if not at least big. if my blog were an ongoing drama series, i would hire people to turn on electric fan to flow in her direction whenever she enters a room. her hair would fly in all sorts of choreographed directions. of course, so would her skirt. but like i said, she's always wearing shorts. so pretty is she that i sometimes think of her as 'the face of facial wash'. if they ever developed a clevage whitening lotion (i'm sure they must have something like that in the market), hers would be the face (or more appropriately, the chest) of it.

as i mentioned, Pangkeng apparently, has always had a thing for her. Pangkeng mainly being a 'boobs' man, makes me think that it's mostly the v-neck and its contents that presents a certain allure to him. but he usually tells me otherwise.

'she's just very nice to me lor...' Pangkeng said when i once asked him in between a cigarette break at work, why he adored her so much.

Singaporeans seems to define a lot of things as 'nice'. Sex is nice. Coffee is nice. Dogs are nice. Mice are nice. anything indescribably favourable to a person seems to put defined as 'nice'. having always had a need to put indescribable things to words, i therefore decided i just had to probe further. 'i'm sure many other people in this world are equally nice as well,' i paused to exhale, 'but you have to tell me what else about her makes you like her. her character, the small little things she does, the big big things she has on her chest? please, anything but nice.'

and here's the thing about Pangkeng. he's not exactly good with words other than expletives, lewd vocabulary and dialects. so he was most certainly stumped for a moment. two puffs of his Marlboro Lights and silence ensued.

he finally said, 'i think it's mainly because she likes me for who and what i am'.

if you've seen Pangkeng before, you would most definitely know that he's nowhere near good-looking. but like i said before, you need to have worked with him for at least two shifts before you realize that deep beneath all that physical derelict, there's really a heart of gold. having worked for practically two years with Pangkeng with him permenently being my junior and carrying out all the menial tasks that i burden him with, he has never as so much said no. well, okay give and take a few expletives. but it's all just a matter of expression for him. he has had so much contact with patients that they always end up telling him stuff like 'if you ever have need of (insert random service), just call me with this number on the name card'. he has been offered handphone sales at cost price, job offers, discounts at restaurants and litigation services. in fact, just about two months ago, a lawyer offered to write up his will, sans legal fees.

'Divorce leh?' Pangkeng asked.

'half-price for you,' the lawyer replied with a deep chortle.

all that said, prior to her transfer to the administrative department, Pangkeng and Facial Wash Face were so-called 'dating'. they did courtship-ish activities such as walks in the park, drinks at coffee outlets, holding hands in movie theatres and the like. at that point of time however, Facial Wash Face was also simultaneously seeing two other men. not that there's anything technically wrong about that as she never promised these guys anything. and furthermore, she explicitly told these guys about the presence of the other potential men. my guess was that there was nothing in these men as yet, that would tip her decision towards commitment at that point of time.

so you can imagine how big the blow it must have been when Pangkeng heard that Facial Wash Face was suddenly trasnferred to administration. admittedly, the only thing that really cushioned the blow was the fact that she apparently cut contact with her prior to the transfer. she never replied his text messages, never picked up phone calls. it reminds me of Romeo when we first see him in the play, 'private in his chambers pens himself, shuts up windows, locks far daylight out, and makes himself an artificial night'. Pangkeng had indeed withdrawn into his private emotional chambers. no amount of boob self-squeezing (from the girls) and light brushing of his nipple (on my part - he always likes that, it's like charity to me) could rescue him from the darkness that he had perhaps created for himself.

our next encounter with her wasn't till several months later. time has definitely healed wounds. but it takes no more than a mere paper cut to burst open when took months to mend. we bumped into Facial Wash Face somewhere in June or July last year, she, on her way to work while we, back from work. decked in a white dress and blouse, she looked really bloated. fat, actually. but it's rude to call people fat. and you're liable to strung up in a litigation battle. the curious thing though, was that she was holding a huge piece of newspaper over her torso. i don't know whether it was ironic or fat's... i mean, fate's (hur hur) idea of a joke, but there was an equally huge slimming agency ad right smack in front of the portion of the newspaper that we could see. i don't know if the rest of my gang noticed it, but it was the kind of thing that brought a smirk to my face.

for Pangkeng though, it was nowhere close to being a positive encounter for him. i thought whether Pangkeng upon seeing her that bloated, was the type that went for superficials. but i chided myself, thinking again about what he mentioned to me with regards to acceptance on her part for what he truly was. Pangkeng remained quiet for the rest of the day.

(it's a bit wordy, so i'll post part two this coming Saturday)

Genesis 2:1-3

2008-10-13T12:31:00.000+08:00

i've always found that you can tell a lot about people by asking how they spend their Sundays. some people buy groceries. some spend it catching up over brunch. some try to recuperate from Saturday night parties while others are preparing for Sunday night parties. some wake up to breakfast in bed made by a loved one, while others wake up realizing that the one that they made love to has the face of breakfast in bed gone wrong. people like me though, simply find myself thinking up of ways to facilitate sleep in church.

Sunday mornings for me, have never really been my cup of tea. mainly because of church. 'it's only two hours every Sunday, can't you just make the effort?' my father would always lament. true, it's two hours. but time is relative as Einstein once said. two hours of doing things that i have absolutely no interest in other than trying my best to sleep. there was a period of time when i used to hideout in the church toilet, reading comics or playing with my Gameboy till the congregationg started to sing the benediction. unfortunately, my father found out about that one fine day and forced me to sit with him and mother from then on.

so i started to aim for excuses to not even set foot in church. before i went into the permanent night shifts, i would always roster myself for Sunday morning shifts. and this was technically done with the church's blessing even, what with the corporate prayers always mentioning 'people who have to work today, may God give them the strength and serenity to pull through a day's labour'. of course, this being a game of wits with my father, was never ever a bed of roses. eventually, father made the suggestion of attending EVENING services. and for a period of time, that meant going to work at 5am in the morning, finishing at 3.15pm, reaching home at 4.30pm and going to church again at 5pm.

these days, my father doesn't really harp over the fact that i make up flimsy excuses to skip church. maybe he has resigned to the fact that we'll be go different directions in the after life. or maybe he would rather hide the fact that he has a gay son who smokes, wears clothes that are a little to tight for Christianity, and has hair the colour of Satan. or maybe it's just me trying my best to sleep on the Sabbath in church.

after all, the Big Guy up there did declare the Sabbath as the day of rest, no?

as you might already know from previous blog posts, Sunday evenings are always entertaining dinners with the paternal family. there would be the occasional picnic at the Chinese Gardens where the only thing remotely Chinese are the Chinese people wandering around looking for anything that's remotely Chinese (give and take, there's a lone pagoda in the gardens that looks seriously infested with mosquitoes and a musty-smelling imperial gate that serves as an excuse for an oriental-inspired garden).

on more jazzed-up occasions, the family would head to random family-themed restaurants in the western vicinity of Singapore and pig out. when i think about it actually, we are quite possibly the reason why restaurants like these declare their dishes to be 'family favourites'. it fosters a sense of pseudo-kinship and many other random adjectives to describe a general being of closeness to one another.

either way, Sunday dinners in my life are mostly with the relatives, trying my very best to avoid their pesky reminders that as the eldest grandson, i ought to be the first in line to walk the marriage aisle and have little Jonathan Jrs. for my grandparents to entertain themselves with. this is also why Sundays are the only days when i am desperately looking for wine (the only accepted drink with alcoholic content within my paternal family's guarded morals) to help speed up the excruciating process.

we're not rich folks, my paternal family. thus the average Sunday evening dinner would be done at a random relatives place on a weekly rotational basis amongst the various relatives. for some reason, it's always the same type of food at the same relatives place. to begin with, there's my grandmother's place where my gruff, beer-guzzling grandfather would whip up traditional food like soup noodles. it's made up of soup and no surprises here, noodles. the soups is quite the fascinating chicken broth strewn with vegetables and weekday leftovers. it looks and tastes a bit like a culinary casulaty. i didn't have a word to describe this infernal creation when i was much younger. it wasn't until i started reading Dickens' Oliver Twist and discovered 'gruel' (albeit noodles instead of the usual rice or cereals or oats), when everything fell in place. many years down the road, the only reason why i still consume my grandfather's soup noodles i simply because he's the only other person in the family to ingest beer on quite a regular basis. that, and the fact that he has tattoos and once worked as a spirit medium to put my aunties and father through school. respect.

and then there's my father's eldest sister who has quite the interesting place in Bishan. they are what i've always found to be a bizarre family. father's a building contractor. mother's a Mandarin tutor who ensured that every single grandson in the family got at least a 'B' in their mother tongue studies (i got a B3 for my GCSE 'O' levels, thanks to her). son's currently serving his national service while the daughter's an architecture undergrad and the only one whom i can talk art and pop cultural references with.

it is evident from their home that they really like art. an avante-garde painting in the living depicts there people on a bench in some bizarre cubism form. kitsch tribal masks of a face sticking out a tongue, a face with its eyes closed and an indescribable face that prolly says 'i'm sorry for the face but i just had some noodle soup' (though in actual truth, all of those faces could possibly say that as well). a random vase. a random picture. a huge ass modernist mirror in the living room that seems to make the house just that little bigger. the food would usually be anything ranging from Thai to Korean to Japanese to local fare. i always feel like there's something going on at that place, just that i can't place my finger on what it is. metaphorical and literally speaking of course, because the art that they own looks really expensive and fragile.

and there's my favourite place belong to my Robert Kiyosaki of an Uncle where they would always serve up the same coconut rice with random dishes of fried finger foods. they live in this cramped three-roomed condominium apartment in the suburbs of Singapore which they got out of reason to close proximity to my grandparents. them grandparents served as convenient day care for my cousins who are currently primary schooling. it's a really intimate setting, what with the lush orangey lighting, nineteen degrees air-conditioning and uber-plush designer sofas.

since there are only five sofa seats in the entire house, most of the relatives will end up sitting on the chilly marble flooring. despite the entire place being really cosy and all, there's still this underground fight going on for seats that everyone does in true 'forbidden city' style of political assassination and espionage. once someone evacuates a seat, everyone suddenly moves in for the kill like ninjas in the dark of the orangey-lighting night. quite possibly because it's either your ass on the plush designer chair or plush designer floor. and like i always say, God made the buttocks with chairs in mind. if it were up to me, i would make chairs with buttocks in mind (hur hur!).

none the less, dinner at the condominium would always be filled with vivid stories of my pre-school cousins' (John and Grace) antics. John whom some of you might recall, was named after me. and it's through these stories that my Uncle of a Robert Kiyosaki's wife would tell, that i start to think that he's in a lot of ways like me when i was in primary school. he's whiny, he cries a lot, he gets bullied often, he has a bad haircut and he always has a gameboy or a book in tow. and he is crazy about High School Musical. i've always liked visiting their condominium because it's like reading an entire collection of Baby Blue comics, except that i do it under orangey-lighiting, chilly air-conditioning and my l33t ninja ass on chair.

and then well.... there's my place which nobody really enjoys. it's a cramped government-built housing apartment that is bordering on being sterile and aseptic, thanks to my mother's OCD for cleanliness. my home is practically like a safe haven of hygiene when you compare it to the general state of the estate outside of my home. litter is strewn everywhere. you see a disused sofa in the corner, used condoms and cigarette butts on the corridor, dying plants outside apartments and many other various bric-a-brac that basically deters people from visiting.

we are prolly as entertaining as a visit to an elderly retirement home. we don't subscribe to cable. we don't have exciting DVD collections (i do actually, but it's mainly drama serials, arthouse flicks and porn). we don't have high-definition television. we don't have exciting stories to tell ('And did i tell you about the time i walked in on my son having sex with another guy...'). we have excellent food cooked by my mother (in my humble yet biased opinion), but it's quite an acquired taste (cold salad pasta). we actually do have those orangey lightings that make people feel as comfortable as hotel rooms. admittedly though, i'm the only person who uses it when i invite strange foreign men back for a good time. then again, i rarely invite these strange foreign men back even, preferring 'your place' or 'transit rates are thirty bucks for two hours'. for some reason, we always deck our guests in ghostly white lighting and in cramped quarters.

i don't entertain the relatives for fear of those pesky girlfriend questions. and besides, we don't have time to entertain because my brother and i would always be in the kitchen working at our individual stations as Chef de Partie under the tyranny of my Chef de Cuisine of a mother. 'no no NO! you don't slice carrots that way!' she would always scream before proceeding to julienne 7/8 of the carrots herself, leaving me with the head of the carrot to dispose of.

that of course, leaves the father with the job of the Maître d' and provider of entertainment for the evening. it used to be a gracious thing for my father. he would pour drinks, make small talk with the various relatives and attempt to chastise the relatives in a polite way for whatever evils they have succumbed to for the week. it used to be much more prominent during a phase my father went through when he acted as though as his home was the source where all goodness emanated from. thank the goodness that emanated from the source that those days are over.

these days, it's DVD entertainment from our local movie rental. kiddy movies, family movies, anything from Pixar, Disney or Dreamworks. you name it, we prolly have watched it. however, it was with last week's family gathering at my home, that my father apparently upped the ante by introducing the paternal family to home made videos. my father is quite the gadget freak. he owns practically everything electronically-cool from a Macbook to an iPhone to the standard digital camera to a video camera to a DVD recorder to.... okay lah. my whole family is gadget-crazy. my father, mother, brother and me all own iPhones.

still, it's because of the Macbook that my father's creative juices started flowing like the source of goodness. my father managed to single-handedly create a rather professional-looking video of my brother's basic military training graduation parade (in local terms, POP) using the Macbook. it was actually quite good, albeit interspersed with clashing Richard Clayderman music. macho photoshots of my brother with his other camp mates accompanied the irritating tune of Ballade pour Adeline. i don't know if it's just me but Richard Clayderman music always makes me want to go have a tinkle. maybe it's the fact that the only places where i hear it these days are mainly in the lifts or the toilets. the general response to the video though, was that it actually looked quite professional. which basically inspired my father to further heights and a really bizarre conversation which my father and i had later that night.

it was while stacking up the guest chairs together that my father started. 'i hope you don't feel that we love you any lesser just because i did the video for your brother, okay?'

we seldom have conversations like that and i seriously dislike having such conversations. i mean, we don't even touch each other as father and son and now we are talking about sibling jealousy? the truth of the reality was that the video had about as much effect on me as scissors against rock. it's just a family video.

'not really, i would rather have appeared in porn' was the acerbic reply that the sarcastic monster in me wanted to reply and laugh over. but he said it with such seriousness that i felt really bad for actually thinking of such a reply. thus i decided to go with the politically-correct answer, 'i'm didn't think of it as that way,' i replied as i lifted the stack of wooden Ikea guest chairs. 'in fact, feel free to make a video of my POP if you want to.' which i am obviously regretting now.

it was a little peace offering to show that all was cool between us as father and son. except, the only problem was that most of my army photos were not exactly the stuff that you would show your family over dinner. 'okay this is the photo of me in a blonde wig when i dragged for an army function' or 'this is when a bunch of army friends and me in bathrobes acting like we were caught in bed, no no no... it was just a one night thing that happened after too many drinks at the local
bar and besides, we used protection'. after rummaging through my collection of army photos. i only found about twenty that i could safely hand over to my father for proper family entertainment purposes.

it's not a lot. but hey.... Richard Clayderman songs never make people stay for long.

how i saw God in seven thousand words of academia

2008-08-09T08:52:00.001+08:00

'God spoke to me today!' is one sentence that you do not want to be seen shouting along the streets. in fact, the only places where i think one can afford to do so without risking being put into an asylum is at an evangelical meeting or some other place of religious purpose. you see, throughout the history of mankind, humanity has learnt that God usually speaks only to a select few. they include the insane, people on drugs, or people who are simply trying to find a substantial reason to commit mass murder, terrorism, or make a quick buck. of course, that still doesn't stop the multitude from claiming that the almighty creator (or some other higher entity of equal stature) hath thus spoken to them.

Benjamin Folds (better known as Ben Folds) once wrote a song (Not The Same) which features a guy who climbed up a tree while tripping on acid. the next day, he came down saying that God spoke to him while he was up in the tree. he became a born-again Christian since then. then there's Diane Duyser who was touched by the 'holy toast' when she took a bite into a homemade sandwich in 1984 and realized that it had an effigy of the Virgin Mary on it. in 2004, it still hadn't grown mouldy and in fact, she sold it for $28,000 via e-bay^1-2. and as if that wasn't enough, George Bush in 2004 declared to a group of 60 Amish in Pennsylvania, that 'God speaks through me.'³ okay okay, to be fair, the whole phrase that he actually said was 'I trust God speaks through me. Without that I couldn't do my job.'⁴ which brings about the question... 'what job?' either there's something seriously wrong in the communication process or there's something wrong with the listener. a point of irony worth noting would be that God incidentally spoke to Moses through a burning bush in a desert. burning BUSH (hur hur!).

so everyone seems to be hearing or seeing or even eating the voice of God and other God-associated phenomena these days, but i still don't see the light of it. or in this case, 'hear' the voice of God. one of the reasons why i still can't wholeheartedly bring myself to Christianity (despite having been brought up in a Christian home for practically twenty years), is this refusal to believe that God is about as effective as the Bush administration when it comes to global affairs. everything happens for a reason, yes we get that overused point. the wars, the famines, the earthquakes, the droughts, the rise of the Superbugs, the increasing oil prices, ERP increments, all this happens for a darn good reason which we mere mortals just can't see the light of. it would be much appreciated though, if God would actually give a decent explanation as to why shit happens in this world. like a memorandum or a circular or some sort ('Okay okay, i sneezed while i was trying to fix the damn tectonic plates, everyone affected by it has their loved ones restored to life and gets a free beach house in a country of their choice').

this actually makes me contemplate whether the world would be a better place if God actually spoke to us via some method of communications. for one, we would have a hundred lesser versions of the Bible to squabble over. we wouldn't have to scrutinize the scriptures for the exact meaning of things. we wouldn't have so many different denominations believing in the same God yet, having different beliefs. but then again, humanity is equally screwed up as proven through history. i mean, look at the Isrealites that Moses brought out into the Wilderness for forty years. they had a substantially better system of communications with God⁵. most items of concern went via Moses who spoke and interceded on their behalf. they whined, they complained and they had little faith that God would actually lead them into the Promised Land. yet God accommodated with all their bull. it's actually almost like Singapore. we're 43 this coming 9th of August and still a nation of whiners and complainers. just look at our local newspaper forums.

so mayhaps a direct communicative link to God might not be that great an idea after all. given the thousands of implications that could prolly exist only in an alternative reality, we're better off figuring out why God does the things He does.

after all, what is a faith, without faith?

two thousand words is not a lot of words. that's what i've been trying to convince myself for the past month. comparatively, it's about the size of Genesis Chapter 1-3 (2,124 words). it's half a chapter of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (the 1st chapter's worth 4,950 words). it's a few hundred Little Misses and Mr. Men books combined together. obviously, two thousand words is not a lot of words to read. but vice-versa, two thousand words is a lot of word to churn out into an academic essay. now throw in the date, 28th July 2008 and four essays worth a total of seven thousand words and you've got the due date and the amount of words i have to generate into four essay of substantial quality.

one part of the pursuit of academia that i've come to love and hate at the same time would be that of essay-writing. admittedly, i love to write. i could sit hunched on a chair, typing and typing and typing for hours on my laptop. and that wouldn't deter me from the qwerty feel of the keyboard, the romantic glare of the laptop screen, the random indie band or trance anthem blasting from my media player. a love for the English language just adds more passion to the whole thing. which basically leads me to declare that writing for me, is like having sex with the English language.

but you know what it's like having too much of something that one likes - it basically kills all pleasure that can be derived from it (which is what's happening to me now, btw). four essays worth seven thousand words which the procrastinator in me refused to even start till the 25th of July. admittedly, it's not even a matter of procrastinating, but rather, a combined effort between laziness, complacency and bad time management.

thus, it was with three days left to the submission date, that i began to write out my random bits of academia substantiated with citations and references. the initial thought was that if i poured my heart and soul into the writing, i could actually churn out those seven thousand words within seventy-hours. besides, my command of the English language was pretty good if not better than average. expressing my opinions about mentorship, qualitative vs quantitative research and a journal article is really easy-peasy when compared to the stuff i write online. but as with most things in life, the reality is always far from the truth.

trawling online for journal articles is indeed not an easy thing to do. one moment, the opinions of the articles seem to sway towards you. and the next, they seem to be going against. before i knew it, i was lost in a sea of articles and quotations that i didn't know how to translate into proper, meaningful words. and thus three days later and many citations such as Oermann⁶ (1999) claims that the essay 'provides an opportunity for students to select, organize, and present their ideas in writing and to develop creative and original responses to questions' (pooi!), i only managed to generate a total of 1,954 words into the essay titled, 'describe ways in which the mentor can facilitate learning and assessment in the clinical environment'. it's time like these when i wish i could do the damn essay in point form and actually still get marks for it.

so there i was presented with a dilemma. i could either hand up one assignment and pass one module for this semester and retake the other two the next (which on hindsight, is a really stupid idea). or i could try writing something less substantial and less perfect than my allowed standards and make do with mediocre marks for this semester and fall short of getting my first class honours. when i think about it now actually, either way, i'm screwed. so i decided to put on a great amount of humility and head down to the school to ask for an extension. on the day of submission itself, no less.

arriving at the school which was located at a busy corner of the central business district, i saw many of my classmates still struggling to print their assignments. some had forgotten to label page numbers. other had forgotten to print their 'acknowledgement of work' page. all of them had basically finished their assignments. it made me feel rather awkward when they asked me 'hey, you finished all your assignments already?'

alas, the administrator (a nice lady with stylish bangs in her late 30s) refused my request for an extension politely. not helping was the fact that two porky-looking administrators (i received their name cards which simply stated that they were 'Country Managers' for the Singapore branch of the school) kept on going 'oh, you're the boy who got the highest marks for the previous assignment!' and simply added to my shame.

all hope was seemingly lost. that was until i stepped into the classroom to find another classmate still heavily attacking her assignments. when i relate to other people of my experiences of her, i call her the 'Tupperware mother'. she's a little plump, she's dowdy, she sells tupperware (she gives me a Tupperware catalogue every month), she attends PTA meetings, has two young boys and rides a scooter of a colour better described as 'bile' or 'vomitus'. though she's genuinely a nice person and all, she has certain traits that really irk me. she's the type that constantly asks the lecturer to review her assignment in class. and once she has a finished product, she asks the lecturer again. and with the reviewed product, she would do her thang again. so much so, that it's a bit of an act of desperation sometimes. and desperation, is sometimes quite an ugly thing.

none the less, she was my saviour of sorts this time as she gave me a piece of good news when she saw my resigned looks. 'the lecturers in UK have decided to extend the submission date! you can hand in the assignment on Wednesday instead! there's still hope, Jon!' apparently, what transpired was that the online submission was a bit faulty during that particular period of time. many people submitting the assignment at the same time caused the server to crash. the submission date was extended due to this. which basically translates into me having TWO MORE DAYS to finish the damn assignments. the first thought that crossed my mind was 'Oh my God'. the second was 'God, oh my... My God, oh... Oh my God!'

apparently, despite my own ugly acts of resignation and desperation, my mind somehow clicked. it seemed like God decided to just somehow push the assignment submission dates a little further. i looked up and actually smiled. which must have looked really crazy. because all that was available to look at when i looked up was the air-conditioning vent and some crummy-looking ceiling boards. actually, if you look closer, you can see the air-condition vapours swirling around to form what seemed like an effigy of Jesus. but then again, i was in a celestial mood. so i can't vouch for it.

and thus, the rush to type began once again. this time, i managed to finish a thousand word critique of a journal article ('The motive of the study was clearly stated in the abstract' & 'The reference list was very well-presented and organized in chronological order' - imagine a thousand words of such obvious facts) and another two thousand words of comparing and contrasting qualitative and quantitative research methods. the latter could be simply solved by actually drawing a straight line through a piece of paper and then sorting them out into points.

on Wednesday evening, i was near the stipulated time for online submission. i still had one remaining article left which i knew i was doomed to not finish. that one was about a recent healthcare initiative and how it has affected the nursing scene. the only things you actually see about nursing in the Singaporean newspapers revolves mainly around pay raises (rare), complaints about service standards (all the time) and touching chicken soup-styled stories about nurses who go the extra mile. perhaps if i SOMEONE gave me more time.... i could actually finish it... of course, this was an idea that didn't cross my mind at that point of time. i was more obsessed with trying to submit my assignments online in the face of some technical difficulties (the server crashed on me as well).

none the less, everything was done by 7.30pm on Wednesday with the one assignment about healthcare initiatives left untouched. i was too tired to think anymore given that i was post-night shift and didn't sleep a wink, plus i had to be at work by 9pm. interestingly, it was while on the way to work that i got a text message from one of my classmates. apparently, the Singapore branch of the school declared that there was a need to submit a hard copy as well in the event of unreceived soft copies via online submission. those who couldn't hand it up by that night, had to do so by tomorrow morning. i got the message at 8pm. i was well on my way to work by then. so on one hand, i had to print out hard copies of all the assignments i've done, which is quite the hassle. yet on the other hand, i have nearly half a day more to actually finish my last assignment at work. if this is not Divine Intervention, then i dunno what it is.

in the end, i decided to not finish up the assignment at all. it was too rushed, and i don't like to hand up work that is of substandard quality. in fact, because of the last minute nature of asking for all our hard copies, i decided to not even go hand in the hard copies which would be flown to the UK. which basically resulted in the school constantly calling me the entire morning the next day while i was trying to sleep post-night shift. they even called my father because i refused to take their calls. and my father being the great abider of rules, woke me up just as i was about to sleep and offered to send me down to the school to hand in my assignments.

at the school, i was filling up the acknowledgement receipts and talking to the receptionist at the same time. it was through her that i found out that once again, God had a hand in this whole submission business. apparently, i was the only one who had not submitted all the hard copies of my assignments. furthermore, the only reason why they could afford to chase me was because the DHL man could not make it for the agreed collection time of the assignments. 'You're very lucky you know, you're very lucky!' and as if that wasn't enough, it was at that point of time when she said 'lucky', that the DHL man stepped in pushing a large trolley to collect the boxes of assignments. God, truly has quite the sense of humour.

so it was through my seven thousand words of academia that i dunno.... saw God for the first time in my life. not literally, but through the various little things that he did. not that i will become a full-fledged Christian after that whole event. but, at least, i can now believe that someone is watching over me (George Gershwin). of course, who wouldn't wish that they had something physical to cling on to when they believe in something? but that is what faith is about, no?

Reference List

1. Woman 'blessed by the holy toast'. (2004, Nov 17). Retrieved 1st August, 2008, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4019295.stm

2. Gilin, E. (2004). Your Own Personal Jesus Toast. Retrieved 1st August, 2008, from http://blacktable.com/gillin041202.htm

3. Bush says "God Speaks Through Me" But what does he really mean?. (n. d.). Retrieved 1st August, 2008, from http://www.irregulartimes.com/godspeaksthroughme.html

4. Kamen, A. (2005, October 14). George W. Bush and the G-Word. Retrieved August 1st, 2008 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/13/AR2005101301688.html

5. Moses and the Wilderness. (n. d.). Retrieved 2nd August, 2008, from http://bibletime.com/theory/history/moses/

6. Oermann, M. (1999). Developing and Scoring Essay Tests, Nurse Educator. 24(2), 29-32.

(it's a long and wordy post. but thanks for reading my boring experience)

shitting and coming

2008-07-19T08:58:00.003+08:00

humblest apologies for the lack of posts for nearly a month. and believe you me, i've been trying. there are a lot of drafts drafting about in the deserted realms of my blog at the moment. and all of them have a body, it's just that the opening for each blog post is missing. it's practically like a headless zombie fest in my blog at the moment.

you see, the problem is that i'm going through a bout of constipation at the moment. and it's not the type of constipation that comes about when you've had one too many times of anal sex thus resulting in compacted stools at some unreachable end of your bowels. no. it's the type of constipation that afflicts the average writer at the most inconvenient of times. of course, any time for the writer is an inconvenient time. because the writer is constantly able to churn out what his senses tell him into pieces of flowery speech. it's a bit like a pastry chef taking the most mundane of household ingredients and baking them into connoisseur-worthy pieces of food.

apparently, the need to shit or the want to bake pastries (whichever metaphor is more suitable for your palate) is just not that. being bogged down with work and a major hospital audit is not really helping things. even worse is the threat of four nursing essays looming in the background. these assignments have their heads on, but are 'bodyless' so to say. which is way worse than the state of my headless zombie blog posts. but then again, that's no proper excuse for not blogging just as there is no proper excuse for not shitting.

like i always tell my patients who are on a regular dose of morphine or have just been through a minor operation, shitting is one of those things in life (just like coffee and sex), that simply can't, or at least shouldn't be rushed. when it comes, it simply comes. of course, if it's not coming for a month, then one should start seeking medical attention or buying better coffee or changing a sex partner. rushing would just result in something sub-standard and who likes a sub-standard shit? so i'm just waiting to come (i've always wanted to say that on this blog).

and right now, i think i'm coming (there i've said it).

how croutons turned into fish food while my grandmother used her secret means of comunication on me

2008-06-22T15:00:00.000+08:00

i seriously think that the paternal family seem to be running out of ideas when it comes to the sunday gatherings that i mentioned in two blog posts ago. remember those picnic outings with them in the random parks of Singapore? the humongous portable picnic tables and gaudy Spiderman 3 mats from KFC? the ones that were filled with a weird assortment of foods and tetrapack drinks? the ones where everyone would be talking about their families while my father would be doing his Martin Luther thing while my Robert Kiyosaki of an uncle would be reading his books on politics and anything else that would most likely have a '$$$$' sign on its cover? yeap, those sunday gatherings in the park.

these gatherings, much as i find them morbidly embarrassing, are actually quite enjoyable. given the hustle and bustle of the modern day life, one would actually be quite hard-pressed to find a decent and quiet spot to have a picnic. everyone in Singapore it seems, wants a piece of the green on the weekends. and that includes us. but when we do find some nice spot that is actually quiet for once, it's when i start to appreciate these outings the most. and by 'nice spot that is actually quiet', i mean that everyone else in the park is quiet except for my family who makes as much noise as a political rally. other enjoyable things in the park of course include (but are not limited to) - curiously gay rollerbladers, over-dressed joggers, eccentric old people who exercise in the park with their chinky chunky peripherals, et cetera.

so it was with the saturday that had just passed that i found out that my parents were taking out the disposable plastic cups from one kitchen cabinet. now, when the parents start brandishing the disposable plastic cups around the house, it can only mean two things. one, that we're having the relatives over at our place this coming sunday. two, that we're having the picnic gatherings. i decided to go with the former as i remembered the picnic gathering that we had had just about three sundays ago. it was at a relatively desolate spot of green named, 'Chinese Garden'. there were lots of trees, presumably Chinese-looking rocks, Chinese fishes in a broad lake that doubled up as a reservoir and a pagoda at the end of the garden that over-looked the whole estate. it was a place that was really perfect for an evening's jog or a walk in the park. or as one other gay friend so aptly put it, 'a nocturnal rendezvous for them horny homosexuals'.

cruising aside, it was with the assumption that the paternal family were headed for my place the coming sunday that i started the usual routine of hiding all the carnal stuff in my room. and i know i sound like Mary Alice (of Desperate Housewives fame) when i say this, but indeed, every family has their secrets. my dad would start keeping all my Xbox360 games that has 'unchristian'-like covers inside a discreet-looking cabinet beside the television set. i do my part by hiding that bottle of Baileys and the 42 below from sight. my secret stash of gay porn which i usually keep on a shelf just above my bed would have to vanish as well (Cousin: 'Hmmm.... i wonder what CDs you keep in that CD pouch of yours!' *unzips*).

it was on Sunday morning that i discovered the blatant exposure of the Xbox360 games just beside the gaming console itself. on the top most of the stack was Dead Rising which had a cover of the main character in the game bashing a television set into the face of a zombie. to avoid having to show a demonstration of the various other bric-a-brac that the main character can also bash/slice/dice/impale/dismember into/from/on the many many zombies in the game, i decided to start keeping the entire stack of games into that nondescript cupboard as aforementioned. my very observant father of course noticed this and casually mentioned, 'We're not having nai nai (our affectionate term for the grandmother - literally means paternal granny) and all over today, we're going to Chinese Garden instead.'

i started the not-so-tedious process of replacing the empty voids in my room with all my carnal indulgences again.

the picnic gatherings are always a potluck event. every family unit in the paternal side is deputized to bring a consumable of sorts to the gathering by a quick family discussion. the lucky family of the particular outing would have the wild card of 'drinks'. all they had to do was provide a beverage of some sort rather than cook or buy something that would satisfy the palates of everyone. if it's not a fruit punch or rose syrup, it would be the infamous Yeo's tetrapack drinks or Pokka green tea bottles that are a dime a dozen in the homes of Singaporeans across the island. i have always enjoyed it when one particular family gets the 'drinks' designation. they always provide a bottle of wine or at least some sort of sparkling juice. as the cousin from that particular family once told me, 'Wine is acceptable in the bible context okay!'

unfortunately, my family had had the 'drinks' wild card on the previous outing. so this time, we were designated with a food item instead. my mother, being the other of two members of the paternal family who pushes the boundaries of everyone's palates in the paternal family (the other's the family who brings the wine), decided to try a quick and new mushroom soup with croutons. she normally does baked goods like cinnamon rolls and raisin bread and what-danish-nots, but i guess she's a very exploratory person by nature. none the less, don't be fooled by the simplicity of the name of the dish. because, it may sound really, like the crass stuff you find at western dining restaurants, but the end result is somewhat a work of art. of course, she's my mother and this is quite possibly a biased statement.

it all begins with four can of Campbell's mushroom soup, pour in a fair amount of water and put them all to boil in a pot under a medium flame. it's actually quite entertaining to watch while my mother cooks because she will start singing her church choir songs while she's chopping up unidentified bits of 'things' (which i presume are herbs and mushrooms) that will end up in the pot of mushroom soup. it's as if she's singing the mushroom soup to perfection.

the tedious part however, starts from the croutons. my mother would start by butter a million slice of bread, dice them up into a billion cubes, and bake them into that all-too-familiar crispy, salty excellence that i'm so fond of. of course, along the way, the crispy pieces would start flaking into a zillion bits and specks, which would basically result in a real mess on the kitchen floor. which is why it's so tedious. i'm always the one who vacuums the floor after the baking of the croutons.

and with that, the end results is a steaming pot of creamy mushroom soup with floating bits and pieces of unidentified chunks and croutons. to put it simply, both are just a match made in heaven. admittedly, i have never bothered to ask what else my mother puts in the soup other than the occasional mushrooms. but you know what they say in the culinary world, 'if it looks simple yet tastes curiously good, don't ask what went into the damn thing.' and thus, looking like we're headed to those infamous heartlands Tupperware party traps that sell 'as-seen-on-TV!' infommercial products, my mother packed and sealed the entire mushroom soup and croutons into them air-tight containers. yes indeed, we were ready for another outing at the Chinese Gardens. not forgetting the disposable plastic cups of course.

since the only thing i did contribute to the mushroom soup with croutons was the occasional tasting, some saliva (i can't help but be conditioned to salivate when my mom cooks the soup, blame Pavlov!), and the post-cooking vacuum-ing, i have always tasked myself to help promote my mother's goods. when my mother presented her cinnamon rolls the first time at one paternal gathering, the oriental taste buds of theirs were not that receptive to the whole idea of western baked goods. i facilitated by rummaging through their fridge for a bottle of coconut jam. apparently, they liked it.

based on this success, i have always been the kinda sad guy you see at fun fairs and carnivals trying their utmost to hawk the wares of others. in marketing terms, it's the wrong target group we're looking at. in my mind, it's always like trying to sell platinum bling blings to a group of Chinese aunties. and the only way to make them buy it is if you put in huge chunks of jade into the plat blings.

at this particular gathering, everyone loved the mushroom soup. given that Campbell's chicken soup is pretty much a staple food/soup in my paternal family, their palates were well-versed to their creamy taste of the mushroom soup. my mother's baked croutons however, were left as untouched as a virgin. in fact, the only people who helped themselves to the croutons were the wife of the Robert Kiyosaki uncle, the cousin who believe that wine is acceptable in biblical context, my father, my brother, my mother and me. and believe me, my mother baked A LOT of croutons. it's as if Jesus took the famous five loaves of bread and broke it into a million pieces and one basket of the famous twelve that he broke, was sitting right there in the middle of the Chinese Gardens right beside me.

i tried really hard. believe me. but that wasn't a fridge to rummage into for sauces or coconut jams and thus, it was a hard battle lost when it came to the croutons. unexpectedly, it was at that moment that my grandmother hobbled over to where i was sitting beside the 'basket' of croutons (you do realize that it's not really a basket but merely, a Tupperware right?). my paternal grandmother has been through many orthopaedic surgeries that involve inserting in metal screws and plates to keep her spine upright. i've already lost count of the number of surgeries she has been for apparently. but what i can confirm though, is that she has enough metal in her to build one of those tacky, touristy replicas of the Eiffel Tower. alas, the pain that she constantly experiences upon physical movement is pretty much comparative when i take one of those Eiffel Tower replicas and stab it into your spine and joints. not fun i can assure you, especially when you're already in your late 60s.

which is why she hobbles. and when she's really tired, she needs a hand to hobble up the stairs. which is what she asked me to help her do when we wanted to take a walk around the park to see some of those Chinese fishes as i mentioned at the beginning of this post. it was during this assistance of her hobbling that she always takes the chance to talk to me. she would often ask about my general well-being, my health, whether my father was ill-treating me and stuff of the like. she always knew how violent my dad used to get so she really cared a lot about my parents and me. plus, my father's the only son in a family of daughters, so being the eldest grandson and the only grandson of the only paternal son, i am (IMHO) quite highly-priced in the grand children's market (i must've lost you somewhere in those family connections, haven't i?) opf the paternal family.

so i expected that my paternal grandmother or nai nai as i so fondly call her, would ask how life was in general. instead, she bent low and gripped my hand tight. and she said to me in a sort of forced and hushed whisper yet with a smile in mandarin, 'Ah Than!!' she always calls me by that since i was young. the chinese language apparently, doesn't have a rough approximate pronunciation for the Jona- part of my name. 'Ah Than!!! Don't smoke already lah!!' which came about as shocking as an Eiffel Tower pain in my mind. 'Smoking is bad for health!'

'How did you know ah?' i asked my grandmother in that equally juxtaposed mix of a harsh and forced whisper yet enveloped by a smile.

'How i know doesn't matter! What's really important is that you don't smoke already! Or at least cut down! Bad for health!' that's what i like about the grandmother. she's as Christian as Jesus himself. but she always gives practical, sound and really quite reasonable advice.

alas, the only response my mind managed to conjure up was a flimsy, 'Okay.' there was a quiet, pensive air between nai nai and me after that. as we hobbled back to the table, i couldn't help but wonder who was the missing link in between that led to my grandmother knowing about one of my many carnal vices. was it the cousin who took up the same nursing degree as me? was it one of the relatives who drove past while i was puffing away on a cigarette? after some elimination and mental images of literally eliminating the suspects, i quickly decided that it had to be the cousin. who else really, had the most contact with me outside of the sunday gatherings.

as we hobbled back together to the picnic table, i discovered the 'basket' of croutons missing. i didn't think that the relatives would self-initiate themselves to gobble the whole basket up. it wasn't until i heard the happy screaming and shouting of my youngest cousins, John Chua (the one that was named after me and has curiously effeminate ways) and Grace Chua feeding the fishes in the pond with my mother's croutons. apparently, my cousins saw the other park visitors feeding the fishes the lake with torn pieces of bread from a giant jumbo loaf. so wanting to join in the fun, they searched for the nearest source of baked goods. and being the clever kids that they are, they saw opportunity in my mother's basket of croutons.

and thus, half-gone were my mother's croutons by the time i confronted John and Grace Chua. i decided to let them have the rest of the croutons as my mother didn't really seem to care about her food as well. in fact, she was down on her knees beside the lake with a wooden stick, trying to indulge in a childhood activity of picking water snails from the lake. the icing on the cake was when there were no more croutons left, John and Grace forced me to eat the toppings off a pizza that one of the family members had baked so that they could have the baked pizza itself. pizza = bread in their minds.

clever kids, i say.

why i never endorse the use of restraints on patients

2008-06-16T09:28:00.003+08:00

i vividly remember my posting at the Institute of Mental Health during my nursing student days. it was an old building located at one of the most inaccessible parts of Singapore. true, there were buses and taxi and people living in the area, but the nearest train station was about a half-hour's bus ride away. in Singapore where our train stations are constantly expanding their branches and networks, a populated area like this being isolated from a train station is something out of the ordinary.

i recall the whole place giving me the impression of an English countryside. the complex stood proudly on a hill of green, like a grand old dame standing erect and stoically, watching the rest of the world with the eyes of weariness. maybe she's really tired, maybe she's on meds. who knows? what i did know and notice though is that a long winding road led to the main entrance. architecturally and scenery-wise, it looked like the place for a mental patient for a retreat. from a nursing and security perspective, well.... it's a long run down the hill if you're trying to escape. not forgetting the fencing and the security guards armed with tranquillizers. of course, you do realize i'm joking right?

on arrival, the lobby greets you with a very warm and relaxed atmosphere. genially friendly staff are there to guide you to the place you need to go. given that the complex is actually quite big, i daresay that it's a godsend. the aroma of fried noodles from the cafeteria and the scent of antiseptic wafts through the eerily quiet place, giving you the impression of hygiene and good food (which is the only way you want your food to be, no?). i allowed myself a wry smile as i thought to myself, 'i wonder if they serve noodles fried under aseptic technique'.

none the less, i was posted at a general ward which housed a grand total of about thirty male patients. some were truly insane. some were mildly off. some were questionably crazy. it's easy to tell the extremes apart. the really crazy ones and violent ones wore orange t-shirts. the questionably crazy ones wore the blue. but sometimes when i talked to those patients, i found myself wondering if they really deserved an orange after all. not because it's more suitable for their skin tone or it looks better on them, but rather the content in their conversation seems rather.... off+++. for all it's worth, several plastic shields and batons were hung in the nursing offices for emergency uses. and i'm sure those equipment are no respector of t-shirt colour.

one of the patients i talked to was a jovial old man who seemed like a mentally-healthy person. he talked about coffee and he talked about politics. and when he talked about politics, his face had this glowy 'in the zone' kind of look to it. it was obvious that he really enjoyed talking about politics. i wasn't that familiar with the local political scene during those days and i took everything he said at glowy 'in the zone' face-value. i mean, it really made sense and it didn't hurt to actually believe in the governmental conspiracy theory that he was relating about. unfortunately i decided to discard what he said on the second day when i started getting chummy with him. he pulled me to one corner of the psychiatric ward, and he whispered to me in hushed tones.

'Eh boy! since you're so nice to me, i'm going to give you something!'

'And what are you going to give me, uncle?' i replied with a cynical tone.

i was half-expecting some junk or some sweets or something silly. after all, these patients had very few physical possessions to begin with. this was for fear of them injuring others or hurting themselves. it was almost like Prison Break, except that you've got an all-star Asian cast. and the orange and blue t-shirts of course.

'I will give you....' he held his breath as he fumbled in his pockets for the mysterious gift, 'the personal phone number of the president!'

from his pant pocket, he took out a note book. it was the old and ratty type that punters and gamblers used to take down sweepstake numbers, copy down names of winning horses and quite possibly the mobile number of 'Krystal' who offers lapdances at bargain prices. he asked for my pen and proceeded to write down the number on a piece of paper. intermittently, he would look around to see if there were any Internal Security Act Agents standing around to arrest him. he tore the jotted-down number from the punter's notebook and handed it over to me.

'Don't look at it until i've gone away!' he said again in a harsh whisper that was in close proximity to my right ear. unfortunately, my Jackie Chan nose was also in close proximity. i could smell the fetid breath of halitosis as he quickly attempted to mingle with the rest of the patients again.

when i opened the folded piece of paper from the punter's notebook, the following numbers to the president's personal telephone were written down in a somewhat childish and untidy scrawl:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

indeed, government conspiracies. he was really funny though and i enjoyed his company thoroughly.

another highlight of that particular posting in the institute involved a fellow nursing student. this fellow nursing student was the ardent Christian type. the type that says grace before food, the type that drops the name of God intermittently in every two or three sentences. the type that says 'Thank God!' and really means it as 'Thank you God my precious saviour and all that thou hath done for me!' aside from the zelous nature of hers, she's pretty and she has a mole on one cheek that really befitted her. i called her 'The Christian Beauty Spot'. i found her enjoyable to talk to and we shared a lot on how our churches are like and alike.

none the less, Christian Beauty Spot and i were on duty that particular day. she mentioned in the morning that she felt tired and weak. i shrugged it off as a lack of breakfast. and as if to chastise that nonchalance to her general body condition, she fainted right there and then on the spot. i manage to catch her in time just as a few other patients were trying to make a grab for her. according to other nursing students, they had a lecherous look on their face. i can't really tell if that was true though i seriously think they were trying to catch her too.

but that's the problem with mental health: how mad is mad? is eccentric really mad? and can mad be sometimes simply shrugged off as eccentric? the homeless chap whom you pass by everyday - everyone so readily labels the poor chap as insane and mad. but the professor of science and the arts and all his weird little idiosyncrasies is no more than eccentric. there seems to be a bias in place when it comes to the definition of madness.

none the less, over a cup of milo in the tea room, she thanked me. there was a look of adoration in her eyes that i felt really embarrassed about. not helping was that her beauty spot of a mole turned into a dimple when she smiled. charming. over the next few days, she kept would bring up the event and reinforce to me that she had had breakfast in the morning. to which we would have a good laugh over and reenact the moments and snippets when she fainted. at the end of the posting, she gave me a CD of a sermon by a famous preacher in her church. the title was something along the lines of wealth and health.

these days when i see her in the hospital, she still looks pretty. my father inherited the CD which she gave to me and occasionally listens to it with plenty of scorn and cynicism.

the concept of restraining patients in the hospital setting has always been one of questionable ethics. when do you need to restrain a sick person? why do you need to do it? is there no other alternative? what about sedatives? how do you go about doing it then? do you know how to tie a knot? why do they call it 'tying the knot' when the only firm sort of knot that you know of when 'tying the knot' is most likely a 'dead' knot?

rubbishy questions aside, the ongoing understanding from having worked in the hospital for several years coming seems to be that only restrain when the patients is doing something harmful to themselves. then again, how do you define harm? a person slashing their own wrists and doing bodily injuries to themselves or others is definitely within the boundaries of harm. but a 'naughty' patient who tries to remove his blood transfusion cannula and refuses treatment when he's already of a questionably unsound mind and low haemoglobin level seems to fall under that category as well. there's loads of factors to consider when the decision to apply restraints on someone is considered.

even so, application of restraints comes with the proper technique. cotton pads are applied to the wrists when hand restraints are used. charts have to be set up to ensure that the nurses check on the restraints regularly to see if they are too tight. the doctor has to be informed. the relatives have to be informed as well. and there's the fact that most relatives, just like parents who receive news that their child has done something wrong in school, almost always refuse to believe that their loved ones are unmanageable to the point of restraints. i knew of one patient whom a colleague had restrained in the afternoon. throughout the night shift, that particular patient's relative constantly called every hour or two to check on the condition of the patients. she apparently slept peacefully throughout the night.

in my humble opinion and principles (hey, i actually do have some of those okay!), i don't really believe in restraints. it's demeaning and besides, most patients on restraints tend to struggle even more than they previously did when they were unrestrained. this basically ends in really knotty situations whereby you spend even more time undoing the restraints that were enforced on the patient. actually, come to think of it, i'm about as capable with tying restraints as a junior boy scout member. i mean, i can do enough knots to get through a couple of shoes, a neck tie, a wedding gift, a plastic bag of general waste and perhaps a session of light bondage that is not even convincingly tight. but since when was a Windsor applicable to a pair of hands? which is why every knot i tie ends up as easily removable as a shoelace or as permanent as a dead knot. most of the time, i cut the damn thing off with a pair of nursing scissors.

my other colleague whom i work with on the permanent night shifts is a strong advocate of restraints however. she's been in this permanent night business for about three years coming. and believe you me, three years of irregular sleeping hours and horrid colleagues handing over terrible work for you to follow-up during your shifts can really make one bogged down and burned out. she has the dark eye bags and permanently tired look on the face to prove it. six months into this gig and i have already sallow skin and a permanent frown on my face as battle scars.

my colleague usually considers restraints after three warnings to patients against whatever silly things they are doing. some are plainly confused. some are irrational. other are just bordering on pure disobedience and bastardry. why come to the hospital when you're going to refuse treatment and cause so much trouble? either way, i think that the 'three warnings' system is quite possibly the best method to go about hinting at restraints. but then again, i'm stubborn and stick to my principles sometimes like a frozen tongue on an alpine ski lift.

i steadfastly refuse to restrain my patients. so much so that if they are restrained at night, i would secretly untie them in the dark of the night. Pangkeng (whom i have taken to calling 'Xena, Warrior Princess these days due to his overall lack of gentleness) gets extremely pissed when i do that. most of the time, the patients don't really do much damage themselves. they pull out their cannulas, they attempt to climb out of bed (but rarely ever manage to do so). nothing that can't be resolved. in fact, most of them actually sleep better at night when they are unrestrained. but then again, the only patients i usually nurse are men.

now, the reason why i brought this story up was simply because of a lapse in my principles several weeks ago when a patient under the charge of my colleague was admitted for a suspected bleed in the gastro-intestinal tract. her blood count results showed a low of about 7.0mmol/L. couple that with a previous history of a duodenal ulcer and she was thus scheduled for a scope the following day. during the course of the night, she was transfused two bags of bloods to 'top up' her blood supply. according to my colleague, she was really nice and all during the day when the bloods were still transfusing. post-transfusion however, she was caught attempting to leave the bed.

there was nothing wrong with actually leaving the bed, but the fact that she actually leaving and walking all the way down to the other end of the ward corridor - now, that's a worrisome fact. we asked her of course, what she was trying to do by walking down from one end of the corridor to the other. she just said she was looking for her relatives. it was about 3.20am at that point of time. when i thought about it, it was pretty obvious that she was trying to look for an escape route from the ward. she was constantly opening doors and on the lookout for an exit. not helping was that she did the above-mentioned with all the subtlety of a brass band's percussion section.

as nurses, we always attempt to try the nice method first. the more forceful alternative would always remain as a secondary plan. of course, the forceful words always come after we settle whatever issue a patient has at the pantry ('What is wrong with this old man? he wants me to hold his penis so that he can pee properly???' - this is true, i heard it at the tea room before). we attempted to convince the old lady to go back to the bed and take a rest as her blood levels were low and she was at risk of fainting at any moment. we tried helping her by guiding her at the arms. she slapped my hands off and ended up slapping me in the nose. which basically gave my Jackie Chan nose a reason to start up a sinus party. i couldn't stop sniffling after that.

after parking her in her bed, she attempted three more 'escapes'. 'escape' is in inverted commas as there was absolutely no stealth in her attempts. you could hear the loud click as she undid her bed rails. the flip-flops she was wearing truly lived up to their noisy names. one bizarre thing though that made us question whether she was of sound mind or not was that she didn't even try to run or walk briskly. she was actually must sauntering about and looking about for that elusive escape route of hers.

and thus a final warning laced with a hint of restraints was issued to the lady before we enforced on her the inevitable. i couldn't bring myself to do it as i was just being a real prick with me and my principles. but one could really hear it was a tough job despite the fact that Pangkeng was there to help. bloodcurling screams and shouts pierced through the quiet night air. and Pangkeng was occasionally spewing vulgarities. he only uses vulgarities when he's with me or when violence ensues. so he was obviously getting physically abused. it was either my friend getting kicked or my principles. i decided to screw them for once and help Pangkeng.

at the bedside, it was truly an ugly scene. gauze wrappers were strewn all over the floor. blood could be seen trickling out from an ex-cannula site that the lady had forcefully ripped out from a vein. the lady was screaming, shouting and kicking everything and everyone in sight. the rest of the patients in the same room as her had woken up and wondering what the commotion was all about. she had even managed to pull her pyjama top open. a button lay at the side of the bed and she had one breast exposed. she looked savage and she looked vicious. in my mind, i made the mental connection between the lady and the harpies in Van Helsing. my colleagues got bitten and pinched. i got kicked twice in the chin. Pangkeng, the warrior princess got slap on the face and his balls kicked. but he's resilient.

it was with all that violence that we decided to reinforce the entire set of restraints - a body vest, a pair of hand restraints and a pair of leg ones. Pangkeng did the ultimate of plonking his entire hulking 98kg frame on her legs to stop the kicking. and it's really ugly to see a woman scream and shout when you usually see them very well in control of their emotions. i felt bad as throughout the whole ordeal, she was screaming and appealing to us not to tie her. she mentioned that we were bullying her as there were four nurses tying her up. she stated that she was old and that tying her up was a sign of disrespect. being Chinese and having a father who imbued me with respect for the elderly, i really felt that the whole thing was... demeaning or disrespectful or well, i can't pinpoint an exact word. but i hoped that i was doing the wrong thing for at least the right reasons.

and restrain the lady we finally did. exhausted, Pangkeng and i decided to head to our secret spot in the hospital for a quick smoke. when we came back an estimated fifteen minutes later, we found that the entire bed had been shifted out to the ward corridor in front of the nurses' counter.

'She actually managed to undo her restraints!' my colleague exclaimed in exasperation.

upon closer inspection, 'undo' was not really the correct word. she actually ripped out her restraints. and those weren't soft, cottony gauze restraints. we used linen restraints that were double sewn at the seams and connecting points for extra strength. as we did her restraints again, she got even more violent and abusive this time. somehow or other, she managed to get hold of a bottle of Chinese medicated oil that she stashed underneath her pillow. she start sprinkling the entire vial of mentholated fluid at us. it was burning. it was hot. and resolved all of us nurses to quickly get the job done.

when we managed to restrain her the second time she suddenly started singing a bizarre song in Hokkien. there were some old Hokkien words in there that i couldn't understand and my Hokkien is l33t. but what i did grasp was that she was trying to call upon the spirit of her in-laws to destroy us. and being Chinese, calling your in-laws for help is sorta like the last resort, given that most Chinese in-laws are quite the horrible bunch. we were kinda freaked out as her unnatural strength, her loud screams and shouts, her Hokkien in-law song... we were thinking along the lines of demonic possession actually.

suffice to say, when she was more settled down and asleep from all the physical exertion (or maybe the demon left her, who knows?), i managed to catch a breather with my colleague.

i asked her, 'you think it's worth it to tie her up after all that kicking and scratching?'

she was scratching at the already inflammed area on her arm where the medicated oil had landed. on her other arm was a slight hint of a bruise. the other arm was a redness that came about from a pinch from the patient.

'maybe,' she said, 'i mean, it was either her or us.'

was the lady with the low Hb condition mad to begin with? or was she just plain 'naughty'? those thoughts made me pensive for the rest of the evening.

but i'm thinking it's mainly due to me being really anal about my principles.

how i got my Platinum card and still couldn't make the father proud

2008-06-09T08:42:00.008+08:00

(apologies for having not blogged for so long, plenty of activities and educational pursuits and work matters, apologies for another post on family issues as well. you must be bored to death hearing about my father and his constant suppresion of myself. i'll blog about something as next week. otherwise, i'll.... ehrm... post naked pictures of myself!)

my paternal family has the sort of 'fun-filled family activities' enthusiasm going on that can really sometimes irk you to death. you see, it all started with one fine Christmas gathering when the entire family committed to spending more time together. this particular Christmas gathering was the one that had just passed apparently. the one whereby my father tried to convince the entire family that the world was ending and that we were to tighten our chastity belts and keep a good check on our faiths to see if we were still in tune with the Lord. the one when everyone simply just laughed at my father's all too zealous belief that the world was ending. the one whereby my father still has a sore spot over the fact that the paternal family laughed at his claims.

in all honesty, it wasn't that my family didn't believe in his theories of apocalypse. everyone in my paternal family (well, practically everyone - i'm not that there yet in terms of faith) is a strong Christian that truly deserves a one-way ticket to heaven. but it was more of the way he did the whole spiel that made everyone think that he was verging on a crusade or matyrdom. it's all cool to believe in an 'end-days' theory, but to be a doomsday preacher is way not cool. which my father apparently needs someone to drill it into him. but how many people actually approach their local doomsday prophet and actually correct them or tell them 'it's not cool'?

the more i think about it, when i actually dress my father in the scholarly robes of yore, hand him 95 pieces of theses and place him in front of the Wittenburg church door, i begin to realize that i have actually been living with a Martin Luther in the house. not exactly in a 'it's wrong for the Catholic church to withhold the bible in a foreign language from the public' kinda way, but more of 'i challenge the authority' manner. it's quite apparent that the doomsday belief of this Martin Luther father of mine (and i say this with all the love in the world for the man who raised me up) has apparently tainted and coloured his social life. my father has only friends from church. my father only conducts business dealings (eg. insurance agents) with like-minded brethren. he even managed to convert his best friend from Catholicism to Christianity. last heard, i think he was a Deacon in one of the sister churches of my dad's in Canada.

so you see, given that we're not getting much of a social life in terms of a family unit, i think it's a prudent investment of time to go on various outings with the paternal family over the weekends. what sort of outings you say? thus far, when we don't head out into the public, we rotate potluck parties at each others house on a weekly basis. we would try to have themes and prepare dishes in accordance to the themes. so far, we have only been successful at Western, Japanese, Korean and of course, Chinese cuisine. actually the Korean was falling apart with the appearance of Chinese ngoh hiong rolls (translated to mean '5 spices' - it's my grandmother's speciality).

when we do go out however, it's much more interesting. we do morbidly embarrassing things like go out to the park with picnic tables in tow. we literally find a grassy spot under the shade and open up this grassy-green coloured portable picnic table that's the size of a hedge. in fact, it blends in very well with a hedge (thank goodness!). since we have only two tables that can sit a family of four, the others would make do with the trusty ol' picnic mats. and not just any ordinary picnic mats, but tacky Spiderman 2 mats courtesy of Colonel Sander (it came free with a family feast from KFC). and sometimes i question their cleanliness because we don't often do picnic moments together. so the picnic mats tend to be in great need of dusting. i can't really tell whether it's just Spiderman's webs or really cobwebs.

during these picnic outings however, there's always a bizarre mix of foods. everyone brings whatever they can lay their hands on. packets of chips that nobody eats at home, a big metal pot of Shark's fin soup (can you actually say that you actually have eaten Shark's fin soup in a park in shorts and singlet), bottles of green tea, a box of 16 doughnuts, roasted duck, a chunk of agar-agar that looks like a fish (??). of course, there's the standard fare of fried vermicelli and finger foods like sausages and nuggets.

it's all these outings that i come truly prepared. i bring along a good novel and my ipod and indulge in a good half-hour's worth of reading. another person who does the same, albeit without the music, is my uncle-in-law who opened the nursing degree programme that i'm currently being educated at. my selection of reads are mainly limited to fiction and the occasional popular non-fiction literature. whereas my uncle-in-law is the direct opposite. he reads books on financial management and success. he would always be armed with a copy of the Business Times and financial magazines. titles like 'You Can be Financially Prudent Too!' and 'Money Matters' flash across my mind when you ask me about the books that he reads. i just met him again last week and i saw him reading 'Master Plan of Evangelism'. eclectic mix of books, that's all that i can say.

i've come to realize that the both of us are the only one who don't really talk much to the paternal family. my reason mainly being that i'm in the presence of my parents and don't find much comfort in expressing myself. my uncle-in-law however, it's a different matter. the only moments he chips in are when it involves politics and financial matters. and he's quite well-versed in these things. listening to him talk is like watching a political commentary. which admittedly, thrills me to no boundaries. i'm sure he quotes most of the stuff from the books that he reads. but it's almost like watching Robert Kiyosaki at work. which is quite possibly the next best thing to sex (for me, at least).

Robert Kiyosaki and Martin Luther... isn't my paternal family quite the fun bunch?

they say that good financial habits comes from good parenting. however, when it comes to all things financial, i'm about as wise as a piece of banana money. my parent's idea of financial prudence is a matter of saving for the rainy days. as the free thinker of the family, i feel a presing need to go against the grain. every day seems to be a rainy day for me. after all, what's money if you don't spend it? of course, i'm not that callous with money. just a tad more generous when it comes to friends and colleagues.

still, i've come to realize that i've made many financial errors in my life. one of the top ones begin that i took up a financial advisor that was introduced to me by my mother. she joins the church choir (she's a soprano) and knows a lot of people in there. one of these people that she's connected with, is an insurance agent or more aptly put these days, a financial advisor. he's a Christian guy whom i suspect is a closet case or at least someone who's trying to suppress those man-loving tendencies. he owns EVERY season of Friends on DVD (not exactly crminally gay) that he keeps in an OCD-resemblant disc folder, he speaks in a light tenor voice, and well... the ground that he treads on basically sprouts pink daisies. but he's a good Christian aman and i can without a doubt attest to that. problem is, i don't feel comfortable sharing my financial situation with brethren that are as like-minded as my father. and my financial advisor is one of them. it was with him that i signed up two insurance policies that amount to a monthly premium of $354.67.

my parents expect a monthly contribution from my salary to the household expenses. which i'm actually fine with. the initial amount was a whopping $500, which in reality i can figure out lots of foolish ways to dwindle it down. i can buy all the lap dances i want for an entire night and still have enough to spare for a a supper for two, a cab ride to the nearest love hotel and the transit rate there. i bargained it down to $300 stating that i was just starting out work, which the father expressed unhappiness and compared me to the cousins who literally contributed $500 a month. if there's one thing parents should never do is to compare their children to that of relatives. it's demeaning. and anyways, the brother's the one who wastes electricity by leaving all the switches on on the 'vampire' electronic devices.

then there's the issue of my school fees that sets me back by about $250 every month. my phone bill as well which never exceeds its stipulated minutes every month since i don't really like to talk on the phone. this basically results in me having roll-over minutes EVERY month. i do subscribe to a wireless broadband service though. total - $67.50. a World of Warcraft account costs me $25.14 per month. adding the odds and edds and i fork out a total of $997.31. i bring home about $1.8 - $2k every month from working the permanent night shifts. which leaves me about $1K every month. and apparently, it's bordering on being insufficient. i find myself lacking about $50 every month. i think it's the smoking.

you see, i smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. and i can't do the low-end brands because they make my throat phlegmy and leave a terrible after-taste. not that i'm trying to be prissy or classy or anything like that. but the only cigarettes that i can enjoy and i find a good investment in are Dunhill Kings, Consulates, Camels and Marlboro Ice Mints. so it's practically $11-12 a pack. not helping is that i need to be at Starbucks every weekend to help generate these blog posts. so if you add up here and there, i'm actually surviving on an amount that's just sufficient, short of $50. i throw $50-100 into savings every month which i end up having to tap back into.

i'm not thinking of quitting smoking or even cutting down any time soon. the last time i bought new clothes was when i was in Thailand. before that, it was during the Chinese New Year, before that it was Christmas and before that? my birthday in October. so i'm not exactly splurging on materialistic goods.

so when i think about my finances, it basically all boils down to matter of unwise financial decisions that i'm bogged down with. the insurance especially. but i understand that in the long run (pending the doomsday prophecy), it really helps. the bigger problem though is that every month i'm constantly having to head back to the parents for money. and i'm not asking money from THEM, but rather, trying to tap on my savings which i decided to let my father safeguard. alas, my father being the prophet of the end times would never release my savings to me without 'the talk'. now, 'the talk' would usually last about a half hour or more. it would usually start from my smoking habits, and develop and evolve till it reaches his favourite doomsday prophecy. the first few times when he did it, it did have some form of impact on me. subsequent times however, it was much less impressionable. mainly because it was the same old recycled material that he would always use. keywords that would often pop up during 'the talk' would be things like 'gnashing of teeth' (to describe what hell was like), 'seven years of trials and tribulations' and 'rivers turning to blood'. and all i wanted was the take some money from my savings...

and to crown it off, he would never ever release my savings to me based on a previous experience of me splurging when i had a lot of money in my bank account. of course, i was young and i was new to the whole concept of holding a singular fifty dollar note in my hand. and splurge i did. what my father would normally do would be to take him like a credit card and roll over the money. so every month, i tap on my father's credited money and roll the money to the next month to pay him back. in all reality, i might as well get a credit card with all the legal and financial implications behind it and be spared the hellfire and brimstone prophecy.

so i did the administrative procedures for a Citibank savings account and credit card application over the weekend. it was smooth-going and my application was approved within two hours. it was after that unfortunately that i had to consider whether to come clean with the father regarding my credit card application. because, living with them is like living with the Secret Police. they used to go through all my mail until one fine day when i raised my voice and locked my bedroom door. they were so freaked out that they never dared to go through any of my mail again. i decided to save the voice-raising and door-locking for emergencies in the future.

out of love and honesty and a responsibility to my parents, i decided to talk to my father about the application and its approval. i tried a 'i want to take responsibility of financial matters now that i can manage better' tactic with my father. suffice to say, my father on top of being the Martin Luther of the family is now quite the wet blanket. 'Are you sure you can manage a credit card because from previous records, i don't think so,' he started. and thus he launched into his barrage about bankruptcy and the seriousness of it and how the banks will come after me if i can't pay up and et cetera. i was hoping for something more along the lines of 'oh congrats on getting your first ever credit card' or maybe even a smile or some sense of pride. and he once again had to make a comparison between my all-too-perfect cousin who saves money every month and contributes a lot of money to the household and can rent a car every month to take the family out. i hate being compared.

i'm thinking that i will never ever be able to make the father proud unless i become a Martin Luther myself. alas, monastery robes and all that are just not my thing. i wish the Robert Kiyosaki of an uncle-in-law was my father. but i try to refrain from doing that because that's already a comparison, no?

adulthood is no more than childhood betrayed

2008-05-24T11:36:00.001+08:00

i've never liked racket sports (not that i like sports to begin with). events such as tennis, badminton, hockey, floorball and whatnot, they seem to project this image of... blame. each time the player misses a ball, whacks the puck out of court or bashes someone's ankle accidentally, he instinctively starts looking at his racket. it's as if to say, 'it's not my fault that the racket's possessed.' which is perhaps why i prefer watching rugby and most contact sports that involve the physical body and the body itself. of course, it certainly helps that the men playing such sports have bodies that appeal to the general public. especially rugby.

but sports aside, it seems that people these days seem to fault everything that goes wrong to everything and everyone else other than themselves. in the context of law, serial killers can get away with a plea on insanity by stating childhood stress and trauma related to a parental divorce. employers who abused their maids relate it to work stress. serial molesters claim that they are the way the are because they were molested by others when they were young. so everyone gets away scot-free just because of their traumatic childhoods and seemingly traumatising stressors, so it seems.

as for me, i'm morally grey with three shades down the darker side. i'm no criminal unless you consider buying the occasional contraband cigarettes to turn me into one. and of course, not forgetting the consensual anal sex with other men. but this got me thinking that in one way or another, we're all quite possibly damaged or at least influenced by events that happened to us during our childhood. after all, the minds of children are considered to be at their most malleable. childhood is like taking a plunge into the great big fondue of life. you may be a bright red strawberry or a colourful fruit by any other name. but once you take a dip into life, you definitely will emerge as a change person. mostly darker, no thanks to the sinfulness of chocolate.

most events that children go through will almost always leave lasting impressions on them. and believe you me, children have really good memories. they remember the good stuff well, and remember the bad stuff even better. which is perhaps why i coined the phrase that 'Adulthood is no more than childhood betrayed'.

admittedly, i can't say that my childhood wasn't enjoyable. there were good moments like Happy Meals, 10/10 spelling tests (i was really good at spelling), Sonic the Hedgehog, Rockman comics and things that endear a lot to kids of my time. however, it wasn't all that a bed of roses as well. i never played with the neighbourhood kids (mother was afraid that i would get kidnapped or molested). i had only one official birthday party with my classmates in my entire life, and that was in kindergarten. i spent a lot of time doing homework, studying and reading. these may have coloured my life today in some way. at the root of myself, i guess i'm still the fat geeky kid from the primary schools. unfortunately, the ultimatum of my childhood that really defined me was my father and his violent tendencies back then.

father was a very violent man. of course, he's not that violent these days, Thank God (literally, because he somehow saw 'The Light' along the way and gave up his violence). he got pissed and irritated very easily, which made him very unapproachable. we used to live with my paternal grandmother in this jumbo apartment. if it wasn't for her, i would have perhaps been caned to oblivion and psychologically scarred beyond repair. it was the screaming, the canings and the shouting that made me hate my childhood so much. i remember praying a lot to God that somehow or other, my parents would throw away the cane. i prayed that they would never use the cane on me again. in fact, i remember one time i prayed so hard that i spent practically fifteen minutes just squatting by the bedside, hands clasped together with eyes shut tightly. though i really think that the reason why i spent fifteen minutes squatting there was due to the fact that my father had just given me a can of whoop ass.

for the record, God never answered my prayer about the cane. when the cane finally started to splinter, they simply threw the old one away and bought a new one from the local provisional shop downstairs. the auntie at the shop would always give me that demeaning stare whenever my parents bought a new cane, as if to say, 'isn't this like the fifth cane they bought this year? i bet this spawn of Satan really deserves it! hmph!' these days however, what with the law and protection against the ol' skool method of chastising children, you don't really find provision shops that sell canes any more.

so for the record once again, maybe God does answer prayers, just that it's a few years too late.

i decided to skip church today again. in fact, i have been skipping church for two months on alternative weeks. there were certainly what i considered to be 'white lies' involved. i mean, i couldn't jolly well tell the parents that i hated church and wanted out. that would be like grabbing the cane from them and using it against them. and i hate having to hurt people, whether physically or emotionally. therefore, i used to rather solid excuse of work commitments and group projects.

truth be told however, i simply can't help but hate church, possibly because it makes me hate myself. the idea of church that has been branded on my mind since young is the warm and stuff place where everyone has black hair, long skirts and hairy armpits accompanied with fat arms. there's an organ at one end of the sanctuary and a piano at the other. people live their lives according to the word of God, as if the other practicalities of life never mattered. if their lives were an Electrocardiogram reading, it would be a pure flatline. a flawless, straight and narrow little flatline. boring, true. but flawless and leading to heaven, none the less.

it's because of this hate that i've turned out to be what i call a 'church bastard'. i don't single the hymns. i don't contribute to the offering bags. i don't partake of the Lord's Supper because i haven't been baptised. i haven't been baptised because i don't want a part in the Lord's Army. i keep my eyes open during the corporate prayer to update myself of the family mechanics of the various church people ('Oooh... new girlfriend!' or 'The three teenage children are sitting between mommy and daddy... spousal dispute'). i end up noticing the hairy armpits and fat flagging arms at this junction actually. i do my best to fall asleep during the sermons. and if i can, i escape from the service for a quick cigarette and come back smelling like smoke.

a lot of this church-hating sentiment i guess, is derived from events that happened during my childhood. nothing major i guess, but there are plenty of scenes that i remember vividly. scenes that are apparently more negative than positive in context. and i don't remember a lot of my childhood to begin with for some reason. it's these events therefore, that contribute to the building blocks of my relationships with my parents and how i've come to hate Sundays and church-going so much.

why i find that i can't express myself in front of my parents

this happened when i was about eight years of age. it was a sunday evening with the paternal family and the cousins. i've always enjoyed hanging out with them because it was the only time that i got to roam around in public by myself. my protective mother would never let me out of her sight and it was quite irritating that i had to follow her everywhere. okay okay, to be fair, the only point of time she did so was at the lingerie section where she would officially hand me over to my father for safekeeping.

we were out at this ancient and run-down shopping centre called 'Beauty World Complex'. it was one of those old buildings that served its sole purpose of housing a few random stalls. these stalls usually sold really outlandish clothes and skin-toned bras. even at eight, i was surprised that i could tell that those clothes were really horrid. stuff that i would never have worn (and no, i'm not referring to the skin-toned bras). i vividly remembered the multi-storey car park to be this dark and creepy place. the type of setting that's perfect for young nubile things to get flashed at by perverts in the middle of the night.

well, the only point of interest for us kids back then was the video game arcade. it didn't stock any of the latest games in the market. but it did have games and kids are quite possibly the most easily-satisfied people in the world. it was these small little joys that help endure the whole outing to Beauty World Complex. why they would have a video game arcade in this run-down shopping mall is really beyond me. truly, the beauty of this place is indeed, complexed.

lame jokes aside, we kids anticipated that one or two of our parents would be bringing us to the arcade after dinner for some fun. the whole lot of my paternal family members were milling and ambling about in a women's departmental store. the kids were just randomly touching and rustling through the women's clothes in the most obscene of places. i was as usual, following my mother. when one of my uncles did finally make the announcement that we would be going to the arcade, i jumped for joy. you know that kind of 'yay! we're going to the arcade after a boring family dinner' kind of jump. all of us screamed and shouted and whoops and pumped fists into the air. just the way happy kids do.

it was also at that same point of time that my father delivered a big slap to my right cheek. i remembered that it was at the intersection in the women's departmental store that separated the lingerie section from the pants. my mind processed what just happened and decided that the best course of action back then was to shut up. somehow or other, i also got the understanding that when your parent slaps you in the middle of public for no apparent reason other than being extremely happy... well... as a kid, you just know that there's nothing wrong that you've done. it's your parents.

i instinctively put my hand to my left cheek. i remember my vision blurring from the tears that started accumulating in my eyes. all i could see was the blurry colours of beige (presumably the bras) and a few familiar faded faces. i hated my father so much at that point of time that i didn't want to see his face.

the rest of the kids went on with their arcade session while i was forced to stay with the parents and endure the public shame. it was also with that day that i think that i must have decided to not ever be happy when i'm in the presence of the parents. i actually think that it was a three day tantrum sort of thing, to refuse to smile or even talk when with my parents. three days turned into three months and then developed into three years. and since then, i can never bring myself to smile, frown or show some signs of feelings when i'm alone in the presence of the parents. i'm just a passive flat line in the eyes of the parents. of course, it's easy to smile when in front of the relatives and family friends. after all, we all have appearances of happiness to keep up with in public. but then again, i don't really express what i feel or think when the parents are around. the thought of a quick slap to the face somehow just lingers in the air.

but this is quite possibly the reason why i never say anything when i am forced to go to church every sunday.

why i hate teachers and can never get close to them

you know sometimes when you think back about the things you did as a kid, you really can't figure out for the life of yourself as to why you did it. it's as if someone or something influenced you to do this unusual course of action. i remember one time during a primary school music class, we were all marching and dancing to a particularly enjoyable piece of music. for some reason, i just flipped up the skirt of a female classmate that was jumping in front of me. i seriously have no idea why i did that. and i was only seven years old then. the music teacher only warned me that that was a very wrong thing to do. children, as you might have realized, can get away with most things.

the event in question happened in primary school during year one. i was seven and bored to death and irritable. i'm thinking it was the afternoon heat actually. it was hot and humid and in the middle of a boring reading session. i decided to up and leave the class and take a walk around the school. i ended up staring at the flag poles that stood proudly at the front of the courtyard. there were two apparently, one with the school flag on it and the other with the Singapore flag with its red, white and five stars & crescent. now from the first day i stepped into school, i have always harboured a secret fantasy of lowering the flag that only the prefect did. they normally did this during the singing of the national anthem. i mean, as a kid the pulley system of a flag pole is like the coolest thing that man had ever invented (aside from video gaming consoles and the computer).

and so i succumbed to temptation and decided to try out the Singapore flag pole. of course, we learnt about living things and non-living things during science class. but the topic of pulleys and forces had not been taught to us yet. so with the simple undoing of the knot on the flag ropes, i basically undid the flag. there was this loud zzzzzzzipp that seemed to reverberate around the whole school as the flag sild down the pole. that loud zip certainly did attract the attention of one teacher that i will remember for the rest of my life. she saw me as i tried to return the flag back to its original position. and like every other good citizen would do when they some something wrong being done, they would shout out the obvious and start giving chase.

'OI! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!'

i was only seven and could run like the wind. she was over-weight, in her 50s and wearing sandals. unfortunately, she had the advantage over me simply because she taught me for Health Education classes and knew who i was.

it wasn't till later that evening when i was about to return home that all hell broke loose. my father was in his smart-looking army uniform (he was with the military back then) when he came to bring me home. it was white and gleaming with respect. and with all the luck in the world, the Health Education teacher was there when i met the father. when i think back, either she just really happened to be there or she was actually nesting there, awaiting the arrival of my father. none the less, she went ahead and told my father about what had transpired during the afternoon. i'm thinking that it must have been a very shameful thing for him back then given the context that he was in the smart air force garb. my father apologized profusely and walked away without even a second glance at me. i stared at the Health Education teacher with all the hatred, ninja knives and nuclear bombs in the world before making my departure.

i tried to keep up with him as i lugged my heavy school bag to the car. i remember that i said nothing at all during the entire drive back home. he was constantly berating me in the car. and you know what quarrels in the car are like. quiet. imaginatively echoey. and quite awkward. i've come to hate that silence when my father shouts in the car. i do recollect that the first thing that happened when we got home that evening was that he went straight to the store room and grabbed the cane. it was a thin bamboo rod with a pink handle.

that was the night whereby i was caned the worst in my entire childhood. my father locked me in the dark store room for what seemed like a long time. i even remember the scratching sound of scotch tape that pierced the air as he tried to seal the entrance from outside. my grandmother and mother were pleading that he let me out. of course, an angry man is almost always a man you can't convince. it was that long period of time in the darkness of that store room that i hardened my heart against teachers and figure of authority. i hated people who did the right thing without considering the implications of their actions. the right thing, may sometimes not be so right after all. especially if it involved the drastic physical punishment of a child.

the Health Education teacher has since then passed away from cancer from what i last heard. she was remembered as a loving teacher who was a firm Christian and strong morals.

i remember her to be the catalyst for my punishment.

why i hate good people (and Chinese language teachers)

i used to be a class monitor when i was in primary three. i was nine years old then. i was really proud of it because the responsibilities were minimal and you got to wear an uber-shiny badge that stated the words 'MONITOR' and a lot of other unwritten pride on it. all the monitor had to do back then was to count heads, announce the arrival of the teacher of the next class and look really important. in today's modern day context of office rats, it sounds almost like the CEO's lackeys.

i was a good monitor with a penchant for the occasional impish naughtiness. being in a Christian-mission school, that was highly unacceptable. but then i think i got to keep my position as class monitor because i did my job well. it wasn't till one fine day that i blurted out the word 'SHIT' during class when i forgot to bring my Chinese textbook. one classmate of mine took the bloody initiative to report me to the strict Chinese language teacher. as with most Chinese language teachers, for some reason or other, there tend to like wearing sleeveless blouses and stockings. not helping is the fact that they have armpit hair and unshaven legs. i'm not sure about you, but ALL my Chinese language teachers are like that. tradition or trend? you decide.

maybe she was pissed with me, maybe she hated my occasional misbehaviour, but i was stripped of my monitor status there and then. and this is why i hate goody-do-gooders and Chinese language teachers. i know, it's a petty thing. but i valued my class monitor status a lot back then and it was a kick to the gonads to me. my church has a lot of these goody-do-gooders apparently, who simply don't consider the implications of their morally-upright actions. sometimes, it's good to remember that you maybe a Christian, but above all, you're still a human. and humanity prevails.

why i hate youth groups

a friend and i agreed yesterday that Christian youths are quite possibly one of the most sheltered people in the entire world. statistically speaking, the average Christian is middle class, has a stable career and a quite a fair amount of luxuries. looking at my church car park, one will see Beemers, Mercedes, and an entire barrage of space wagons and family sedans. so the average Christian youth has hardly tasted hardship. 'trial by fire' to a majority of these people seem to mean examination and minor classroom disputes. when you compare these problems to that of the poor, the abused and the destitute, it hardly makes you bat an eyelid.

the youth group that i grew up in were children that accompanied me for many years. from kindergarten to secondary school, we have seen each other grow and mature. most of them are now in some foreign country studying something worthy of today's working world. arts, economics, financing, banking, zoology, et cetera. in my batch of youth group members, there were only two of us from schools for the lesser mortals, some other guy whom i don't see in church anymore and me. my youth group leader was this family man who was raised in an elite school and was working in a managerial position of sorts. he had a nice car, nice family and a pretty nice home in somewhat prime estate.

unfortunately, he was the type that favoured intellectuals. i couldn't hold a conversation well back then. i didn't know what to say when they brought up topics. and so i was more often than not neglected during those youth group classes. i was pretty sure that the other guy whom i don't see in church anymore was really left out. he was raised in a traditional Chinese family where they spoke mandarin. my youth group leader over the years, seemed to focus all his attention on the intellectually-endowed crowd. prolly all the mental-sparring shit that they loved to indulge in so much.

but what really made me hate my youth leader so much was one church camp. this happened when we were all in secondary school, teenagers to be precise. teenagers as you might have grown up realizing, are one of the most easily-influenced crowds around in town. you could prolly blame it on peer pressure. and it's most likely true. they seem to value the opinions of their friends more than their family members. indeed, it's one of the complexities of the youth.

peer pressure was what this youth group leader employed after a night sermon. the task was simple: there was an imaginary divide on the center of the floor. if you're on the Lord's side, please stand with me. if you're want to be with the world, you can scoot to the other. all of us were already on the Lord's side as the sermon was preached on that side of the floor. so perhaps we were all too lazy to move (it was a NIGHT sermon after all). as for those who were on the edge of the imaginary line, you could see them hurridly shifting over to the Lord's side, as though as the darkness will claim them if they don't.

in this context, peer pressure would never allow the teenage youth to go over to the carnal side. to do so, would be to allowing yourself to be officially recognized as 'one of the others' in the youth group. it's what a youth fears the most, not being accepted by his peers. of course, this would entail of whole barrage of follow-ups like one-to-one heart talks about your spiritual growth and a tedious exercise of checking up on you constantly.

it seems like an insignificant use of peer pressure upon impressionable youths, but i felt betrayed that night.

and so, these are the events of my youth and childhood that might perhaps have damaged me in some way. but upon recollection, i think that they might have strengthened my resolve to not easily be influenced, to not give in to physical punishment, to grow stronger. some people lead great childhoods with fond recollections of their parents and the good times together. some have really bad childhoods. for me i think, if it needed a lot of caning to change my father into a better person, then i say it's simply no more than a matter of trial by fire.

like they say, 'what doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger'.

how i ended up kissing Pangkeng

2008-05-10T12:08:00.000+08:00

i love to socialize with people in general. i really do. the rewards that come from it are endless. to begin with. it broadens horizons, introduces new perspectives, and if it's a guy, gives one a potshot of a chance at sex ('Speaking of bed linen, why don't we test out the 'bed linen' at MY place?'). the only problem i have with socializing is that i hate it when it all goes wrong. i have an avid fear of conversations becoming boring. this is especially so with old friends whom i know them inside out. i fear the boring. so much so that i will never ever been seen doing anything uninteresting. whenever i'm out, i'm always armed with my cigarettes, a paperback, my laptop and if i'm utterly bored, i'll even bring along a vibrating dildo.

point is, i realize that i can't spend too much time with people in general because i'm afraid of becoming stale material. i'm scared of having nothing interesting to say. in my books, either i have something witty, punny or interesting to say, or i don't say it at all. this is regardless of whether they are close friends or simply just acquaintances. which perhaps might explain why i eagerly celebrate the concept of the One Night Stand so much. there's a purpose in meeting for the two people who agree on the One Night Stand, it's mostly fuss-free and most importantly, with no strings attached (it's not called a Two Night Stand for a reason, no?). the person you're meeting prolly knows as much about you as you are familiar with your healthy gallbladder.

obviously, this fear of becoming a boring person has sorta tainted the way i handle things in life. i abstain from outings that have a chance of painting the town a monotone shade of grey. every single detail about me has something interesting about it. you can ask me about anything i'm wearing at a single point of time and i can tell you a long story about it. most importantly though and the most relevant point i want to make with regards to this blog post, is that i seldom am keen to go for long overseas trips with small groups of friends. mostly i dread the moments when all of us are spent and exhausted with nothing interesting to say other than mentioning random non sequitur in the middle of conversations. like i said, when i have nothing interesting to say, i just don't say it at all.

when i have nothing to say at all, i'm about as exciting as a library reading of the vibrating dildo that i carry in my bag all the time. of course, you do know that i'm joking about the dildo in my bag right? why put a dildo in your bag when you can put it up your.... well you get the point.

'Let's go to KL!' Kegal Laughs suggested one evening when we were transitioning from the afternoon shift to the night.

'Let's go have sex!' i replied sarcastically, half-immersed in cleaning up the mess that the afternoon staff have left around while pondering whether she was serious about Kuala Lumpur.

the idea of Kuala Lumpur had been thrown around amongst my colleagues for quite an extensive period of time. in fact, several months ago, Kegal Laughs had brought up the idea of a weekend clubbing holiday in KL, Malaysia. we swore to get wasted and hopefully, laid. of course, as with most random outings that you bring up at work, they get swept away faster than you can say 'housekeeping'. and thus, the nonchalant and equally sarcastic reply to Kegal Laugh's weekend getaway.

'*kegal laugh* No! I'm serious about it this time!' she tried again to arouse my interest. if i were a heterosexual male, then arouse my interest it did.

'Okay then, you give me the name of a hotel that you would like to stay, how long and when!'

true to her word, she got back to me with an answer within ten minutes. and thus, like the moment spermatozoa comes into contact with the egg, a foetus of a plan was conceived and put into action. and grow into a baby of a holiday it did. we found people who were willing to come along for this trip. Pangkeng, whom you guys have already been so fondly introduced to, you already know. he's coarse, he's vulgar, he's perverse and he's a real brute. but beneath that ugly exterior of his, he has a heart of gold. he's the only guy whom i know that would bring my patients to bathe in the assisted showers at 3am in the middle of the night.

Kegal Laughs, our resident nymphomaniac was of course also headed for this trip. she practices what she preaches whenever she giggles or chortles. we tried an exercise once to see whose mouth was bigger by stacked fingers (our own) into our mouths (our own). she managed four before gagging on saliva.

'And *kegal cough* kegal cough* that's what i like latinos! *kegal cough*' she exclaimed unabashedly.

the last person who agreed to go on this trip is someone that i have yet to officially introduce. she works with me on the permanent night shifts and is quite the object of Pangkeng's perverse affections. let's call her The Fiddy Cent Model. if you have watched 50 Cent MTVs such as 'Just a Li'll Bit' or 'Candy Shop', you'll realize that most of his MTV model are scantily clad in g-strings that provide as much coverage as a newspaper in a thunderstorm. the reason why i label her as that is solely because she has a posterior the size of.... ehrm... let's just say that you could write your thesis on it and still have enough space for referencing and appendix A & B. she's a meena with a pretty face and an even prettier *points finger*.

the common points amongst the four of us were that we drank, we smoked and we had the combined morals of a fake Coach bag. it was with this motley crew of people that i took the brave step into the social unknown by making this holiday trip with them. i sorta guessed that i would start keeping silent by the second day of the trip when i had nothing witty to say to them. i mena, i work with Pangkeng and the Fiddy Cent model on my permanent night shifts. so i've talked a lot with them during our smoke breaks and over supper in the ward. none the less, we made plans. actually, it's more like a singular plan.

the only thing we managed to agree on was that we wanted this trip to be cheap. and Kegal Laugh suggested the most convenient and affordable accommodation in the form of one Puduraya Hotel. situated directly above the Pudu Coach Station, it was the exact place where we would arrive and depart in KL. 'It's a three star hotel!' Kegal Laughs stated with much pride and gusto. this basically sent shudders down my spine and visuals of people waking up in a bathtub filled with ice. a note beside them would state 'Seek medical treatment immediately, we have just removed your kidneys! :)'

and thus we met at the train station leading to the buses that would take us straight into the heart of Malaysia itself. this was right after a night shift and all of us were looking forward to the five hour coach ride to KL. to avoid boring you with the details and summarize the travelling bits to KL, this is a picture of Kegal Laughs without the make-up and me who have just woken up when the coach stopped at one of the rest stations along the Malaysia highway. this marked the beginning of us smoking two pack of cigarettes within a day while in Malaysia.

but like i said, avoid the boring bits. we reached KL with all our limbs and luggages intact. the coach dropped us off at the road that led to the Pudu coach station. the afternoon sun beat down on us like bright Christmas lights and the traffic drifted past us at the speed the same Christmas lights would change their flashing patterns. we were constantly touted by men offering cab rides and coaches to various parts of KL and Malaysia. i was half expecting someone to sell me tupperware or sex. it wasn't when we reached the hotel that i should have known not to be surprised if someone did offer me a social escort for the evening.

opening the hotel room door, we found what resembled our local chain of love hotels named 'Hotel 81'. we had adjoining rooms that were connected by a short hallway that last no more than two foot steps. the beds looked decent but felt really scratchy when you laid on them. the bath tub where i might have my kidneys removed had yellowed stains in them. there was water dripping from the faucets. and the toilet had a lighting that was reminiscent of a B-grade horror movie.

yep, we ended up staying in a love hotel it seems. what confirmed my suspicions of the Puduraya hotel being a love hotel was a lift trip down the lobby after we had settled down. we entered the creaky life accompanied by one man and a woman. the man looking like your average Chinese Malaysian guy. plain and non-descriptive. the woman however, was dressed to the nines. she had bouncy shampoo commercial hair, thick make-up. her boobs were that type that said 'Helloooo! I'm Helga the milkmaid!' she carried an LV clutch in one hand and balanced a pair of Gucci sunglasses on that bouncy coif of hers. the give away that a 'business transaction' of sorts was done between the both of them was that they never said a single word while in the elevator. there was this awkward sexual silence in the lift as we contemplated about the man who paid for sexual services.

part of the itinerary of our trip was actually to get as smashed and as wasted as it was financially possible. need i remind you that we were on a shoestring budget. from talking to the cab drivers that we hired during the day, we discovered that the taxi fares at night can cost quite the nuclear bomb. so we decided to make do with drinks in the love hotel. in preparation for this, we bought ourselves hard liquor. a bottle of Absolut, a Bacardi and a Johnnie Walker Black Label. the girls bought mixers to accompany the drinks. Pangkeng who's a beer kinda guy, partook of the mixers as well. i like my drinks and things neat and untainted.

of course, alcohol does really bizarre things to people. for one, they lose their inhibitions and starting acting out. some get really horny (Pangkeng). some get crazy (The Fiddy Cent Model). some just keep quiet and deliver witty quotes at the most appropriate moments like Kegal Laughs and me. for some reason though, drunk people like to play games during drinks. one fine example since we didn't have any playing cards would be the classic Truth or Dare. Kegal Laughs and i agreed that we would rather take the dare than the truth as we both had a lot to hide. i, for one, have my sexual orientation to consider. Kegal Laughs i presume, had her alternate lifestyle to consider.

none the less, one of the dares that we attempted was the famous 'Kiss (insert person's name of the same gender) on the lips. the dare was that i had to kiss Pangkeng on the lips. if i did so, then Kegal Laughs and The Fiddy Cent Model would do the same as well. i mean, it was easy as lesbian porn for the two beautiful girls. Pangkeng who was ready for anything that was even remotely close to being sexual was all ready for it. gay little me still had my social inhibitions to consider. and to crown it off, i wasn't that drunk yet despite five glasses of Johnnie Walkers.

it's one thing to kiss a random stranger or a gay guy. but to kiss a good friend and colleague of yours is a totally different ball game. it would have been more palatable if Pangkeng was more pleasing to the eye. bless his soul and all, but it was while looking at Pangkeng's acne that i hesitated a little. the bulbous little things seemed to talk on a life of his own. Pangkeng was a tad irritated with my hesitation and tried pulling me forward with his brute-like arms. but gym-trained arms almost always trump brute arms. i pushed him back.

'If we're going to do this, we'll do it on my terms!' i warned him.

at the background, the girls were poised with their cameras and chanting 'Dare! Dare! Dare! Dare! Dare! Dare!' like a gaggle of pom-pom girls.

i swig one big gulp of Barcardi, took three puffs of a cigar that we had bought at one of the downtown stores and felt the immensive high that overcame me all of a sudden. of course, my alcholic-inspired mind interpreted it as a bunch of guts and courage. and thus i grabbed Pangkeng's shoulders, closed my eyes and took the plunge.

it was warm. and i didn't really enjoy it. a bit like kissing microwaved fish without the butter, spices and other flavouring ingredients. 'five seconds! five seconds!' the girls dared. and so it's official that i kissed Pangkeng on the lips for five seconds in the middle of KL. of course, the girls did the kiss on the lips for a full five seconds that verged on being French.

i fell asleep soon after. the good thing though is that we never mentioned the kiss again for the rest of the trip. and when we went back to work again, everything happened as if the kiss never happened.

i'm thinking that that's straight men for you.

nocturnal food

2008-04-26T11:25:00.001+08:00

Singapore is quite possibly the most boring place on Earth. it makes me wonder why tourists bother coming here in the first place. but hey, we're generating plenty of revenue and sex with foreign men, so i'll keep my mouth shut. or maybe open, in relation to the latter point. point is, our country has very little news that really makes or breaks the world. our geographical location makes us pretty well-protected against natural disasters of most sorts, so no New Orleans-like situations around here. our economy is pretty buoyant these days unlike the economic recession of 1997. our arts scene is possibly as controversial and inspirational as the 9 o'clock news. it's always the profitable and popular stuff like musicals, musicals and oh, did i mention musicals?

our crime rates are quite meh and humorous actually, sometimes even bordering on pure bastardry. murders normally involve rudimentary weapons best described as 'i reached for the first weapon i saw, which was a spatula' rather than drive-by shootings. our local thugs rob old people (there's the bastardry bit). local fights are mostly bar room brawls and street gang clashes, a lot of it revolving around a night out to the club and opening ten bottles of Chivas Regals at one go. Chivas seems to be the #1 choice of the street gangs that get into a lot of fights. indeed, this is the Chivas Life.

given the boring context here in Singapore, it's quite possible that our locals have therefore found an obsession to build up their lives with. food, to be precise. we have A LOT of food in Singapore. there are four primary races in Singapore to begin with (in no order of merit or preference for those racially-sensitive folks) - Malays, Indians, Chinese and the last very fondly labelled as 'Others'. given the Singaporean culture to profit on obsessions, there have been many methods that have helped build the culinary industry. we have reality programmes designed to spot the best of the best of specific foods. we have guidebooks collaborated that offer the top 10 of (insert random local cuisine). i even know of a specific couple in my church that keeps one of these guidebooks in their car (a Beemer). they make it a point to visit a food outlet mentioned in the guidebook and cross it out. when i last talked to them, they were already 75% through the very much dog-earred book that sat beside the equally dog-earred street directory.

none the less, it's with much thanks to the buoyant economy in the recent years that we've been seeing a lot of foreign fine dining popping up all over the place. French, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, Korean, Japanese, etc. you name the country, it's with a quick google that you can find it on our sunny shores. it's also with thanks to our Singaporean obsession with food and our knack for business, consumer versions of these fine dining places have been popping up for those who can't afford it and those who are ignorant of the sequence of culinary utensils on the dining table. we even have niche restaurants like Curry Udon places and Tapas bars. and yet, people are still complaining about the lack of proper food in this good country. a comment moan i often here from friends and colleagues goes something like 'But there's nothing here to eat!!' behind them would be an entire row of food court outlets offering local delights and western meals.

like i always tell people, 'Food is a blessing. Variety is therefore, Godsent and perhaps prudent Economics.' i know it doesn't make much sense. but then again, neither does the fact that we are whining about the lack of food in a country that has an abundance of it.

working in a Singaporean hospital, you'll begin to realize that this abundance of food is not an applied reality. my colleagues are constantly whining about this lack of food in the hospital during the night shifts. well, the only source that's open at night unfortunately is the convenience store. true, it's air-conditioned and it offered hot foods and drinks. but you know what convenient stores are like., always stocking what's mainly convenient for THEMSELVES. it's the usual spiel of chocolate bars, potato chips, fruit juices, biscuits, instant noodles and factory foods. cheap, empty calories. whenever i head down to the convenience store, i end up buying the Kellogg's funpaks and a tetrapacket of milk. simply because there's variety in them. it's this lack of variety that we're complaining about, not the quality of food actually.

this is why we're supremely grateful for the fact that food delivery services are in existence in Singapore. and please don't mistake it for those that you see on American drama serials where the lead says 'What're we having for dinner tonight?' and the supporting character takes out a Chinese menu and replies 'Let's order Wong's! I'm craving for dumplings!' no, the reality is far from your average American drama series.

our typical drama scenes during our night shifts go something like that:

Me: What're we eating tonight eh?
Pangkeng: Anything lor
Me: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?
Another colleague: Anything lor
Me: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?
Another colleague: Anything lor
Me: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?
Another colleague: Anything lor
Me: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?
Another colleague: Anything lor
Me: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?
Another colleague: Anything lor

i could go on, but you get the drift. it's because of this indecisiveness within my bunch of colleagues, that the onus of deciding on what to eat at night boils down to me and my cravings. unfortunately, the food delivery variety in Singapore is rather limited. despite having worked for six months on permanent night shifts, i have only managed to discover three places that make deliveries - McDonald's, an Indian-Muslim restaurant named Spize (i have a lot of Muslim colleagues), and a ching-chong Chinese restaurant just across the road from the hospital. no pizza deliveries as our local pizza parlours only deliver till 11pm. by the time we settle down from passing the nursing reports and clearing up the mess that the previous shift has left behind, it's already 11.30pm. i could order earlier, but once again that indecisiveness simply just prolongs the whole process of ordering.

not making things any easier is that my ward has this under-running policy that if you're ordering food for the night, it's courtesy that you have to ask the rest of your colleagues in the department. all would be fine if any of my other colleagues bothered to take up the initiative of ordering food. but initiative just like food delivery at night, is very much lacking in my ward. therefore, i have become the only unofficial person who orders at night. and believe you me, taking orders is not an easy process. it's an extremely time-consuming process that involves plenty of persuasion, money and walking around. in fact, i've managed to come up with a systematic approach to ordering food. it comes in five steps actually whereby i take on five different roles at each point in the various steps.

Step 1: The Propagandist
this usually occurs at 10.30pm when everyone is busy but i'm hungry. i decide on what i want to eat and start calling up the various sections of the ward to inform them that i'm ordering. i could walk down the ward corridor, but walking two hundred metres is not fun. walking back two hundred metres from the end of the ward corridor back to my section is even more 'not fun'. what is the most 'not fun' bit is having to entertain certain colleagues who will break into their usual spiel about the lack of variety. 'What? Spize again! Very boring!' having to maintain apt PR with the other colleagues, i refrain from reaching for the nearest item that can cause bodily harm.

Step 2: The Advisor
the ward routine is that we're usually busy between 10:30 to 11:00pm. therefore it's by 11:00pm that i start taking orders from people. this is the tedious bit where i have no choice but to do the two hundred metre routine of walking and socializing with the colleagues. it'd have been all fine and dandy if the colleagues could make up their minds on what they want to eat based on the delivery menus. but they can even decide when i pose them the question of 'What're we eating tonight eh?' so i don't expect much out of them really. thus to help make up their minds i probe them for their cravings. Chicken or beef? Rice or noodles? Cheap or expensive? Any drinks? Condiments? Upsize? Would you like to change your drink to something else? it's costs another fifty cents if you upsize! Why don't you order so that we can hit the quota for the delivery service's reduced delivery charge? i normally complete this part of the process at 11:30pm when everyone else has completed their work and i haven't even touched a single bit of it. and does anyone help me to complete mine? other than Pangkeng, NO. ungrateful wretches.

Step 3: The Orderer
this is when i make the phone call to the restaurant in question. i read out my orders. they read back my orders. i can't really fathom why they would read back my orders other than to clarify that i've ordered one big mac meal upsized, one double cheeseburger a la carte, one McSpicy meal upsized, two Chicken foldovers, two happy meals both with fries and nuggets and the toys for girls, two McFlurrys, and the drinks will be three cokes, one sprite, two iced milos, one iced latte, one coffee and one more large coke a la carte, and chilli sauce and curry sauce and barbeque sauce and a lot of mayonnaise. do i sound like i can remember all my orders in some random sequence? 'It's easy what!' the guy who takes my orders over the phone would be thinking while staring at his computer screen with the orders in possibly Arial font.

Step 4: The Debt Collector
this is the part that i hate the most. because most people are simply not initiated to pay up. it's a bit like being a politician, having to tease and prod the most out of the colleagues for the delivery charge. on good days, people actually pass me the money automatically. on even better days, they tell me to keep the change. on really screwed up days, nobody pays up and i am forty-dollars poorer. not that i'm a stingy sort of fellow, but this has happened at least six or seven times out of the thirty times i've ordered takeaways. i truly deserve a tip. falling short of hanging a severed horse head at each of the ward's section, i can only ask nicely for payment. oh my god, it's already 11:30pm. and i haven't started on a single bit of work yet!

Step 5: The Distributor
sometimes when i can't be bothered with collecting money yet, i'll just wait for the delivery guy to arrive with the food before i start collecting back cash. i'll have to separate the various orders into bags for the various sections of my department. if the delivery guy had quite the bumpy ride, i would have to wipe up the sauce. i have to ensure that they have straws. they have condiments and et cetera. and thus begins the two hundred metre walk down the corridor with food once again and back. i would have been ravenous by then and possibly poorer by a few dollars due to those colleagues who conveniently forget to pay.

it's usually by 1:00am that i'm able to settle down and have my food. by then, i would have been irritable and in dire need of nutrition. so the next time someone offers to take orders for food, do tip them. do something nice for them. give them a hug. give them a word of grateful thanks. because lurking beneath that cheerful exterior, there's someone waiting to reach out for the nearest object of bodily harm.

and it might not be a spatula.

straight dreams

2008-04-19T09:12:00.006+08:00

it's raining heavily. and not just any rain. it's the type that has monotone clouds, monotone lightning, monotone rain drops. if sound could be described as monotone as well, then it would be apt for the thunder. there's a faint smell of freshly-cut grass mixed in with the rain. and true enough, when the scene pans downwards, we see the horizon defining the sky and an endless field of green grass.

in the distance, we see two people. presumably lovers, presumably star-crossed. like a hundred-metre dash, they run fast. like a war film trailer about lover separated by politics, they run with no regrets. like two magnets separated by a science teacher teaching a class about north and south poles, they dash to each other like it was a scientific law that designated they do so.

the two lovers clash in a hug. they don't kiss. they don't make love on the field. they don't do anything else other than wrap each other in an embrace that possibly explains the context of the entire situation.

two people. a man and a woman. he closes his eyes and cradles her. she is crying tears of reunion. the tears have a special glint though. possibly because they've been diluted with the monotone rain droplets, spelling out a short-lived reunion. she has the face of an angel no less, despite the fact that she's crying.

the hug lasts for no more than a minute. two cars arrive.

and that's when the dream ends.

for most gay people, i'm sure that there's some point in their lives that they've asked themselves THE question. it's a question that maybe spells out self-doubt. maybe guilt. or regret. or whatever negative connotations that come about when i reveal the question in the next few sentences. well i'm not sure whether it's most gay people or it's just me. but it's only recently that i've begun to question myself. 'Could i turn straight again and live with it?' can i revert back to the lifestyle that i left behind oh-so-many years ago? can i drop an ideal that i built my life from, right here, right now, and not look back? can i go back to sex with the supposedly designated gender that society says i ought to be having with? could i possibly get married with a woman and settle down? can i actually deal with having children? when i ponder over such thoughts, the only question that i can truly answer is the one about children. and you know how i feel about children, preferring most of them to be under the care of a Miss Havisham sort of character.

it's definitely a daunting question, even for the most mature gay person. we've spent so many years working hard to get to the point where we are today. we built our lives around values that contravene most of the world's norms. and i can assure you that in the midst of meeting many gay people, most homosexuals have forgotten to add a few accommodating straight people in their list of friends. so you see, it's not like a change of underwear for a gay person to just turn the tables on the sexuality. or to put it in a crude metaphoric 'hur hur hur' sense, it's a bit like wearing a really kinky piece of women's undergarment. you have to take a while to figure out to put which limb into which hole of the undergarment in question.

it is with recent concern though that i've been pondering this question of turning back to the path of the straight and narrow. of course, these thoughts don't just pop by one fine day and rear their ugly head. it's perhaps destiny and fate and the circumstances that they've thrown in that give situations their context. in my case, it's mainly feelings and dreams. well, not dreams of death and dying like i mentioned before in my previous posts. i used to dream a lot about dying, with my playing the role as the person who dies. not a very fun thing to do when you experience the various methods of death with the feelings of pain that my mind conjures up when i'm sleeping. the good thing is that these days, i'm don't dream so much about death anymore. it's as if my mind has decided to move on from horror movies and psycho thrillers and perhaps start watching something else more substantial.

substantial in this case refers to the stuff that you often find in your local film festival. the type that has twenty second shots of water dripping, twenty seconds of silence and another twenty seconds of an upclose shot of a vagina. all for no apparent reason other than to dare the boundaries of film mores and perhaps artistic license. well okay, my dream are not that incomprehensible, but it does give me that feeling when i wake up after my post-night shift afternoon sleeps. the electric fan would be blowing in a corner of the room, the brother would be in another watching streaming movies and downloading porn at the same time, the window reveals grey clouds of impending rain, and i would be up in bed, hearing the sounds of the afternoon heartland soundtrack

i wake up from one indie film, only to be in an indie film of mine.

have i told you about my preceptee before? well, she has the face of an angel to begin with. she's as lanky as a supermodel. she wears braces. she has a great-fashion sense. she's porcelain white. her sinus gets aggravated when she's stressed. she's always giving gentle slap on the shoulders whenever i tell her something bad about a patient. and i like it when girls do that. she's the embodiment of innocence, so much so that you feel like you just want to protect her from the evils of this world. and believe me, i've protected her a lot. i've seen her cry before when an unreasonable renal patient went cranky and start blowing his top over small idiotic matters.

admittedly, i couldn't help but have feelings of attachment for her the first time i saw her. and this is primarily quite weird given that i'm gay in the first place. but you've got to admit once again, that some girls just have the effect on men. i may be gay, but i'm still a guy and men know how to appreciate beauty when they see some. it was with this thought that i realized that in an alternative reality, she would be my kind of girl. of course, in that alternate reality, she wouldn't be married. yeah, she's 19 this year and married to a policeman. i'm attending her wedding dinner in the later half of this year.

so it was with some fright that i woke up to that dream where i hugged her in the rain. she was crying. quite badly. and with that secret sense of longing. of course, this is just mainly what my mind conjures up. i'm sure she's deeply in love with her husband and not feeling this way. but i've always believed in the reality of an alternate universe and another time. somewhere else, we must be related in some sense. either as lovers or something along those lines. however, what matters most is that i'm in this reality and i know that i'm steadfastly gay.

like true colleagues, i told Pangkeng about my dream over a cigarette break. he was smoking a Marlboro light while i on my Consulates.

'i dream about the rest of our colleagues all the time what!' he replied after i told him about my dream. obviously, i omitted the fact that i was gay and that it was a very weird dream for me.

'what do you dream about when you dream of colleagues?' i asked.

he took a long drag of his lights before replying nonchalantly, 'mainly sex lor.'

and to think i'm already making a big deal out of a dream of hugging a married colleague in the rain.

how i ended up buying expensive underwear in Thailand

2008-04-11T11:59:00.000+08:00

money is indeed, a really sensitive topic within gay relationships. for the typical straight couple, tradition, norms and a superego have perhaps more or less defined that the guy should mostly pay for dinner, movie tickets, coffee and the hotel room. if the girl is prudent and really nice, she'll even bring along condoms, lube and her best friend (insert random heterosexual chortle here: hur hur hur!!). for the two men in a homosexual relationship though, financial matters are more of a grey and rainbow-coloured area. after all, tradition, culture and superegos are not exactly familiar with gay society and its social mechanics. should it be defined by age as in 'i'm older so i'll be picking up the tab'? should it take into consideration professions (doctors and janitors in a relationship)? or even better, sexual position preference (top picks up the tab because he's more manly)! which is why i believe that to avoid all the money-related conflicts ('i paid for all your stupid sparkling water during your fine dining meals, you bitch!'), it's perhaps better if gay people just go dutch on most things.

in my short few years of being gay so far, i have seen my fair share of couples breaking up over money matters. a typical example would be a couple having joint accounts and one partner in the relationship being a spendthrift, fancying indulgence and constant extravagance. it's a problem that isn't prejudiced with age though. even young couples that earn barely enough to club on the weekends are plagued by it. you know how relationships are - expensive and as stable as a chemical reaction. and you thought that the young couldn't possibly break up over financial matters.

of course, for all the breakfast-coloured sunshine and silver linings in this world, i have also known of really giving and generous couples who make sure that money doesn't become an issue in any conflicts that may arise in the course of love. i know i sound like a marriage counsellor here, but openness is one factor that really helps. other options involve going steady with a simple man or pre-nups. but speaking from a more practical perspective, avoiding extravagance and the impracticalities of life is seriously the most useful solution. for some reason or other, the average gay person simply loves extravagance and the empowerment of luxuries. is it a by-product of the Dorothy Dollar? or just simply the media and its constant barrage of the ideal gay man in a pair Gucci slippers and designer threads? and since we're on the topic of Gucci slippers, i'm actually dying to see the day when someone slips and fall while wearing a pair (this deserves another straight man chortle: hur hur hur!).

i once saw a young gay chap of about twenty. to put it simply and without prejudice, he's the skinny and effeminate friend that you prolly know of or have one of. i like them because they are generally hilarious and vivacious people with plenty of attitude. this guy in question though, was decked from head to toe in black and brands. huge logo-ed ones, to be precise. he was what one could call as your definitive fashionista. from the top, there was a black Lacoste polo tee covering his skinny frame. a pair of black Abercrombie jeans hugged what was left of his anorexic butt. he carried a black Louis Vuitton carrier that prolly weighed more than him. what seemed like an original pair of Gucci slippers (i couldn't jolly well reach down and feel for the fabric can i?) announced his entrance with a really noisy 'piak-piak' sound. the crowning glory was a pair of Gucci sunglasses that screamed 'I am Nicole Richie, here me roar' (meow!). admittedly, i have nothing against style and luxury. in fact, i shouldn't have a say in style as i can't tell the difference between a birkin and a bag. the only issue that i have here is that i find it rather sad to see someone covering himself and what's left of his dignity in branded and logo-ed goods. everything on him has a logo the size of Zimbabwe. from the trade mark LV motif, to the gold-embossed Gucci frames.

and oh, did i mention that i happened to see this guy in the blue-collared worker's main mode of public transportation - the train.
yes, class meets crass.

i've never been one to spend tonnes of money on the various impracticalities of life. not that i'm a prudent person when it comes to all things financial. after all, i am the guy who signed up for insurance with a three hundred dollar per month premium. not forgetting another three hundred for the household expenses and another two-fifty for my education. none the less, i know i'm treading on really sensitive ground here given that 'impracticalities' is a rather loosely-defined term. i need my cigarettes just as the same way you might need to get your daily dose of a protein shake (which i used to, but now don't). point is, i know what i ought and ought not to be spending on. take for example, i would jolly well love to stride into the nearest Lacoste boutique and say something chi chi like 'Can i have ten of this in ten different colours?' but obviously i don't because not only do i have to put my ass on the street market for ten month after the whole Lacoste hoo-hah, but also it's just purely impractical. and silly. and foolish. and retarded. but 'nuff said.

this trip to Thailand (yes, it's another Thailand post, sorry to bore you guys to death with my Sawadee stories) has really been one revolving a lot around money. to begin with, i have already burned a hole in my pockets just to get there and get bored to death with the family. i found the perfect solution for this though. whenever the parents went shopping, i quickly went my separate way and found myself a nice coffee join to start reading, smoking and people-watching. the brother of course, had no choice but to tag along with the parents because my mother believes that he will get kidnapped by tuk tuk drivers or Southern infidels. plus he didn't have a lot of money to begin with. i contributed a hundred bucks to the brother's expenditure in Thailand. and a few one cent coins just in case he needed the loo (you have to pay for entrance into the toilets in Mah Boon Krong).

everyone of course bought plenty of things. everyone that is, except the father whom i can't recall bought much. prolly still saving for that HDTV that he so wants. i went on a book-spending spree, buying more than ten novels to keep me pre-occupied in Thailand and public transport in Singapore for at least two months. i bought cheap tees, pants, shorts and stocked up on a barrage of cheap beauty products. i even had money left to buy souvenirs for colleagues. i actually went there with a list of things i had in mind to buy. so i was pretty much left with an excessive amount of money which i spent on really impractical things like Wireless Fidelity in the hotel room. in case you didn't know, Wireless Fidelity is more commonly known as WIFI, not to be mistaken for something along the lines of fidelity and promiscuity which in this case might be a male masseur in my hotel room. but as i said, WIFI in the hotel room is silly. and foolish. and retarded. and impractical given that i'm in Thailand, the land of a thousand smiles and many more internet cafes. but i don't do silly things without a reason.

the brother, being a young teenager and a real narcissist bought several cheap tees, a pair of sunglasses and one item of much decadence. the item in question here, being an Adidas sweater. it was white and had stitched-on red stripes at the side in the trademark triple stripes of Adidas. i would have been fine if it had been a simple Adidas jacket. but no, on the back of the jacket was the huge word 'JAPAN'. and thus, i spent a half of the trip in Bangkok watching the Chinese brother wandering around in Bangkok with the ching-chong face made up of won-tons and Chinese takeaways. i couldn't help but laugh internally when i see authentic Japanese tourists in their street-styled clothes walking past him. unsurprisingly, none of them wore apparel which stated their nationality. this also prolly explains why my mom is paranoid about the tuk tuk drivers and Southern Infidels kidnapping the brother.

my mother was more prudent with her purchases though. she bought accessories. she bought clothes. she even bought a Thai silk nightie that looks really nice. alas, she bought a fake Longchamp bag as well. being no style guru, i can't tell you the exact name of the bag in question. but it's the trademark one that comes in a variety of colours and the brown flap over the top. there's a logo emblazoned into the brown flap which my mind captures as 'the guy on th ehorse in mid-jump'. i was in the hotel room when my mother returned from shopping with the proud tote in hand. but the moment i got to touch the leather flap, i had problems convincing myself that it was a genuine item. plus, 'the guy on the horse in mid-jump' was slightly faded when i recalled seeing the original product. in fact, the guy looked better if he were on something more ancient like a tapestry or a brochure for medieval holidays in Europe.

but enough with what my family are buying in Thailand. the norm of the our short holidays in Thailand would go something like that: the first half of the day would be spent out on the streets of Thailand's coffee joins and shopping centres. the other half though, would be mainly in the hotel rooms. you see, just when i thought i had the legendary 'iron stomach' that could ingest and digest any food from all over the world, i developed a bout of indigestion on the second day of the trip. i didn't seek any medical attention as there are three nurses in my family, me included. the culprit here i suspect, would be the Chang Mai rice that i consumed in the latter-mentioned country.

now, Chang Mai rice is different from your typical Thai rice that we Singaporeans mainly consume. it actually comes in clumps (which sounds rather lewd - 'I come in clumps!'), it's sticky and it's hard (which sounds equally lewd). not to be mistaken for glutinous rice, Chang Mai rice is the type that suitable for extended storage due to its lack of moisture and 'clumpiness'. in fact, it's perfect for food fights over the dinner table. if you run out of Chang beer bottles to throw in Chang Mai, grab some local rice and hurl it over to the nearest drunken tourist for a grievous injury to the eye.

out of the seven days on the trip, six of them were tainted with fevers and the constant purging of solely liquid. everything else was just clumping along in my stomach and intestines and remaining undigested. use your imagination when i say that 'whatever went in, came out looking like it never went in'. i permanently felt like puking half the time. all i could do when i watched my parents and the brother pigging out on steamboat and pizzas was exude a greenish tinge on my face. it was with this that i decided to spend the second half of most of the days in Thailand under the cosy comforters in my hotel room. i watched plenty of Nat Geo, Discovery Channel and MTV, suffice to say. i learned a lot about Global Warming. i was humoured by Mythbusters. and i saw how Janet Jackson danced with four (or was it five?) glowing balls in 'Feedback'. by the fifth day however, i was bored stiff. mainly because cable TV is all about reruns. plus i had already completed three of the books i purchased in Thailand.

the cool part though was that i brought along my Fujitsu laptop with me to Thailand. the not-so-cool bit was that i had no internet connection. i had porn on my laptop though. and as many guys would attest too, porn is only fun till the point you come. you can have 9 hours worth of porn in your storage space, but if you come within 9 minutes, it's pretty much is useless, isn't it? not that i come in 9 minutes, mind you. or in clumps for that matter. it was with this ultimate boredom that i decided to purchase WIFI in my hotel room, a three day pass to the world wide web. i spent the last two days in my hotel room mainly playing World of Warcraft from the afternoon till the night. this is what i mean by 'impracticalities'.

despite spending on exorbitant internet access, i still had quite a large amount of money to contend with. close to three thousand baht, if i recall. falling short of a massage, i couldn't really think of anything else i wanted to spend on. besides, if anyone were to massage me at that point of indigestion, i would most definitely have hurled. and vomit-stained towels are really not that widely accepted at most massage parlours in this world. even the shady ones that offer extra 'services'. so the idea of something that i could spend on came to me at what i defined as 'The Gayest Moment' of this family-oriented trip to Thailand. as i might have already declared proudly, i didn't have any sex in Thailand.

what transpired was a random trip with the family to the huge shopping complex formerly known as the World Trade Centre in Bangkok. it was one of those places that were more attunede to the foreigners that go there for holidays. there were plenty of boutiques and various other chi chi places selling luxury goods. one of these upmarket places was of course, the Zen Department stall. 'The Gayest Moment' of course happened when i passed by the men's underwear section, no less. like your typical men's underwear section, there were really artistic mannequins of Herculean torsos clad in underwear. and you know what they say about art imitating/irritating life. as if one cue, there were several equally Herculean men wandering around the rows and rows of undergarments. some were obviously gay. some were obviously couples. for some curious reason, all of them were Asian. all of them were staring at the new-comer with that gay stare, as if daring me to purchase some expensive underwear.

from a gay person's point of view, it was one of the most fascinating underwear departments i've actually seen in my entire life. not like the typical ones in Singapore that stock funny-looking under that require instruction sheets and some creative thinking in order to put it on. not like the average ones in Singapore that have plenty of grey, whites and blacks. not like the horrid ones in Singapore that have really gaudy designs of yachts and stars (i'm not joking about this). i dunno what made me decided to purchase expensive underwear in the end actually. maybe it was the fact that there was a sale going on. maybe it was the pressurizing atmosphere of Herculean testosterone and pheromones wafting about. or maybe it was that i had money to clear before my departure from Thailand.

it was with some decision however, that i decided on two pairs of Aussiebums. i couldn't help but think about what the sales assistants were thinking when i made my purchase. prolly something along the lines of 'i could purchase more than fifty meals in Thailand with that amount he spends covering his manhood'. there was even a VAT refund for the underwear i bought. but that was too much hassle. i couldn't help but feel guilty over my purchase. a sort of guilty pleasure though. somehow or other, i always imagine most expensive items looking like money. like take for example, a birkin bag would prolly look like many stacks of hundred dollar notes shaped like a birkin bag. in the same line of thought, my Aussiebum covering my genitals would be nothing more than a few wads of cash sewn together to provide coverage.

it's not a pleasant sight, i must say. well at least not something that anyone could come in clumps to.

elephants, oxes, culture and all that shit

2008-03-31T09:26:00.007+08:00

i like to people-watch. this is of course, not to be confused with the primary gay past time of cruising for sex. to me, people-watching is one of those activities that you can learn a lot from. it also helps that i have this uncanny ability to notice bizarre little details about people. it could be one's manner of walking, one's manner of speech, the accents, a scar, line of vision, choice of apparel, et cetera. from these details, my mind processes it with cultural facts and information gleaned from life. it mixes it around and comes up with a conclusion as to why that particular detail exists of this person.

i know this makes me sound really intellectual and all, but i assure you that i'm not that clever. and anways, most of the conclusions that i come up with are along the redundant lines of 'He's wearing a white shirt because he's a waiter' or 'Prolly because he likes to wear white'. poin tis, people watching accompanied with the ability to notice bizarre details on people is prolly the main reason why i love visiting foreign countries so much. plus the fact that you can seal real hot men in the flesh.

beats having to download porn just to see a Caucasian.

if there's one thing i've noticed on this trip to Thailand, it's that people go to the Land of a Thousand Smiles for various different reasons. in fact, you could divide up those reasons into two simple ones. for the typical Asian tourist, it's the cheap bargains, cheap food, cheap produce. not forgetting the really (cheap) fact that you can be an average middle class worker in your home country, but thanks to the currency rate and way of living in Thailand, one can really live like a king of sorts. the inexpensive airline tickets are another big lure as well. i can't help but think that perhaps this is why every other gay person in Singapore thinks of Bangkok as the perfect weekend destination to buy cheap goods and hook up with other hot Caucasians or Negroids. pricing, simply put, dominates the mind of the typical Asian tourist.

for the average Caucasian tourist though, it's a totally different matter. in the eyes of the Asian tourist, the average Caucasian is prolly insane. it could be an American tourist taking pictures of the Bangkok rush hour, in the middle of the road. or the purchase of a Jade Elephant statuette or an ornamental vase. i daresay it's that immaterial substance that permeates every corner of Thailand. the typical Caucasian tourist asks questions. why the curves on the roof of a Buddhist temple are done that way. why are the temple domes are covered in gold leaves. why there are over a thousand step on the only entrance to the Buddhist temple in question. it's this all-encompassing thing called Culture.

it's perhaps this stark reason of a lack of culture in our family holidays, that my parents decided on Bangkok with a detour to Chang Mai for this trip. after all, we've done Bangkok so many times that we're prolly bored stiff. the normal routine whenever i go to Bangkok with the family would be to get what i want from the various department stores and then head to the nearest coffee joint for a cuppa, some reading and people-watching. my father will accompany mother on her shopping trips like the perfect husband. my brother will simply follow along because he doesn't have any money of his own to spend.

Chang Mai is quite the desolate place. not as crowded as Bangkok and the traffic is actually way better. and there are 'American' pubs everywhere on the main tourist districts offering ribs and steaks and Chang beer. which explains why the night market rates are prolly jacked up way higher than the Bangkok prices. it's a great place to relax and chill none the less, which was what i did most of the time when the parents weren't in my hair to bug me.

our time in Chang Mai was spent doing cultural things. things like visiting the various handicraft and produce factories with our tour guide, Noi. Noi was really informative and knowledgeable about Chang Mai itself. after all, you wouldn't expect any less from a person armed with a Masters in Political Science from the University of Siam. previously in the import/export trade, he became a tour guide after 9/11 when his businesses folded one after another. and thus, he told us the history of Chang Mai, the various kings, the princesses, the ones who brought back the silk trade, et cetera. i had a better understanding of why the Thais are the kind and hospitable people that they are after listening to his stories.

the second day of Chang Mai was rather exciting to say the least. we went all wildlife and nature and took an elephant ride. Noi drove us all the way to an outpost in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. there was a big sign that announced something in Thai and broken English. you could basically understand two things from the sign:

1) there were elephants in that outpost
2) this was an outpost of some sort

Caucasian tourists were everywhere. most were plus-sized, in their 50s and had really bad peeling tans. the screech of cicadas pierced what would otherwise have been a nice quiet forest of sorts. if you listened closely, you could pick up strains of French, Russian and German words occasionally punctuating the air. Noi who wasn't one to waste time due to our tight schedule of visiting many other cultural-inclined places quickly ushered us onto two elephants, the parents on one and my brother and me on another. i have to admit that the only elephants i've seen are on Discovery Channel, Nat Geo and the Singapore Zoological Gardens. and these are all encounters behind a television screen or at least some fencing. therefore, to see one upclose and feel the skin and all of an elephant is really quite an experience.

riding an elephant is not like riding a horse or a 100% speed mount (to put it in World of Warcraft terms) where you hop on and get to the business district within five minutes. there's a big hand-made seat with leather cushions for two tied on top of the elephant. an elephant trainer sits in front of you armed with a stick and a mobile phone, presumably to send text messages when he's bored ('I'll c u @ outpost 4 lunch in 1 hr, am ridin now'). it's a slow process that only tourists with all the time in the world to spare can afford to do. for this elephant ride, our destination was to the village of what i think was the Lisu tribe in Chang Mai. i felt like a joystick, suffice to say. we constantly swung to the left, to the right and then one sweeping round. this constant pattern of swing left and right and one round was really making me feel queasy. what wasn't helping was that at that point of time, i was going through a bout of indigestion, having consumed a large amount of Chang Mai sticky rice the previous day. i thought of lighting up a cigarette. but i also thought of smoke-aggravated charging War Elephants in a computer-based strategy game (Age of Empires) i once played. i decided to live with the nausea and a handy stash of Maxalon pills that my mother brought along.

we spent close to an hour on the elephants, riding from the outpost all the way to the Lisu village. it's really like National Geographic, crossing rivers, seeing kids play in them, forests and plenty of flies and mosquitoes. my father and i were pretty nonchalant about all things buzzing, having survived the army and all that survival training stuff. my brother and mother though, were constantly slapping them and losing their karma points. our missing luggage hadn't arrived at that point of time and therefore there wasn't any repellent to go around. there was plenty else to see otherwise. the villagers dotting the surroundings. i couldn't help noticing that anatomy of elephant as well.

as you know elephants are BIG creatures. and BIG creatures translate into BIG anatomy. there was another elephant in front of ours. and it had an anus the size of well.... i can't find anything to describe it. but to put it metaphorically and humorously, if you wondered why the Vitruvian Man has his arms stretched out... well it has something to do with the length and width of the elephant's anus. amidst all that gray skin, there was a rude pinkish hole that constantly dripped some really viscous fluid of sorts. one would automatically assume that's the anus of course without expecting anything else other than faecal matter to pop out of it.

but Mother Nature sent her act of confirmation with a really loud plop of sorts. it was that kind of plop that sounded like a human dropping from a building, thanks to CSI. lo and behold, the elephant started shitting mid-trip to the Lisu village. the rude, angry-looking anus in front of us started evacuating huge chunks of big green balls of shit. they looked equally angry too. i'm not sure about elephant social mechanics, but this shitting seemed to be a sign for all the other elephants trekking through the forests to start defecating as well. whilst riding on top of the elephant, one could feel a sort of strain going through mammal itself, before you heard a loud plop behind you.

i'm fine with mammals shitting actually. but i'm not fine when the shit that comes out of the elephant is accompanied with green fluid. and you could be in another country far away from home, but the laws of physics still apply. in this case, wet and hard lumps of shit hitting the floor will cause the wet bits to fly all over the place. 'all over the place' included several spots near my sneakers when our elephant was trying to overtake the elephant in front of ours. who was shitting, no less.

i was therefore really relieved when the elephant arrived at the Lisu village. there were no tribal dances and people crafting wooden inanimate objects as the average Caucasian tourist would expect. my parents though, being the Asian tourists, predicted another tourist trap selling handicrafts. and true enough, there was a whole row of stalls selling local products, mainly along the lines of bags and trinkets. business was bad. not because there were few people visiting the village solely to pee in the toilets and get a few drinks. but prolly due to the fact that there were about fifteen over shops all selling THE SAME trinkets in THE SAME colours and THE SAME designs. and every shop owner was a Lisu girl dressed in THE SAME tribal costume saying THE SAME welcoming greeting of 'You want come see!' in THE SAME accent and THE SAME tone of voice. i'm not trying to be degretory here or anything like that, but some business smarts would be really welcome here. obviously, the whole batch of tourists around us never bought anything.

you must be wondering then, how on Earth did we get back to the elephant outpost? thank goodness it wasn't by elephant this time, but rather ox-cart. two oxes, a wooden cart and a ox rider armed with an even bigger stick of sorts prolly to tame the critters. he had a mobile phone as well, of course. it was a really rocky ride. and from the experiences, i couldn't help but conclude that our oxes seemed really unintelligent or have problems with psychomotor-coordination. the right ox kept veering towards the right of the designated dirt path. and to the right of the dirt path is a bunch of trees. hoorah.

the ox rider of course, had to do something. and he had two things i hand, the taming stick and the mobile phone. i was hoping he would use the mobile phone actually and call some friends for a replacement cart or whack the ox or something. simply because the taming stick was really thick and had a huge wooden ball at the end of it. getting bashed with it would result in internal haemorrhage or some random forensics detail. 'WHOCK! WHOCK' two hard beatings on the ox's back were given. being people of urban living, we as a family were of course shocked. my dad gave the ox rider a nice tip of two hundred baht after the whole ride which lasted a good half hour.

we asked Noi later on as to why the ox rider gave the poor critter such a harsh chastising. he told us simply that oxes in the Thai culture are considered to be one of the less intelligent creatures when compared to others such as monkeys and elephants. there was no other way to teach it properly other than 'negative reinforcement' (in his own words). SPCA would come beating at the Lisu village's door step.

but then, that's culture for you.

why my mother can't survive a holiday disaster

2008-03-29T10:43:00.000+08:00

for the uninformed (as in you didn't get the information, not as in you have a uniform fetish of sorts), i'm just returned from a short hiatus in Thailand. Chang Mai, to be precise. remember that Tokyo trip for two that my mom won first price for in her organization's annual dinner and dance? it was apparently a five days four nights thing for two to the land of the rising sun, costing somewhere between three to four thousand dollars. i would have bore no grudges or feelings of jealousy if the two parents of mine decided to be selfish (for once) and claim the trip for themselves. in fact, i can already see them soaking up the heat in the hot springs and eating sushi while making loud exclamatory noises ALA Japan Hour. back in Singapore, i would have practically the whole house to myself with no one to constantly bugger me about my smoking habits while i play World of Warcraft.

but obviously, something like that would be rather hard-pressed to happen. mainly because my father is a family man. the duty-bound, 'my children's expenses before my HD TV', responsible person that one would rarely find in these days of materialistic wealth. the father would not have it any other way than a family trip, the main reasons being that:

1) we as a family, have not been on a holiday in a very long time (the last time we went on one was to Vancouver in 2005)

2) the brother is entering the army for his National Service soon - it's difficult to plan a trip when one of your relatives is in the military (or any other governmental organization for that matter)

3) it is after all, paid by my mother's organization.

and thus, plans were made and think tanks in the entire family's heads were activated to brainstorm for holiday destinations we could actually go. we actually did set out sights on several places initially. Japan, for the culture and the food. Perth, for the farmland animals, koalas, kangaroos and perhaps the food as well. UK for the art, gardens, palaces and tea, presumably. Korea, for i dunno.... Bae Yong-joon and kim chi? so many holiday ideas, mainly about food, but here's the catch: hey! reality check people! we don't have enough money!!

and thus like scorned upper middle class people having to make do with second best, we decided on Thailand. and do note, this is after i contributed at least a thousand dollars for airfare (mine), another two hundred for food and on the mother's behest, a final hundred dollars for the brother's expenses (who couldn't be bothered to take up a part-time job despite having been lazing around for two months coming while waiting to enlist in the army). that's practically three quarters of my month salary. whatever happened to responsibility and duty-bound and 'my children's expenses before my HD TV'?

and thus, with our luggages in tow, we found ourselves at Changi International Airport on a friday. despite the time being no more than six o'clock in the wee hours of the morning, the father seemed rather perky. so did the mother. and of course, the brother. i was still recovering from the night shift blues, having completed another set of nights from monday to thursday. it was all pretty much a blur to me. the checking in, the piling of the luggage on the baggage counter, the passports, the sudden disappearance of myself for a quick cigarette break. i had a feeling that i was not really going to enjoy this trip. based on past experiences, i could already foresee intermittent periods of silence where nobody knows what to say, phases of indecision where nobody knows what to do. i brought along my laptop because of this. if i'm bored or speechless, i could open up my laptop and start surfing on the wi-fi internet. falling short, i could bash myself on the head with it for agreeing to come on this trip.

the plane ride was uneventful. a ride to Suvarnabhumi Airport and then a quick transit to Chang Mai International. the children barely communicated more than a few sentences and brief terms of agreement to the parents throughout the entire ride from Singapore to Chang Mai. even then, the method of communication was mainly through a family-trained tradition of grunts and nods. however, all this changed when we tried to survive our first-ever family holiday crisis. we were awaiting our baggages along the belts. my humongous Quiksilver carry-on, check. my brother's small carry-on, check. the parents' medium-sized wheelie, check. the parents' large boxy luggage, ch.... wait, where is it?

it's one of those epiphanic moments of denial that you typically see in American dramas. you know when the lead is alone and in another country without her baggage. a really emo-sounding indie tune would be accompanying the scene and the baggage belt just grinds to a silencing halt at the appropriate climax of the song. except that in this scene, we had just one luggage less, two really calm men, one panicky mother and one nonchalant teenager. the baggage belt did have that really have an impact though. it seems rather to silly to stand watching at a non-moving baggage belt, but we did just that. presumably hoping that some random Thai airport staff would poke his head from the dark recesses of the baggage belt entrances and start screaming something incoherent like 'PRAKTUCHAI KAP SUM PONGSAP SONGKHRA BAGGAGE SINGAPORE KRAP PONG PONG KRAP??' (loosely translated: 'What in lemongrass is this baggage from Singapore doing in here at the end of the baggage aisle?')

and i'm not kidding you when i tell you the first thing my mom said was this:

'*gasp* But all my facial products are inside!!!! my hand cream. my moisturiser. my sunblock!!!!'

my mother - 45 and still quite the bimbo. my dad was primarily concerned with his itinerary and PDA and electrical chargers, which of course made more sense. he took it much better though, in the same resigned way that i seem to have learned from him. no point crying over spilt milk. we thus lodged a lost property claims with a pretty Thai lady of about late 30s. she was your traditional Thai beauty. the type that should be found working the duty free counters rather than handling your lost luggage. her make-up was so thick that you could go all Discovery Channel on it with your hammer and chisel and discover fossil fuel and dinosaurs bones beneath it. she seemed more preoccupied with holding her pen in a manner that wouldn't put her well manicured and painted nails in harm's way. this of course agitated my mother even more.

word was therefore put out from Chang Mai to Bangkok for a serial tagged baggage. and seriously, there was nothing much we could do since our one piece of luggage was not in Chang Mai anyways. with that, we proceeded out of customs and into the warm humid air of Chang Mai. our tour guide, Noi, a very jovial-looking gentlemen of about forty greeted us warmly. my father greeted him back as Nok. and for the rest of the trip, he was Nok. nobody bothered to correct him, not even Noi himself.

of course, my parents who have never had luggage lost overseas before packed all their important essentials like mobile phones and itineraries into one big bag. my mother was acting in a forlorn sort of manner that started to drain the spirits from the trip. we could be visiting a Silk factory and she would suddenly start talking about her moisturiser. half-way through a paper umbrella crafts centre, she would recall that she was unprotected from the UV rays and bemoan the lack of sunblock.

mid-way through lunch at a hole in the wall Thai restaurant she started to urge the father to push the tour guide to make frequent calls to the airline side to get updates. she said in Mandarin that she thinks Noi isn't trying his best to look for the missing luggage. and when the mother speaks in Mandarin (which is seldom), she's trying to hide something or say something bad. the fact that Noi was also a smoker wasn't really helping him build cred with the parents. having smoked a cigarette with Noi a few tourist stops ago, i asked him about the luggage. he simply said that these things usually resolved themselves within a day or two. nothing much to worry about. 'your mother seems very worried though,' he added. we shared a rather resigned smile.

because of this constant association i make with evil whenever my mother speaks in Mandarin, i decided to tell my mother to get a grip on herself. in a nice way, of course. i offered her my facial foams and washes. i even offered her my exfoliating scrub which had granules the size of Pakistan and would probably get rid of half her face. 'But all my Truste products....' she wavered off. 'You really Truste your products eh?' my father giggled. the brand of multi-level marketing lycopene-based facial products that she used was of course, aptly named Truste. i wanted to laugh out loud, but then again LOL, LMAO or even ROFL for that matter, in front of the family.

of course, all that worry was for naught. because roughly one and a half days later, our luggage arrived intact, smelling like airplane cargo. my father thanked Noi profusely, even shaking his hand so much that the coins and keys in his pocket jangled like Christmas. as we checked the luggage in the hotel room, we couldn't help but notice a little tag that indicated from whence our baggage came from.

a chinese logo. chinese words stating the name of a china-based importing company.

yes, China.

take away my uniform, take away my cup, but you can't take away my ehrm... dignity/pride/all-encompassing sense of justice?

2008-03-23T16:55:00.001+08:00

the hospital is one of those dangerous places that are bounded by an inordinate amount of laws. of course, most of these laws are about as helpful as a pistol that points backwards. as in, if i try to shoot you in the foot, i will end up shooting my own head instead. of course, this makes a rather exceleent cure of one's migraines, but it leaves a rather grisly mess for the forensics team to figure out. that, and the fact that headless people are generally considered rather dead.

having worked for several years in a hospital, i have come to realize that one of the most prominent laws the general public loves to wave about is the Law of Negligence. or what i would like to call the Law of Negligee. the negligee being a item of fabric to promote a certain transparency of sorts, but mostly useful and looking good if only one has the required assets to wear it. similar to real working life in the hospital, the Law of Negligence is only useful if you do your work well in the hospital and follow laws by the book. but truth be told, taking care of one human being is never easy work. taking care of one human beings while being bounded by laws and rules is rather difficult. now try taking care of eighteen human beings and throw in the laws, ethics and rules, it's seriously overkill. eighteen patients is what i usually have under my charge. i break the rules half the time in order to help the patients. not fun when you consider my measly pay and my entire career at stake.

i find the whole Law of Negligence thing to be a real ironic matter. we nurses put up with a lot of bullshit from the patients. we put up with even more bullcrap from the relatives. i mean, for most relatives, the hospital is the next best thing to a pet care centre to dump their elderly relatives whom they have absolutely no intrest in taking charge of. call me cynical and call me horrid, but countless are the times when the whole nursing profession is treated more like a service-oriented job. the typical complaint that comes about with the relatives are things like 'Why didn't you walk my father after the operation?' or 'Why didn't you change my father's diapers regularly?' which sometimes i would really like to pose the question back to them in a 'if you were in my shoes kinda way', 'do you actually bother to walk your father?' and 'do you want to do the changing of the diapers instead?'

of course, the rules in the hospital are not only limited to negligence-based ones. as with any other organization, there are rules set in place to keep the staff in check. like women and hair accessories. no dangling 'Beyonce-ish' hoop rings are allowed for ear accessories. only one wedding band is allowed for rings on the fingers. and coloured hair is generally frowned upon. i daresay that i'm the only male nurse in my hospital that has golden hair. which generally makes me very much frowned upon. yes, male nursing seems to be a really dowdy lot.

but back to rules about the nursing uniform. the nursing board has dictated that uniforms are strictly forbidden to be hung behind the doors of the cubicles in the staff toilet. this is of course for a good reason. a sanitary napkin dispenser lies in the corner of the cubical. people are bathing and splashing bacteria all about the toilet walls. menstruating women who can't pee properly staining the toilet seats (i have personally seen this before in my staff toilet). ironic, given that we practice aseptic techniques while at work, but can't seem to be hygienic with our ablutions. none the less, i have always made it my habit to hang my uniform in the shower cubicles in the toilet when i leave for work. this is purely out of unbounded love for my parents who do the laundry. one uniform typically lasts for two days. i have told my colleagues about this little tit-bit before and received feedback ranging from 'eeeeee' (the clean freaks) to 'oh please! mine lasts for three days *flies buzzing*'.

not helping is the typical locker that the nursing staff are given is about as big as a box of condoms. okay okay, i'm exaggerating here. it's roughly the size of two boxes of condoms. the staff locker is big enough to fit in one set of folded uniform and prolly a pair of shoes. and really, who in this hygienic society of ours wants to keep uniforms and shoes in the same place? whatever happened to the medical drama locker room scene where one can actually HANG those scrub suits to air dry?

there was a period of time when the female nursing staff all kept their shoes in the cabinet underneath the sinks. one of the health-care attendants (the people in charge of washing dishes, cups and serving beverages and doing the menials tasks that keep the hospital running) who had an all-encompassing sense of morality, grabbed the ward supervisor violently by the arm (she has a history of bipolar disorder, now well-controlled, thanks to medication) and dragged her all the way to the staff toilet. 'YOU SEE, SISTER! ALL THE SHOES OVER HERE!! SO DISGUSTING!' she emphasized, prolly with the same ardour as one would preach the gospel to a group of heathens. this particular health-care attendant is rather fond of capital letters and exclamation marks in her speech. all the affected females had their shoes dumped into a big black trash bag after that brouhaha. the females in question also had a hard time sorting out the uniformed black shoes and have come to hate the health-care attendant in particular.

none the less, my uniform which was supposedly hung (hur hur!), had disappeared when i got to work one night shift. initially i thought i was the victim of someone who hated me at work, but then again, i didn't aggravate anybody enough at work to generate that much hate. which led to the next logical conclusion, the bloody supervisor. she's the old school of nursing type of person who got to her senior nurse manager position by following strictly by the book. the type that would definitely find it hard to survive in today's rather flexible world. left with no uniform and an impending shift, i went to borrow a set of scrubs from the Infectious Diseases ward. the ID ward typically wore hospital-issued t-shirts and flowing pyjama pants which tend to 'flow' rather well over prominent private parts. Pangkeng, being the naturally perverse person that he was, couldn't help but constantly comment and try pulling down my pants which were precariously suspended by a simple knot. and i'm very bad at knots.

infuriated by this sudden act of confiscation, i refused to speak to my senior supervisor for three days. if there's one thing i've learnt since primary school, it's that taking things without permission equates to stealing. so technically, she stole my uniform from me. and if she wants to return it back to me, she had better come see me rather than i go see her. it wasn't until the third day when i had no choice but to pass her in the hospital corridor that she confronted me about the uniform in question. to summarize, i listen to her explanation without agreeing to a single thing she said. she returned my uniform intact with my name tag which was hanging neatly on a hanger behind her office door. admittedly, i was touched. but i guess deep down inside, to avoid similar feats of theft from happening, i decided to use that small two-condom boxes-sized locker to keep my uniform.

about a fortnight later, an even sillier act of supervisor-based theft occurred in the ward. the nursing staff have a norm of keeping their cups and water bottles in the pantry. the pantry being the places where the patient's diets are kept and stored. on a normal day, one would find about fifteen to twenty water containers amassed at the pantry. logically speaking, since the staff lockers are already filled with uniforms, shoes and toiletries, keeping a cup where one drinks from in that locker is rather unhygienic. of course, once again, the nursing board dictates that the pantry is solely meant for the patients. and with the Joint Commission International audits looming round the corner, the supervisors are going gaga with the rules.

the night staff arrived one fine day to find that the water bottles and mugs missing from the pantry. in fact, the entire pantry was devoid of a single water container. Kegal Laugh's Ripcurl water bottle. Pangkeng's mug described as 'my deceased grandmother gave it to me!!!!'. my very own Aquacel Ag mug that i got from the very first colorectal seminar that i attended which had very high sentimental value to me. of course, all of us were angry. 'Taking without permission is stealing,' i proclaimed at the top of my tar-coated lungs. and so we investigated and ask around the afternoon shift staff who prolly knew better as to the fates of our mugs and water bottles.

one health-care attendant witnessed one of our supervisor gathering all our mugs and putting them in a transparent plastic bag. and if that wasn't enough, she proceeded to place the transparent plastic bag conveniently outside the disposal room. normally, placing stuff just outside the disposal room is a message to the housekeeping stuff to throw things away. and believe you me, our housekeeping staff are really efficient and don't ask questions. you could place chopped up body parts wrapped in tin foil outside the disposal room and they would still send it to the great big garbage dump for incineration.

so either the supervisor in question really was ignorant about this norm, or she was just the plain embodiment of evil and wanted to dispose of all our cups, just so she could teach us a lesson. being infuriated at that point of time, we all went with the latter. that was when i started to formulate a plan of sorts. well, since the supervisors are so in love with taking away and throwing away all our water containers, let's give them more to throw away then. i grabbed a new unopened packet of plastic disposable cups and started placing them at every corner of the ward. the nurses counter, the toilet, the trolleys, the pantry, the medical officer's office, the floor, the cabinets. every single surface that could support a cup wasn't spared. i even managed to pyramid of sorts on top of the water dispenser. the tune of the New Radicals 'You Get What You Give' kept playing in my mind while i carried out my diabolical plans of revenge.

but of course, the thing about plans is that 'Man Proposes, but God Disposes.' early march was pretty much the monsoon season accompanied with strong winds, no thanks to El Niño. it happened to rain that particular night and the wind blew half the cups away. even my pyramid display wasn't spared. suffice to say, i spent the night picking up cups like an Egyptian loser. not exactly very fun thing to do.

silly little rules and authorities, perhaps this is why i've never liked working for organizations. but then again, which young adult ever enjoys subjecting oneself to rules and authority?

technology for the modern homosexual

2008-03-17T10:35:00.000+08:00

technology, in a cheeky and extremely lewd sense, is more or less comparable with a dildo. doesn't matter whether it's a vibrating, rotating or electrical impulse-releasing one because it really does 'broaden' (hur hur!) one's horizons. just when you thought that the time when everything there has to be discovered has come to pass, a new bit of technology really gives one new inputs of perspective/pleasure. of course, one could come to embrace it or even reject it with ardent displeasure. for me, i welcome new technologies with a pinch of salt. especially that of mobile and communicative technologies.

you've got to admit that we've come a long way since the days of paging devices and chunky video cameras. i was actually one of those simpletons who thought that the video camera was the epitome of recording advances. of course, i was also an impressionable eleven years old at the point of time, primarily obsessed with Pokemon, Twinson's Odyssey and Rockman manga. i remember when my dad bought his first Sony Video Camera. it was big, accompanied in a big carrier, and came with an even bigger price tag. this basically encouraged him all the more to film practically every second of his life with the family. till today, we still keep DVs of birthdays, weddings, festive occasions and funerals. yes, my father actually has a one minute video still shot of my maternal grandfather in his coffin. that and the twenty-plus digital photos of the grandfather in seemingly artistic shots.

fast-forwarding a few years, today's mobile devices are compact, efficient and definitely more affordable for the average consumer. the typical teenager owns at least one mobile phone, MP3 player, camera and laptop. to think when i was a teenager, i didn't even have a Motorola MemoJazz which was all the rage back then. i relied mostly on coin-operated phones before proceeding on to become rather acquainted with phone cards. of course, all this also means well for the average homosexual.

from a 'you've come a long way, baby!' point of view, there are two things that technological advances have changed drastically for the gay man. back in the dark ages (and this is based solely on what i've gathered from mature forty-year old homo men that i'm acquainted with), the main way of getting laid would be cruising and clubbing. swimming pools were hot spots. toilets were smelly but good spots. and Sunday nights at the clubs are always packed... with men-loving men, that is. VCDs were the main form of media when it came to porn. i have yet to come across anyone who owns an intact copy of pornographic material on a VCR-playable tape. but i'm sure there were many circulating around in the early 90s.

these days we can practically get our rocks off without leaving the house, all thanks to 'The Big Connection' fondly known as the internet. come to think of it, the only instance i can think of whereby one has to leave would be fine examples such as 'crap, i've run out of rubber' and 'is your place available because my mother's at home'. as any gay man can attest to, being a homosexual is really an art form in itself. having to stay inconspicuously under the radar for the general straight public, yet at the same time letting out the homo vibes for the gay crowd - definitely not an easy feat. social mores and taboos within the gay community. the places to go to get to meet like-minded brethren. if one is lucky, one has someone to learn the tricks of the trade from (i make it sound like prostitution). i wasn't so lucky, apparently. i basically gleaned everything from the internet, followed by sexual encounters, followed by meeting actual gay people who weren't interested in meeting up just for sex. web cams, chat rooms, gay personals on the internet, downloadable porn, etc. one could be gay without even having sex with real gay men.

the other thing that has truly affected today's gay men is that of mobile recording technology. i'm thinking that back in the 70s or 80s, the thought of fitting a recording device on a mobile phone was totally preposterous. hell, the thought of a mobile phone was even ludicrous. today, just log on to any streaming porn site such as (insert random site that you frequent)tube.com and you can see supposedly real videos of Singaporean men and their sexual escapades. common titles include things like 'Me Waking Up in the Morning with a Hardon' or 'Cumshot at 30,000 feet' (this one is real! someone actually took a wanking video of himself in an airplane toilet! SQ some more!).

the modern video camera phone of course, bodes well for the narcissistic gay person who would rather have sex with the mirror. call me paranoid, but i've never been a fan of recording myself having sex with other men on mobile devices. well, at least not after the whole Tammy hoohah in Singapore. but hey, who am i to judge? everyone's entitled to get their rocks off in whatever way that helps. of course, the whole mobile recording device thing was thrown into perspective just a few days ago at a gathering of four men. two's company, three's a crowd and four is definitely an orgy. so yeah, it was an orgy of sorts. did i make it crystal clear? or do i need to calculate the meth?

there were three laptops at the gathering. three hard disc drives full of downloaded porn were also present with their laptop accompaniments. being a bit of a pornoissuer of sorts, i brought along my heavy duty Maxtor that had practically 360GB worth of media. suffice to say, someone showed me a rather scandalous porn of sorts. it was rather grainy as it recorded on a mobile device. but you could make out a computer screen with a shot of someone having webcam sex. my train of thoughts while watching the grainy recording were as followed: 'oooh... big', 'nice body', 'is that a gold necklace?', '*gasp* oh my god! isn't that (insert random high profile gay person in Singapore gay scene)?'

to which i asked my acquaintance who owned the recorded video, '*gasp* oh my god! isn't that (insert name of high-profile gay person in Singapore gay scene)?'

i left the gathering in the wee hours of the morning, grateful that i wasn't that big on web-camming. as in 'i don't like to have web-cam sex', not 'why does my penis look so small on the web-cam?'.

hospital horror stories involving smells

2008-03-10T12:40:00.000+08:00

one of the most practical assets of being armed with this giganormous Jackie Chan nose of mine (other than to headbutt irritating citizens of Singapore on the trains who refuse to give way when people are trying to get off, nose first of course) is that i'm almost always able to pick up the most distinct of odours. this ability is of course most poignant in the hospital where the sick and the destitute primarily exist. the production of smells is further amplified by the fact that most of these individuals are really not that well to begin with. and funky odours coming from the human body is its way of saying 'Oi! seek help! seek medical attention! go to the fragrance department!' the same could of course be said for bad BO and halitosis uncovered by beauty products.

the wide variety of smells in the hospital is perhaps one of the reasons why i like being in the hospital so much. i have to admit that i have this obsessive obsessive obsessive obsessive obsessive-compulsive desire to smell every single fluid and solid that comes out from the human body. in a single night of working in the hospital alone, thoughts like 'Hey! this is the smell of Mr. Chan's shit!' and 'Oooh! Gangrene!' waft across my head, the same way those odours are doing so in my nostrils. i can't pinpoint an exact reason as to why i love smelling funky odours other than perhaps just professional interest. of course, it could also be an undesirable fetish of sorts. but that's just plain gross.

some of these smells have become so distinct or second-natured to me, that sometimes, they become rather indescribable. you just know that odour comes from (insert random producer of foul smell) when you inhale it. i mean, it's easy to describe the smell of shit and piss. but how do you go about describing the smell of shit laced with blood? or piss from a patient on Penicillin? or even the smell of gastric contents? some things in life are simply just better experienced first hand. you know what they say about pictures speaking a thousand words. but with smells, they mostly just render you at a loss for words.

none the less, i have decided to compile a list of the various smells that i commonly come in contact with on a routine shift in the hospital. not all of them are body fluids of course. because you can only derive so much fun from shit, piss and gastric juice. so for starters, let's go with....

1) Septanol - is that vodka? oh wait, it's just medical disinfectant.
i'm a clean freak. i have this bad habit of needing to pack up the nurses' station and treatment room before i commence with work proper. and believe you me, the hospital is one hell of a dirty place to be at. from hospital acquired infections to the various ailments that the patients come in for, 'clean' is the last word a hospital should ever endorse. we're looking more at 'hygienic'. and at risk of sounding like a Dettol advert, i have to admit that there's nothing more pleasant-smelling and trustworthy than the many bottles of Septanol that one can find in the hospital. it's blue, it's made up of 70% methylated spirit and most interestingly it smells strangely like vodka. every time i clean up the treatment room, i can imagine drunk little gaseous atoms knocking against each other, and well.... just generally knocking each other up. how can i not love a medical disinfectant that kills germs and reminds me of clubbing at the same time?

2) General Anaesthetic - the common cure for halitosis
halitosis (or in layman's terms, bad breath) can be quite a distressing experience for the average Joe. but hey, i think i might have just discovered a simple cure for the typical attack of halitosis. you see, i once had a patient who admitted for the simple hernia mesh repair. he was genuinely nice and really courteous and all. the only weird thing he kept doing was to cover his mouth when he spoke to all the nurses. it was only when he had to sign some formal documents and speak to me at the same time when i realize why he kept on with this idiosyncrasy. his mouth apparently, emitted this really foul stench, strangely resemblant of a dish of all the strangest foods in the world fermented together in a great big melting pot. and one could tell that he must have lived with it for quite a long time and was really embarrassed about it. i felt kinda bad for him actually, because he was considerate enough to want others to avoid smelling it by constantly covering his mouth.

post-operatively though, he seemed like a changed man. for one, he was conversing with me without the hindrance of an appendage muffling his speech. the foul stench was gone apparently. and the dear patient could definitely feel it. instead of the vile concoction of fermented foods, the pleasant staple smell of medical disinfectant and anaesthetic coloured his speech. there was this confidence in him that made one feel warm and snuggly inside. so i say, if you've got a case of bad breath, don't panic. go for surgery under GA. tell your local GP, 'i want my ear piercing during under surgery, and make sure it's under local anaesthetic!' do this while covering your mouth please.

3) Vomit (part one) - is that the smell of the Ministry of S... blueragrhhhh!!!
vomiting is the body's way of saying (actually more like screaming and shouting) 'i've had enough alcohol for the night! put in some more and i'll morbidly embarrass you!'. and throughout my entire nursing career, i've received only two such patients in my general surgery settings. of course, in my entire clubbing experience, they're a dime a dozen. me, included. there's nothing that feels better than vomiting after a night of heavy drinking. of course, that's not the point. the point is that the distinctive smell of Absolut and vomit permeates the air when such patients are around. i remember one such overflow patient, a case from the Department of Internal Medicine.

she was morbidly obese, on top of already being morbidly embarrassing to herself. she came into the ward straight from the Emergency Department, drunk and incoherent. she wanted to pee, but couldn't even walk to the toilet. she was vomiting like there was no tomorrow. and before you knew it, she soon fell asleep with her legs with her legs spread-eagled, black lacey panties for all to see. around her were puddles of pee, vomit and patients with looks of disgust. this is a typical case of people drinking too much on their first ever night out in the clubs.

the next day, the whole ward smelt like a club on Sunday morning.

4) Milky Milky Stools - it smells like funky strawberries (which makes a good name for an ice-cream flavour)
i've generally found dietitians to be the prim and proper ladies of the hospital. they are almost always slim and petite. they wear nice clothes and walk around in pumps or clickety-clackety heels. i mean a plus-sized dietitian wouldn't really reflect well on the profession, would it? of course, the dietitians can afford to dress up like they are partying in the wards, not only because they are beautiful and live by a balanced diet, but also, they are simply not involved with the nursing side of things. what nursing side of things you say? cleaning up stools, cleaning up vomit, cleaning up everything that causes an unpleasant smell generally.

dietitians are generally called in when a patient is not taking food well. perhaps they don't have an appetite or perhaps they just need that extra nutrition to supplement their diet. one of the most common tools for helping these malnourished patients to put on weight would be that of Ensure. in case you're not from the health-care profession, Ensure is a brand of well-balanced and nutritious milk feeds. it comes in strawberry, vanilla and chocolate flavours. the staple orders in my ward are tragically, strawberry. Ensure can be a real boon or a bane, depending on the patient's gastric tolerance for dairy products. the worst professional bomb that a dietitian can throw to the nurses is a simple order of Ensure 6 cans/day for a patient who has just recently started taking soft foods. and you know what milk does to the lactose-intolerant and people who were recently re-introduced to solid foods. they shit all six cans of milk out like their bodies were simply no more than a catalyst of sorts.

this is why i've become so familiar to the scent of shit mixed with strawberry milk. Ensure-based shit is a creamy and thick pasty kind. the closest resemblance in terms of consistency and colour i can think of is Japanese curry. and boy, do i love Japanese curry.

5) Bloodied stools - the smell of the Industrial Revolution
people can shit bloody stools for all sorts of reasons. from a tear in the stomach lining to putting phallic-shaped objects up their orifices WITHOUT the aid of a lubricant. my ward, being general surgery and all, commonly receives cases of the former, the bleeding gastrointestinal tract cases. we call them BGITs for short. sometimes they have stomach cancer which causes them to bleed and bleed and bleed. other times they are simply no more than ulcers in the stomachs. the more serious cases have their haemoglobin levels ranging in the 6 and 7s (Haemoglobin levels above 9 or 10 are generally considered to be quite okay). they often require a massive amount of blood transfusions to replace the losses. the worst is when the blood goes in, simply to come out from the anus again. and blood-stained stools are the most worrisome kind. they don't smell as unpleasant as your typical stools, often bordering on the odour of metals or coal. but like i said, they make you worry a lot for the lives of your patients.

6) Menses - the fisherman's wharf
one of the things that you'll come to accept as a male nurse is the fact that you will have to get changed in a unisex toilet. or at least in my hospital, i'm always changing and doing my ablutions in a unisex toilet. i remember the first time as a student nurse when i used the staff unisex toilet, the distinct smell of fish was wafting through the air. that was the day when i added the Sanitary Dustbin into my list of things that one will commonly find in the toilet.

Pangkeng and I are always screaming and complaining about the women in our ward who pee and dirty the toilet seats with their menstrual fluid. our idea is that if the women can moan about the men who don't put down the toilet seats after use, then the men also have the right to retaliate with stained toilet seats. and believe me, it's a very nauseating scent when left in the toilet for an extensive period of time in a country like Singapore. and you know what's the crowning glory of it all? i'm supposedly put in charge of maintaining the cleanliness of the toilets. of course, the janitor does a very good job of cleaning up the majority of the stains. but within an hour, the toilet always smells like a trip to the fish market. and i'm not saying it's fish just because all the men think it's fish. it really smells like fish.

7) Vomit (part-two) - I know what you had last dinner....
another common ailment that our ward accepts is the case of intestinal obstruction, or I/O for short. we get a lot of I/Os over the festive seasons, whereby the locals stuff themselves to death at buffets and gatherings. and when your body is stuffed, the best way of expulsion is either through vomiting or if your body processes things fast, defecating. for those who are admitted into the hospital, we insert a tube down their nostril that goes straight into the stomach. and then we suck out the gastric contents of what they had during dinner. there will be a drip running at the same time in case we suck out too much and they get malnourished and faint. we call this procedure the 'drip and suck'. this always initiates laughs between Pangkeng and me.

but what gets more laughs between the two of us is when we try to identify the food products the patients have had previously before admission into hospital. the common things we have smelt before are tom yam soup, chicken broth and being resident alcoholic drinkers in the ward, red wine. we always make it game. once we've smelt the item at hand, we'll lay a cigarette bet of one or two sticks. then someone will proceed to ask the patient what he had for dinner. i normally win when it comes to the wine. Pangkeng being the big eater wins the food portions.

being exposed to these smells in the hospital have made me practically immune to the worst of smells. i have smelt rot and death before. the rubbish truck loaded with yesteryear's foods can drive past me but i wouldn't even flinch. perhaps this is why i love working in the hospital so much. it's practically an adventure of smells for me.

why love is patient, is kind and also very much blind

2008-03-01T15:37:00.005+08:00

one of the reasons why i'm so cynical about love is prolly the number of relationships that i've seen building up and crumbling faster than you can say 'we'll be together forever'. i've met gay couples starting off with so harmonious of relationships that even the most adept of feng shui masters would approve of. however, throw in some emotional turbulence and infidelity, the same gay couples break up within the span of less than a year.

apparently, being gay exposes you to a world of perilous relationships fraught with cheating and fickle-mindedness. most of these relationships of course end with plenty of drama and in the twinkle of an eye. and speaking of things twinkling, i've also known of gay men in their forties and fifties who have obviously materialistic twenty to thirty-year-old boyfriends. i mean i've got nothing against young-old love, but evidently, most of these men that i've known of have debts incurred by their twinks. i've always wondered why despite everyone warning them that they are falling into a money trap, they are still very much in love with these twinks. being quite the cynic of gay love, i'm thinking that's what the Spice Girls meant when they sang the lines 'Love is Blind, as Far as the Eye can See'.

it seems though that our heterosexual counterparts are faring much better in the war zone of love. my beautiful preceptee has just gotten married at age twenty-one to a policeman. my great friend from secondary school also just got married in Australia. my plus-sized latin mama friend from the same secondary school also got hitched last year to an American. come to think of it, i'm attending the wedding dinner of a nursing school acquaintance who is getting married to an air-force pilot.

wedding bells are ringing everywhere apparently at the age of twenty-three.

i had just started my shift on the Thursday night that had just passed when the ward phone gave a shrill rang that broke the immense silence of sleeping patients and nurses writing their reports. being a narcissistic lover of my own voice, i picked up the phone and launched into my usual introduction and greetings.

'Good evening, ward 69, Staff Nurse Jonathan speaking, how may i help you?'

normally the introductions would be so long and tedious that i would get cut off at 'ward 69'. the more impatient ones slice at 'Good evening'. this one though, allowed me to finish and even threw in a free five seconds of silence and what sounded like sniffling.

'Hello?' i asked, wondering whether someone had made a wrong call. Singaporeans are so fast-paced that they normally don'tleavepausesorspacesinbetweenconversations. the deep breathing and sniffling continued for about a few more seconds before a female voice came through the line. it was the recognizable quivering voice of a malay female colleague of mine. let's call her 'The Good Girl' out of old times' sake and my habit of labelling people whose names i can't mention on this blog.

'Jon, (The Good Girl's name) here. (pause, sniffles, pause) Do you have something you want to tell me?'

i was at the nurses station at that point of time picking up pieces of papers and alcohol swabs that the previous shift had strewn about. a normal routine i would do just before i start work proper. my colleagues can save lives, but they can't maintain a sense of tidiness. Florence Nightingale, a seemingly hygiene freak would shudder at the sight, it seems.

'Huh? What do you mean?' i blurted out.

'Pangkeng told me already. (sniffles) i just want to double confirm what i already know.'

apparently, Pangkeng and i know something about a colleague of ours and a certain scandal he had committed with a nursing student that was attached to our ward. this particular male colleague was in a supposedly steady relationship with The Good Girl. it wasn't the first time that she had asked a question like this. i remember one time when i was doing the night shift with her when she just asked out of nowhere, the same question of 'Jon, do you have anything you want to tell me?' i shrugged my shoulders, feigning ignorance and said, 'Ehrm... you're beautiful?' she laughed it off apparently.

the phone conversation with The Good Girl took a bit of a downhill turn from that point on.

'Well, since Pangkeng told you about it already. then there's nothing more than i have to add then,' i said. there was a certain tone of finality in my tone of voice, as if it were the end of a chapter in a novel about love, life, death and scandals in the hospital.

'He's a bad guy, that's all i have to say.'

was it something i said? was it something i should have said? or maybe was it something that i should not have said? because, all of a sudden, my words launched her into tears. and if there's one thing i'm more terrified of than roaches and anything more than eight-legged creatures, it's got to be people crying over the phone. i simply don't have the vocabulary to console the crying and the technology whereby where can express our feelings by touch over the phone is still a few centuries away. a real crying (hur hur!) shame if you ask me.

so i did what i did best when i have nothing to say, i simply said nothing at all. as i listened to The Good Girl cry, my other night shift colleague mouthed the words 'who is it?' there was no one around and besides i was pretty close to this colleague, a pious and religious Muslim girl who wore her tudung with grace and a great sense of moderation outside of work. i mouthed back The Good Girl's name and everything fell into place for her.

The Good Girl carried on with her intense crying for about a good two minutes or sound. i couldn't help but think it queer that someone should be calling me at work on an office phone and crying at a relatively unnatural hour of eleven pm. i also couldn't help but think that The Good Girl sounded a bit like a banshee.

and as sudden as the crying came about, she ended the conversation in a normal sort of voice.

'Okay thanks Jon bye,' and the phone went click, the dial tone a clear indicator that the bizarre conversation had just ended.

Fat Boy Slim (there's a hyperlink there, the only thing you can do is really to click on it, that's what hyperlinks are for right?), remember him? well, The Good Girl is his girlfriend. to summarize, Fat Boy Slim is quite the chauvinist. brash, crude and almost always talking about sex. it's okay to talk about sex, really. but it's not okay to talk about sex all the time when you don't look like you're getting any (the general word around the ward is that he's not getting any because he's girlfriend is really a good girl through and through, plus he cuts quite a full figure). he sells expensive fish on e-bay as a side job. he smokes when his girlfriend is not around. and he's an all-rounded bastard (literally speaking).

there was this one time when i worked with him during an afternoon shift. The Good Girl made him a boxed dinner and left it in the communal fridge in the ward. as luck would have it, we were so busy with admissions and transfers that we simply didn't have time for a decent dinner break. and so the uneaten dinner was left in the fridge during the whole shift. it wasn't till the end of the shift that he took out the tupperware. it was quite a lovely sight, suffice to say. fried rice, fish nuggets and two sausages with perfectly-spaced grill marks on it. it was almost a personification of love. of waking up at 4am (The Good Girl was on the morning shift before ours). of chastity and purity. and Fat Boy Slim just poured it into the dustbin. 'I've no mood to eat now lah!' was the only logical explanation that he could come up with.

recently though, matters in the ward were complicated with the return of a nursing student previously attached to our ward. let's refer to her simply as The Third Party. she's quite a decent-looking thing, being of mixed blood and all. so it's a wonder why The Third Party ever had a fling with Fat Boy Slim. to crown it off, the fling is still on-going. not helping is also the fact that The Good Girl was working in the same section of the ward as her.

i'm quite a big fan of all things dramatic, so it would have been quite fun to see the catfights and sparks flying all over the place if Fat Boy Slim were still around. alas, he has been called up by the government to serve his requisite two years of national service for the country. thus, the two girls in question were left hanging around to sort the awkward moments out by themselves. i can't help but give a different look whenever i pass The Third Party in the ward. Pangkeng and i are constantly guessing whether she even knows she's a third party, which all the more complicates things.

love is such a complexed thing, yet we all can't help but succumb to it. i couldn't help but be glad that i wasn't in love after that phone conversation with The Good Girl.

why i love kegal laughs so much as a friend

2008-02-25T09:50:00.000+08:00

you know the kind of friends that you have at work, whereby the progress of friendship is hampered solely by the fact that the relationship is founded in the roots of the workplace? the type that you find yourself digging deep into the recesses of your heart (and if i could go lower, the intestinal tracts, the bladder or perhaps the bowels), simply for conversational topics. conversational topics not about work and gossip, but about anything else other than that. the type that you find yourself wanting to avoid taking the same train as them before or after work, just so that you won't have to go through that golden moment of awkwardness when you guys have absolutely nothing better to talk about other than this colleague's tight uniform and that other's work integrity?

well, Kegal Laughs is one of those colleagues. i love her to bits, i really do. and in an alternative world where i love boobs and i love her bits rather than loving her to bits, she would be the type of girl that i would be chasing after. she's funny. she's pretty. and she has a great family background. plus, she's a bit of a nympho. in that alternative world, we might actually have an agreement of sorts to make full use of her nympho tendencies.

each time we smoke between shifts, we never fail to relate our clubbing escapades and sexcapades (just that i use non-gendered terms; nope, she doesn't know that i'm gay). she would always be telling me about how her girlfriends who always go home to sleep after clubbing. not in their own bed per say, but that of others. and obviously not alone as well. typically, they would be sleeping with some random Matrep (pronounced Maht Rape, a common local term used to describe typical Malay adolescents who smoke and live typical Malay lives, some of them come with piercings and tattoos even) they picked up at the club. and did i mention about her strong family background?

she has a brother whom i met once and i suspect is gay (he just happens to look very much like a Twink). and they are very tight as siblings. her mother is quite the riot as well, based on the stories that she has shared with me. one of them involves her mother strutting around at home in nothing more than a pair of panties and a bra. out of a curiosity for details i asked Kegal Laughs, 'What's the colour of the panties and bra, eh?' to which she replied after taking a puff of her Viceroy Menthol Lights, 'Beige! it's like wearing contact lens, like wearing nothing at all (there's a local advertisement for contact lens that has such a tagline)!' and then she proceeded to laugh her very Japanese-porn-inspired sounding laughter that i've come to be so familiar with.

of course, all would be well if not for the fact that her mother was coming close to a full monty while her rather religious father was doing his evening prayers (Kegal comes from a family of Muslims) at the side of the living room. 'Panas lah!' her mother explained as she plonked herself down on the sofa. from the corner of her eye, she could also see her father, poised upright and reciting prayers. yes, it was obviously that humid.

in the last year alone, i believe that our friendship has made some progress though. good enough for smoke breaks and Christmas gift exchanges, but alas, still not enough for a train ride home together. for the Christmas that just passed, Kegal bought me a bottle of Beckham's Intense Instinct. and this may sound bizarre but nobody other than the first boyfriend of three years has bought me cologne before. and please, relatives don't count. besides, they didn't buy eau de toilette or cologne or parfum. they are the bigger fans of thrift stores, preferring that pervasive smell of deodorant that reeks of cheapness and words along the lines of 'least-favourite relative'.
for being the second person in my entire life to buy me cologne, i decided to brave a trip into the legendary women's encampment named, Forever 21. not by myself, thankfully ('Can i help you sir?' 'Oh it's okay, i'm just shopping for a weekend dress'), but with Sunanthar. after acting like a heterosexual couple for several minutes, i settled for a gold clutch. it was a battle between gold and silver, but like i told Sunanthar, 'why settle for silver when you can go for gold?' and that was the message for Kegal Laughs when i bought her that clutch.

i had the unfortunate circumstance of taking the train home with her the other day post-morning shift. maybe it was the fact that i was so used to talking to her in uniform. or maybe it was just that i was too tired to make any small talk about her boyfriends and her life. but about ten minutes into the trip home, we both took out our headphones and blasted random tunes on our ipods. it was that bad actually. and i'm the type of person who would rather go home by the longer and lonelier route, thank brave an awkward conversation without the aid of an alcoholic beverage in hand. perhaps that's why Pangkeng and i function so well as friends. of course we also have sex (as in a vested interest, not the act itself committed between the two of us), beer, cigarettes and an overuse of Hokkien expletives to keep the sparks alive. plus, he verges on being a bisexual.

so obviously, 'great friends at work' doesn't exactly translate to 'great friends outside of work'. Kegal Laughs is the type of person who will most-willingly help out at work even though she has tonnes of things to do. when i hand over the nursing reports to her, she will be the first to say 'it's okay, just pass it to me and i'll finish up for you.' of course, being the one person who loves her to bits, i would do the same for her as well. such a great person, that i'm just simply not all that keen to lose her as a friend when we're outside of work. armed with determination to resolve this issue, i therefore decided to organize the second-ever colleagues-based dinner outing. my ward colleagues simply don't have this 'outside of work' culture. they mainly keep to themselves. which is very irritating when i try to organize outings. they seem so keen when i bring it up during work, but they are the queens of throwing in the towel at the eleventh hour.

most of them are prolly afraid of the social awkwardness as they haven't existed outside of work together before in plain clothes. so in order to spice up the ol' dinner-and-movies routine, i suggested shishah. for some reason beyond me, the majority of the Malay people her really like shishah. i gathered Kegal Laughs and two other colleagues that smoke with me during breaks as well and planned an outing to Ambrosia, a local Mediterranean restaurant at Arab Street. at this point, i have to say thanks to Audrey, Jiayuan, Fadhil and his boyfriend Charlie for organizing the previous wonderful outing Ambrosia. Ambrosia has all the charms that can wow the pants of people. it's dark, it's filled with Middle Eastern carpeting and cushions, and serves over-priced but somewhat great food. and most importantly, it's an indoor setting with a free-smoking policy. all that smoke and carpets always make me think about one of my favourite porn films, Arabesque. of course, the men in the film are smoking shishah of a different sort.

it was a small cosy outing with three other female colleagues, all of them Malay, all of the smokers. Kegal Laughs was there of course. we made small talk about our lives and mainly about work. and the weird thing was that no matter how hard i tried to divert the conversation away from work, they would always bring it right back to the start. we could be exchanging fleeting sexual encounters when the whole conversation would revert back to work again ('And speaking of big penises, did you see the doctor with the big bulge in the pants?').

as i sat on the floor of Ambrosia that night, smoking shishah and cigarettes while listening to the girls exchange ward gossip, my mind started to wander. i was getting contemplative. and that's always a bad sign. i noticed as well that the Middle Eastern carpets that decorate the floor were not very well-maintained. i found a very long strand of bleached hair, which i started curling around my fingers. at the same time, i also wondered why i was fighting so hard to make the friendship between Kegal and me go beyond the settings of work. was it that i just wanted more funny sex stories from Kegal Laughs? or was it that twenty years down the road, i would like to have a friend of decent character to be by my side? and believe me, being a homosexual, it's hard to find decent friends with good character. i'm sure you gay people out there know what i mean.

we ended the night walking along Arab Street trying to make small talk and smoking. one smoked Viceroys, the other Marlboro Red, and another a pack of lights. as i puffed on my Consulates, i came to realize that sometimes colleagues will just remain as that, colleagues. no matter how much you may be helping them out at work, social mechanics just can't seem to pull things close together.

and that's a fact of life i guess i'll just have to live with.

why i like Pangkeng so much as a friend

2008-02-20T19:54:00.003+08:00

the other day, Pangkeng SMSed me.

PK: hows life? (in his typical SMS shorthand)

Me: Ok lor. Sore throat, smoke too much. (in my typical Queen's English format)

PK: i tink we need 2 cool down, may b drink sum Ang Moh Herbal Tea. (Ang Moh is our local term for Caucasians, it's a Hokkien-based term)

Me: like what? Earl Grey? Chamomile? Lavender? i drink a lot of that.

PK: beer

ME: KNN lah. hur hur.

we met up for our weekly beer drinking session at a tacky hole-in-the-wall bar in Kitchener Road after that. the name of the Bar was 'Oh Carol!'. i dare you to guess the name of the bar owner.

how my brother beat me to a rhinoplasty

2008-02-16T10:22:00.004+08:00

there are apparently several physical traits that run through the Teo family. but before i go on, just let me clarify that i'm not a child from a previous marriage or an adopted refugee from the mountainous regions of China. my father's a Teo. and i'm a Zhang. for our not so culturally-inclined friends out there who can't tell whether a Park is Korean or Chinese (it's neither, it more like architectural landscaping involving plenty of horticulture), Teo's the mandarin version of Zhang. Zhang is simply the local dialect that we use in our names, Teochew, to be precise. on days when i've got nothing to thank God for, i simply count my blessings that i'm Jonathan Zhang Hong'en when my dad applied for my birth certificate. in a different time and era, i would have been Jonathan Teo Hong Woon. i already sound like a comic book, and that's not a good thing. if Caucasians adopted Chinese-naming cultures, they would have very fond and humorous names like John POW BANG WHOCK. and a lot of !'s thrown in for good measure. POW!!! BANG!!! WHOCK!!!

none the less, i'm proud to be part of the Teo family. simply because there are several physical traits that run through the Teo family. i would like to say 'well-endowed' being one of them. but i haven't seen my brother's privates and have no intention of a viewing either. so that's a miss. but on first glance, the Teo family has generally great eyebrows. thick, fully-formed clusters of hair that sit above our eyes. the cool thing about them is that don't require much primping and plucking. unfortunately, this also means the looming threat of uni-brows. my brother and i both own eyebrow tweezers. he owns the one that my mother previously used for plucking hairs from raw chickens.

hairy legs are also pretty evident. the type that ants and many other six/seven/eight/eighty/eight-hundred legged insects of this good Earth have to come to fear and revere as 'The Jungle of Immobility'. as a non-effeminate gay person, i am actually a tad embarrassed to admit that i have shaved my legs before on one boring afternoon after the 'O' levels. suffice to say, i shaved off a lot of skin along the shins and bled so much that a hypochondriac would be screaming for a pint of fresh blood. i have to admit though that i like the feeling of bare skin under comforters and blankets. the problem wasn't evident until i tried having sex one week post-shaving. i was labelled with 'cacti legs'. and the ants were having a good time too.

i'm a bit pissed off though. the one thing that i didn't inherit from Mother Teo was the nose. my brother got lucky and was at the front of the line when they were giving out straight noses in the Gene Bank. given my homosexual disposition, i was prolly queuing up at 'well-endowed'. until i realized that i was at the queue for 'okay-sized'. but then, i've already acquired 'fire-power' and 'sex-drive' and 'great torque settings'. the nose though, has always been a sore point with me. back in the days of secondary school and puberty, i had plenty of blackheads and acne. admittedly, it was quite a horrid time for me. i squeezed, prodded and pressed every single pustule i could find on my face. my mirror was constantly wiped with glass cleaner to remove pus stains. and seven to eight years later, i have scarring that i have no intention to remove. there was one rather bad pimple that appeared on the tip of my nose. that left a deep indentation that isn't that noticeable until you see it at close view.

practically everyone has made fun of my nose at one point of time or other. these people include my Math tutor, my grandmother, an ex-boyfriend, my swimming coach during the primary school days, several nursing school mates and many others that have much more aesthetically-pleasing noses than mine. they have called it everything from big to rotund. there was even this really bizarre one from a random sex partner who said 'it ought to be a seperate entity and given a name of its own'. one other person said it was a Jackie Chan. as much as i would like to be associate with Jackie Chan for martial arts, back-flips, stunts and one-time marital affairs, i'm afraid the closest i can get is just the nose.

and so that's how i'm stuck with my Jackie Chan nose.

my brother's name, in case you didn't know, is Jeremy. he's a nurse as well. and he has recently signed a three-year contract with the same hospital organization as mine. so that makes a pair of nursing brothers in the same hospital. he's much slimmer and inherited vanity from me. we both dress up for the simplest occasions, use a lot of hair products and squirt enough cologne to put the fragrance counter to shame. unlike me who thinks going to the gym and jogging is a sport of its own, Jeremy plays basketball on a frequent basis (the post-gym activities in the showers burn calories, no?). he's the handsome, sportier and stylish version of Jonathan that prolly are quite popular with the gay crowd these days.

unfortunately, he's also more accident-prone than me. my mother constantly fears the day when he'll be knocked down by a Nissan Sunny when he's jogging. she's terrified that he's to suffer a cardiac arrest when he plays basketball. she's the one who always screams from the kitchen 'make sure you don't do anything dangerous!' when the brother heads out for basketball when she's cooking. she does this when she is stir-frying vegetables at high heat, chopping garlic at an intensely dangerous speed and boiling soup at the same time.

it wasn't till three weeks ago that her fears were answered when the brother came home from late night basketball with an ice-pack on the nose bridge. being the concerned parents who never had children who might require the services of the emergency department or hospitalization before, they certainly played the part badly. there was of course concern involved. at the same time, there was also a lot of irritation and spurts of 'Aiyoh!' as well. you see, this wasn't the first time that my parents have seen my brother getting sports injuries. and each time he does get one, he shrugs it off, as if saying 'Tis but a scratch, a flesh wound, a call for Paracetamol!'

apparently, what happened was that the brother was trying to grab a ball or something (i don't really know how basketball works) from another guy who could be considered pretty much a giant. it was either a case of a difference in size or a lack of skill, but the brother got elbowed in the face and ended up with a broken nose. the mother, an enrolled nurse who was watching The Amazing Race at that point of time was too mortified to look at my brother's nose. this is despite the fact that she works at the urology centre and does TURPs and kidney biopsies and handles erectile dysfunction cases on a daily basis. nurses are weird eh? my father, being the man of the house, looked at the broken nose in question with the same intensity as Nip/Tuck. i was surfing porn at that point of time.

and just when i was about to expect my father to blurt out 'So tell me what you don't like about youself?', he suddenly asked for my opinion on my brother's nose instead. a quick alt-tab from gaypornblog.com to google.com revealed much information. suffice to say, there was a slightly deviated septum (nose bridge) and a little swelling. he wasn't bleeding and it wasn't affecting his breathing. i shrugged it off with the 'flesh wound and paracetamol' sympathies and returned to surfing porn. the rest of the night was spent with the mother bemoaning things like 'why are you so careless?' and 'do you want some paracetamol?'

as luck would have it, the brother was working at the ED (as in Emergency Department, not Erectile Dysfunction) in my hospital at that point of time. he had a consultation with one of the doctors there and came back the next day with an elective admission into the hospital at the end of the week for an operation to correct the deviated septum. YES! A RHINOPLASTY! my brother who already has my mother's perfect nose is going to get his nose even more perfected! and i who have been suffering the fate of the Jackie Chan nose was jealous. not only because he is going to get a nose of the celebrities, but also that he practically arranged the whole admission behind the parents' backs. and after what i think is a staff price and a nose job done by a consultant, the total amount would cost $1100, totally deductible from my parents' medisave (a Singaporean healthcare scheme) account.

yes, we are all saving for our children's nose jobs.

my brother's operation day was a Friday. it was also the same day when i sat for my LSCN (Life Savers Course for Nurses) practical and theory test. i passed my practical bit with flying colours, but i failed the written test three times in a row with the same marks of 67%. they require a 80% passing mark. it was a rather depressing day. as i trudged from the LSCN centre to the hospital (which was just a stone's throw away, which reminds me that i would now like to throw a stone at my brother's $1100 nose), i couldn't but help thinking how horrid the day was.

as a hospital visitation formality, i bought some pastries from the local cake shop in the hospital as a peace offering for the brother. my parents are strict with the formalities, they used to buy Danish Butter Cookies whenever they visited anyone in the hospital. as i made my way through the ward, i met a few familiar faces. a nurse from my nursing student batch, a doctor whom i've worked with before who i suspected was gay, a few other familiar co-workers. all of them obviously wondering what in the world i was doing there.

and there it was just as i entered the room, the $1100 nose job. resting on the bed, exhausted from the anaesthetic, and looking very serene. maybe it was the dim lighting, maybe it was the fact that i was a bit defeated from having failed my LSCN theory, or maybe it was just the fact that there's $1100 sitting on my brother's face, but at that point of time, i looked at my brother fondly. and i thought back about the times when we were young and used to talk and play avidly. these days, we just happen to be the occupants sharing a room in this life. he would borrow my clothes, and i would occasionally borrow his (i do it more than him). we share hair products and cologne. we practice almost the same beauty routine and yet we don't talk at all. in fact, the last time i talked to him seems to be more of a matter of months rather than days, hours or even minutes.

and so i sat on the chair for about a half hour or so. staring at my brother's face. looking at him eye-to-eye. except that his eyes were closed. i've never looked at him for such a long time that it made me realize that he had the same triangular face as me. obviously another Teo family trait obtained from the mother. the following day, my brother came home and spent the rest of the day sleeping. a nose guard was in place, as if in anticipation of revelation at Christie's.

the starting price was of course $1100.

life is a funny thing

2008-02-09T12:08:00.000+08:00

'life is a funny thing' - i've come to realize that that's a line i use most often when i've got nothing conversationally better to add. come to think of it, it's more like a conversational starter, filler and ender. you know those great one-to-one moments when no caption summarizes it better than words like 'BIG OMINOUS PAUSE' or 'GAPING SILENCE' or even 'HOW DO I FAST FORWARD TO THE PORTION WHERE WE HAVE HOT SEX?' of course, some great alternatives are fine wine and smooth-talking. however, 'fine' wine hardly relates to 'fine' pricing and i kill conversations so fast that i've nicknamed myself the 'smother'-talker. so what's a financially-challenged and conversationally-inept person to do?

it's times like these when i pull out my full and rock-hard weapon called, nope... not my cock. you can't go whipping your privates around like a weapon. women and men alike will be screaming and you're not even at the Folsom Street Parade. what i'm referring to is my collection of life stories. what i would like to call my 'Life is a Funny Thing' (LiFT) collection. i mean, i do share a big part of my 'LiFT' collection on this blog with no holds barred and plenty of crude language and context thrown in for good measure. but of course, to maintain an aura of mystery and market value, i still have to hold back that occasional few. some are certainly bizarre life stories. some are just downright embarrassing that i would rather share with a select few (which those select few will pass down to another select few - gossipers! whoremongers!). some are just better told with the actions involved ('and so we topped each other in this really tantric position that resulted in a penile fracture...').

all that said, i'm glad my life so far has been enriched with a lot of weird people and events that make this blog palatable and interesting enough to maintain an average readership of 216 daily (or at least that's what the blog counter says). and it's all thanks to you, the readers that make the numbers. so give yourself a pat on the back for that. you know what's the uber-weird thing though? nobody in this good Earth, and i swear nobody except TWO very brave and courageous souls have approached me on the streets, stating my blog as a point of recognition. maybe it's the fact that we're in Singapore and we're Asian and we're conservative and all that. or maybe it's the crude facts that i post online that make people want to just maintain that fifty metre radius around me.

but really, i won't and i don't and anyways i can't really bite well now given the Bell's Palsy. and if you think i look very scary, it's just part of the attitude that comes along with a goatee. i go to the gym for aesthetic purposes. the pectorals are not there for Fight Club. and really i'm a nice guy through and through. so here's the deal i'm trying to strike with any of you readers who see me on the streets. if you see me, just pop by and say hi. and you could chat up with me, bum a cigarette from me, and i would be more than willing to share with you a LiFT story if you have the time and the inclination to listen. of course, you might be wondering why all of a sudden i'm trying to make contact with the world outside this blog.

it all came into perspective when the two brave souls approached me in public. nearly a few hours after i blogged about my Bell's Palsy, i found myself at the hospital's staff gym trying to ensure that the one-sided paralysis was isolated at the face. so there i was, doing bicep curls while staring at the mirror with lop-sided grunting faces. all of a sudden, one kindly-looking gentleman approached me and asked amidst the clanging of the Smith Machine and the incessant 'clump clump clump' of fat office women on the treadmills. 'HOW'S YOUR BELL'S PALSY AH?' he asked, in a voice that was perhaps a tad too loud. i surveyed the scene to realize that there were only a few regular gymmers around, most of them amongst the administrative staff. okay, so there wasn't any equipped enough with medical knowledge to know what Bell's Palsy was.

i can't remember what i told the nice stranger. and i've never got your name. but i appreciate the fact that you took the guts to come up to someone that you've read online about and ask about a medical condition. so thank you for making the effort, i appreciate it. well, as for the other stranger, let's just say that i was at a local coffee joint having cigarettes when i was approached by a guy that was quite pleasant on the eyes. he requested that i not write about him. and so i shall respect that. he admitted that it took a lot of 'courage and silliness' approach me, the random stranger. suffice to say, we made great conversation over cigarettes and went our ways.

two people have tried it. so why not you? after all, there's good conversation to be had and free cigarettes. and oh yes, that upLiFTing tantric sex story involving a penile fracture awaiting to be told.

there's a hole in my mouth

2008-02-04T10:11:00.001+08:00

i gave two solid knocks on the door. a solid wooden door like that definitely deserved an equally solid knock. not just one in fact, but two.

through the opaque glass that was set in the door, i could make out about four people inside the room. all of them, obviously anticipating what i had to present. the fact that i was only twenty-three only made them all the more excited.

'hi, i'm the MG chap!' i introduced myself as i pushed the creaky door open. i thought to myself that two solid knocks were severely undeserved as the door screamed for a burst of lubricant.

'thanks for seeing me on such short notice' i said, trying my best to muster a smile. it must have looked like a lop-sided one, come to think of it. bloody nerves just don't work when i'm nervous.

i took a seat and maintained that lop-sided smile with the other four people in the room. i think they must have noticed and expected it. but the kindly lady directly in front of me told me to relax. she asked a few questions of formality, perhaps to make me feel more relaxed. perhaps to set the mood of things to come.

'come...' she said.

'what?!' my mind exclaimed.

'come,' she continued 'i want to see you smile for me, i want to see the lack of symmetry!'

i couldn't help but think of what a mad plastic surgeon, Dr. J.S. Steiman, once said in an Xbox 360 game. Bioshock, to be exact

Aphrodite is walking the halls - shimmering, like a scalpel...
'Steinman,' she calls, 'Steinman! I have what you're looking for! Just
open your eyes!' And when I see her, she cuts into me a thousand
beautiful pieces.

Today I had lunch with the Goddess, 'Steinman,' she said...
'I'm here to free you from the tyranny of the commonplace.
I'm here to show you a new kind of beauty.'
I asked her, 'What do you mean, Goddess?'
'Symmetry, dear Steinman.
It's time we did something about symmetry...'

none the less, i did that lop-sided smile that was so characteristic of me these days. she proceeded to do the same with my hands. my arms. my legs. i felt a bit like the Vitruvian man. except fully-clothed, less lithe and perhaps with a better hair-stylist.

suffice to say, she touched me in places where i've never thought of touching before. and believe me when i tell you that i touch myself a lot. one by one, i was examined by the other three people in the room. they all gave weird stares. some of inquisitiveness, some of curiousness. but all of them refrained from passing a comment.

for some reason the novelty of touching a twenty-three year old gay man in bizarre places seemed to pass within twenty minutes. three people left the room, leaving me and the kindly lady who told me to 'come', alone. she grabbed my wrists, and suddenly applied a great exertion against me. i felt pinned down despite the fact that she was no heavy than forty-five kilograms.

failing to push me back, she reached for my feet instead, trying her best to topple me over.

'i seriously need a gym membership' i thought to myself.

it wasn't till a good five minutes later, when we sat back on our respective chairs. pent up, and exhausted from the excessive pushing. no prodding, i thought with relief.

'well, it's not MG, for sure' she smiled to me.

it all started three days ago when i was smoking. i kept making squeaky noises with my lips when i placed my cigarette on the left side of my mouth. when i smoked on the right side of my mouth, the only things i emitted was a puff of smoke.

it got worse when i tried drinking soup. i actually leaked. from the right side of my mouth! it got worse the next day when i tried to wink at someone and discovered that i couldn't wink on my right side. i could muster something that looked like a perverted old man with a history of stroke trying to make a pass at some sweet, young thing. yes, it's that scary! so i told Pangkeng about what has been going on with me. who told my gay colleague. who told several other colleagues. who told my supervisor. this particular su pervisor is my favourite one apparently. she's young, she's quite happening and she's intelligent, armed with a Masters in Nursing. she even brought Pangkeng and me out with her husband to St. James once. we went back home, having polished off a bottle of Jack Daniels. it was a black-labelled one. and we didn't foot a single cent. she even has a pet dog at home. and i like people with pets.

she told me to close both eyes. with which i did with lop-sidedness. she told me to smile. which i did with the same seemingly half-heartedness. and she gave me this serious-look which seemed to say 'you might have to be put on a ventilator for life if the worse comes to worst because it might be a fatal disease you're having.' of course, she never said that. she said to me: 'it might be MG'. and lo and behold, i just blurted out the words 'Myasthenia Gravis?' it's one of those rare epiphanic moments when something which you've studied during your student years suddenly just pops up once again. and like old acquaintances, you embrace or you just study it again. except this time, it's embracing me so tightly that i can't wink at people or smoke with a cool demeanour.

of course, i tried to play it down and tell her, 'Maybe it's Bell's Palsy lah!' two things crossed my mind at this time, the first being 'Where are these bizarre medical terms popping up from when i got a horrid C5 grading for my anatomy and physiology during my nursing student days?' the other thought was, 'Doesn't Bell's Palsy have some small minute scientific connection to a certain strain of Herpes Simplex? Wait, when was the last time i had sex? Oh, three months. Or was it weeks? Oh i just had sex with the janitor three hours ago. Haha, just playing tricks on my mind!'

none the less, my favourite supervisor made some important-looking calls to several people she worked with at the neurology department previously. and believe me, she had to make a lot of calls because it was a Saturday and stethoscope-wielding health-care professionals were rushing off to have brunch and/or sex. within fifteen minutes, she came back with a piece of rough paper with instructions to look for a Burmese neurologist-on-call at a neurology ward in the hospital.

to which i proceed to of course. of course, i must not neglect to mention that i managed to take up practically a half-hour to settle some discharges, order a carton of Ensure (a nutritious mix of strawberry-flavoured milk and i think, protein) for a home bound patient, serve some medication, chit-chat with some people, clear up some lunch trays, work-related stuff, BEFORE i managed to run off for my impromptu appointment. such is an Asian working environment. you can be stroking, but they don't care. they would rather see you attempt to change that diaper while you are fitting in a patient's shit than send you off to the Emergency Department.

and thus i made my way. the neurologist-on-call was really a kindly young lady. like all Burmese people i have met in my life so far, she was patient and really hospitable (while all this was happening in a hospital, hur hur. okay, not funny). she tried to get me to raise my eyebrows, smile, close my eyes, open my mouth, stick out my tongue. to which there was an obvious deficit in the right side. she proceeded to try some motion exercises with which she was trying to prove there was some right-sided weakness with my right arm and limbs. apparently, it was isolated to my face only.

she was convinced that it was nothing more serious than Bell's Palsy. i had a fever last week which might have caused swelling somewhere along my face and thus causing one isolated facial nerve to function half-heartedly. it's treatable with steroids and anti-viral meds for that nasty herpes virus. i'm a knowledge whore. so i immediately wiki-ed Bell's Palsy. the prognosis is generally good. requiring a usual three weeks to see some progress and three to six months for complete recovery. what? three to six months??????????? what are the Catholic kids living opposite me going to say?????????? UNCLE, why is it you can only smile with one side of your face??????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!

i reported the news back to my supervisor. with which she gave me a very reassuring smile. i returned the smile with my not-so-reassuring version of a smile. for the rest of the afternoon, the rest of my colleagues were suddenly extra kind to me. they offered to help me serve my meds, thinking that i might be put on an artificial respirator within the hour. they constantly watched over me, ready to catch me when i showed signs of epilepsy. i felt reassured, yet at the same time irritated. to which i summarized to Pangkeng and my gay colleague,

'i'm not that afraid to die really. and even if i do, you guys will be there to make sure that when i'm on my death bed, you will make sure i'm a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) case. you see, i'm such a considerate patient! really, i'm tried all four vices of life, i'm not interested in a relationship, i'm twenty-three and this will prolly be the only few years when i'm happy to die now. so even if i die now, i'll die with no regrets. well, except for not going to a Mardi Gras yet.'

i thought it was a bit harsh. Pangkeng obviously didn't know what Mardi Gras was. and my gay colleague knew i was prolly joking about it as well. and so, i dithered about myself for the rest of the shift. of course, i couldn't help stoning out and contemplating the future of one-sided facial weakness. what if it gets worse? what if the MG i really wanted wasn't Mardi Gras but Myasthenia Gravis? what if what if. how come nobody thinks of positive 'what ifs'? as i walked to the train station with Pangkeng and the gay colleague that afternoon after shift, we were quietly smoking our cigarettes and making minor small talk. i tried to lighten the mood by making stupid jokes about one-sided facial weakness. apparently, i think they were irritated with my method of coping with what seemed to them, a crippling facial disease. i felt bad for patronizing them. so i decided to feed them with what they wanted by being serious for once.

i decided to visit the Emergency Department yesterday. in my hospital, no less. the doctor prescribed steroids and acyclovir and gave me three days of medical leave. i'd already taken one day for fever at the beginning of the week, so i felt bad for taking another at the end of the week (horrid, Asian working environment). as i handed over my medical certificate over to a different supervisor who was on shift, she taught me a few idiotic-looking facial exercises (she was neuro-trained). to which i actually decided to do occasionally at home.

i went home that Sunday, feeling unworried about my condition, and more guilty about taking medical leave for a sunday afternoon. sunday afternoons were always busy in our wards. Pangkeng was working that Sunday afternoon and i felt extra bad about leaving a brother in the lurch. the only good reason i could come up with was that i didn't get to sleep the previous night since i could only close my right eye to a maximum of 75%. i even tried putting scotch tape on my eye. which i had a hard time washing off after that. i say, try washing your face with facial wash when you cannot close your eyes properly.

and just in case you're wondering, i still look normal. the only good thing now is that i can drool at hot men in public and blame it on Bell's Palsy.

the departure of the satanic neighbour

2008-01-31T10:15:00.000+08:00

i've never liked the whole process of moving and shifting houses. it's not only tedious, it's involves a lot of administrative work, and oh boy, bizarre people who have never seen a very neat house complete with Christianly wall hangings. i remember the first time my family sold our five-room apartment at Chua Chu Kang, we had what Singaporeans fondly call 'the viewing'. this involves a lot of Tetrapack drinks, hor d'oeuvres upon my mother's insistence ('buyers can't make decisions on an empty stomach!'), and a lot of housework. i was always in charge of vacuuming. my parents would take the viewers on a short tour around our obsessively clean five-room apartment. once a viewer left the apartment, i would be out with the vacuum cleaner doing my thang.

the Zhang family lodgings are perhaps one of the cleanest and homeliest of places around. we don't employ domestic help to do the housework, so its mainly left to the people living in my house. except the brother of course, who believes in maids (my parents and i, we're the maids) and doesn't even bother to do a single piece of housework. i can't wait to boot his lazy ass to National Service. i have been to a fair number of people's homes in my time, and well.... stayed overnight on some instances as well. and nothing comes close to the overall neatness and cleanliness that my home has. in fact, i have this weird need to check out people's toilets when i visit. not only do you get to see their beauty secrets, you also get to see the stray hairs and rolling balls of dust (like in those Westerns), all happening beside their expensive Biotherms and SK-IIs.

the one thing however, that really makes the Zhang residence stand out the most, has got to be the feelings evoked within the viewers when they visit our home. maybe it's my father's ardent zealousness and the four different bibles and various plaques of bible verses (Joshua 24:15, As for me and my house we will serve the Lord) all hanging around the house, but the general comment that my parents get from them potential buyers are quite bizarre:

'You've got a very peaceful and tranquil home!' - this lady never bought the apartment

'I can feel a good spirit in this house, almost like an angel!' - i was pretty freaked out by this, coming from a couple of newly-weds. they didn't buy the house as well.

'You've got a good Christianly home! And your this finger food ah, the clams are excellent!' - this elderly couple (Christians as well) took an extra portion of Tetrapack drinks and polished off my mother's hor d'oeuvres, AND NEVER BOUGHT THE HOUSE! Parasites!

'I get a good feeling in this house!' - Okay yes, yes, we all get it! this house comes free with a good spirit and a psuedo-presence of the Good Lord, so are you going to buy the bloody apartment?

one of the problems we didn't have any luck after two viewings could simply boil down to the fact that my parents wanted to strike a deal with other Christian brethren. and so, they requested for a Christian house agent, to get more potential Christian buyers. perhaps to preserve the warm, snugly feeling of God in our home, or simply just so that God can broker the deal or something. it wasn't until we had the first non-Christian buyer that came to our home and had a quick look. they bought it on the spot. and that evening, i remember my father bringing the whole family out to some expensive buffet somewhere.

the following week, he paid the down payment for a Nissan Sunny, from a Christian car salesman no less.

remember the seemingly crazy neighbour who lives above me that goes shouting 'ZHU BAH JIE' at the most insane of hours (eg. midnight?). actually, for a quick recap, you could just refer to project 355: even free has a motive (yes, click on it! you know you want to!). the good news is, he's moving out. the bad news is, not without damage to my health. or at least, that's what i suspect. and for a good reason too.

like i mentioned before, there was a period of time when the Satanist neighbour would give out free cigarettes for no apparent reason. most of the time, i would refuse to take them or i would not smoke them. it wasn't until last year October, that he started free loading off my cigarettes. not helping is the fact that the neighbour is a practising Satanist whom i can't help wonder if he has done stuff to my father before. he once mentioned while smoking my cigarettes, 'hey, i think your father doesn't like me' (my father being ardent and zealous and all that). just prior to this sentence, he was talking about how he cursed his classmates using voodoo dolls.

besides, it's not like i can run away from him. this neighbour lives above me. his balcony is just above my front door. so each time i pop out for a smoke, there he would be, looking down from the balcony and shouting to me 'Smoking ah???!' and within ten seconds, he would run out from his home and join me for a smoke. and watching him smoke can be quite unnerving. i had my suspicions that he was on psychiatric medication. he needs help lighting his cigarettes, given that his hands are always trembling. plus he's always licking his parched lips - dehydration - another side effect of anti-psychotics. it wasn't until one day when i made the fatal error of giving him my mobile phone number when he casually mentioned after six missed calls in a row, 'Hey, i didn't go see my psychiatrist today.'

the first thought that came to mind was 'Chee bye!' the second thought was 'how am i going to reject giving a psychiatric satanist neighbour cigarettes?' so we've proven the PSY bit. but what about the Satanic bit? after all, i've only got his word to take it for real. well, throughout our conversations sponsored by my free cigarettes, he would constantly mention a lesser demon. he would always mention how he wanted to 'Soul Link' with the demon and gain its powers and all that dark mumbo-jumbo. i of course, thought he was joking. until the day when he showed me his identification card whereby he took on the name of this lesser demon. once again, the first thought that came to mind was 'Chee bye!'

and so began a game of hide-and-seek. i would actually sneak out just to smoke. and when the Satanist neighbour could actually smell my cigarette smoke, he would dash out of his house making a whole lot of noise in the process. and i, scantily clad in boxer briefs and singlet, would be chased around the whole apartment block just trying to avoid contact with him. because what would you do when a psychotic and Satanist neighbour asks you for a cigarette and already for the umpteenth time? not that i'm being stingy, but there's a limit to free even.

it wasn't till the last time in late December when i sat down with him for a cigarette (it was after the night shift and i was too tired to get chased around the block), that he said to me cryptically: 'I've done something really bad. Something really bad that i would never be forgiven.' when taken in context, the last time i bumped into him before this was the first time i outright refused to give him cigarettes because he was holding his own pack in his hands. 'Why should i give you cigarettes when you have your own?' i told him. and he left with a disgruntled look on his face.

i couldn't help but shudder to recall one other conversation we had about how he had tried to kill his parents when he was 'possessed' by a lesser demon and how the police were involved. or the time when he decided to stop taking his anti-psychotics. with all this in mind, i can't help but be inclined to draw a missing link between sickness and a work of mischief on the Satanist's part.

the Satanist has moved out since then. but like i said, not without suspected damage to my health.

fourteen years in Chua Chu Kang

2008-01-24T09:05:00.000+08:00

this is not National Geographic. this is Chua Chu Kang. an apt caption for this picture would perhaps be 'mating over mangoes'.

i've been living in my current estate of Chua Chu Kang for at least fourteen years to come. and admittedly, i've never really liked it. if you take a walk through the block of flats within Chua Chu Kang, the most prominent thing you would notice is the bizarre and varied amounts of litter that are strewn across the whole estate. beer cans at the void deck, used condoms at the carpark, Enalapril (cheap hypertensive medication) foils along the corridor, crumpled kleenex EVERYDAY at this particular spot under some windows, more than ten grossly yellowed Q-Tips (upon closer inspection, it's just the litter of bike-loving people who are fine-tuning their vehicles), dog poop complete with a platter of flies and some fancy French dressing that turns out to be nothing more than dog pee. the lists goes on. but obviously, my estate has a trigger-happy littering issue at hand.

and just when you thought the litter was the only bad stuff Chua Chu Kang had, i suddenly hear you complaining: 'What that strange odour that wafts in the air? it's like... chicken poop and fertilizers and dog crap and all foul-smelling creatures that roam this Earth!' the only reply i can conjure at this point of time, having lived in Chua Chu Kang for fourteen years, is: 'What smell?'

i can't help but thank God that He created the nose with the concept of Olfactory Fatigue/Adaptation in mind. to put it in simple homosexual language, you see someone hunky and handsome that you wouldn't mind having sex with. unfortunately, he has bad body odour. just give yourself a few minutes, and before you know it, that smell of unwashed underpants and egg white is gone. all thanks to Olfactory Fatigue. this is why BO should never be an excuse for not having sex with handsome, hunky gay men. this perhaps also presents new dating opportunities for the gay zookeepers and chicken farm workers.

alas, living in Chua Chu Kang is truly an immersive experience for the five senses. it constantly attacks your sense of sight, sense of smell and definitely the sense of hearing. living at the apartment directly opposite mine is a family of Catholics with two young boys and a Filipino maid. and you know how much i like kids better when they are locked away at say... orphanages and military schools. whenever i step out of the house, they run right to the door and have intellectually-stimulating and insulting conversations with me. like the following:

Neighbour's Kids: Hello uncle!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (they are that happy to see me apparently, and equally insulting at the same time, i'm only 23 for crying out loud!)
Me: (with fake pride and gusto) Hello!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
NK: Uncle, where are you going???????????????????????
Me: I'm going out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
NK: Going where????????????
Me: OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
NK: Yes, uncle!!!!!!!!! But going where??????????
Me: Isn't OUT somewhere?

don't you just love that innocence???????????????????????????
living two stories below me is an Indian family. they are generally nice people when you meet them along the corridors. and i suspect they are the ones who leave the beer cans lying around at the communal tables down at the void decks. however, stick them back in their houses and it's almost like having a Brass Band within a four-room HDB apartment. there would be a constant verbal sparring of nondescript Tamil, followed by the loud clanging sound when something culinary like say... a wok, comes into contact with some hard surface. till today, i have yet to identify whether 'hard surface' is a human head or the kitchenette.

indeed, living in Chua Chu Kang really heightens your senses. thank goodness though, no sense of touch and taste as of yet. chicken poop, i can imagine, is not exactly palatable.

caught between an uncle and an education

2008-01-23T10:04:00.000+08:00

i know this sounds absurd, but i've always managed to find plenty of correlations between nursing and prostitution.

for a start, both jobs involve plenty of 'service'. of course, 'service' being a broadly defined term here. a Staff Nurse Level I could derive irritation from making a cup of Ovaltine, the same way a Callgirl Level I gets irked when the clients start getting 'pushy' during a blowjob. similarly, both professions involve a lot of diversity. for one, you don't get to pick your clients or colleagues. since both jobs are not exactly the prime choices of the Singaporean society, you generally get a bizarre mix of people who have heard the 'calling'. the 'calling' to serve, or the 'calling' that sounds like 'ka-ching bada bling bling'. who says nursing isn't a profitable job? try working permanent nights like me.

still, the same goes for 'client' diversity. i'm almost always nursing old men who could really do with a dose of viagra to spice up the old routine. the Ho down at King's Cross would be the first to attest to that. occasionally, there would be the good-looking chap who patronizes the premises which makes you agree that there's still some hope left in this world. unfortunately, most of these men are prolly damaged goods. the type that would force Roxanne to put on her red-light.

come to think of it, nursing and prostitution are two jobs that your parents will definitely not want you to take up unless they themselves are in the profession as well. hell, even the average person generally doesn't consider the hospital or the red-light district as fantastic places of employment. in fact, i dare you to find me girls (or boys, or to be fair, trans-gendered persons) who actually think 'I wanna be a Ho, afta' ma O's!!' post GCE examinations. it's prolly for a reason as well. both professions really expose the workers to a whole platter of contagious diseases. Hepatitis, STDs, MRSA, just to name a few.

but you know what's the main connecting factor between both jobs that i respect the most? the fact that nobody wants to do them and that there are people who still do them. we need Roxannes, prolly the same way society needs Nightingales.

in case you guys didn't know, i'm currently taking a part-time overseas degree with a UK university now. all would be well and wonderful if not for the fact that my uncle is the principle of the school and my cousin who is a Staff Nurse as well is in the course too. she's quite the devout Christian, though not the pushy, ardent type, like my father. two months into the course, she prolly knows that i'm a smoker and have piercings (a great taboo within the paternal family). well, i was never that close to her to begin with.

the classmates within the class are quite of a wide diversity. there are mothers, expectant mothers, Indian Nationals, PRCs, girls who have armpit hair, smokers, people with tattoos, loud-mouthed chaps, etc. it's almost like a Motley Crue (i don't know how to do umlauts, apologies) of sorts, minus the mothers and expectant ones. not everyone in the class is really of the same learning speed however. i'm not gonna start labelling any of my classmates with degretory terms, but here's a few classic quotes that i constantly hear during class:

'If you constantly scold the nursing students, you will only bring down their morality'
- during a lesson about mentorship, let's extend our arms to welcome a new generation of heathens, harlots and charlatans.

UK Lecturer: Alright, you guys can go for a short coffee break now. Be back at quarter to ten!
Student: That's 9.50 right?
- WTH?

UK Lecturer: 'You can actually purchase these nursing texts online. Like Amazon?'
Student: 'What's Amazon ah?'
- i can't find an appropriate smarmy remark for this.

slow-learning students are one of the things i have learnt to cope with since my student nursing days at the polytechnic. i can fully understand that people have different learning speeds and are perhaps not that familiar with googling things up on the internet and thus need to ask extra yet seemingly redundant questions during class. generally, they give me plenty of time during classes to doodle on the notepad and think of witty theories like the above about nursing and prostitutes. i do have a problem however, with slow-teaching lecturers. and that's what this class is currently experiencing.

the cool thing about this nursing degree is that it accommodates the constantly changing work schedules of the typical hospital nurse. there are morning and evening classes, both taught by two different lecturers. the not-so-cool thing however, is that both lecturers are of a different (dare i say it?)... teaching calibre. the morning classes are taught by a Chinese lady who happens to be a consultant with my Uncle's school. she was trained in the UK and is pretty much good friends with one of the Principle Lecturers in the UK university. suffice to say, she's the old school of nursing type. the evening classes are taught by a Peranakan lady with a hairdo that reminds me of a curator in a very high-crass museum. she's a very 'modern' lady of sorts. with plenty of experience in the local nursing education system.

the usual attendance for the morning classes is one or two miserable peeps that have to attend it when they've got conflicting shift schedules. the evening classes are a different story however. they usually number in the 20s. on a good day, they can even hit the 30s. so evidently, the evening classes are more popular than the morning ones. and for a good reason too. given that i've been attending a lot of morning classes due to my night shifts, i daresay that i'm well-equipped to make a judgement on this. you see, the old school of nursing lecturer doesn't really prepare her stuff well. i agree that she has the adequate nursing skills to handle patients in the hospital. but she's just not that cut out for teaching. actually, wait a minute. she doesn't really teach during class. she just hands out questions and topic for us to google up during class and calls it self-learning.

which would be all great if not for the fact that the students in class are devotees to the School of Rote Memory. they pay top dollar for the degree course to be infused and force-fed with knowledge. to tell the truth, i'm fine with both the rote memory and self-learning systems of learning. the fact that the old school of nursing lecturer constantly fumbles in her lessons is quite a motivating factor for me to do a speed search on the topic and bombard her with retorts during the lesson. but hey, this is Singapore and nobody ever said 'NO' to service and knowledge force-feeding, did they?

so it seems that a revolution is on the way. my classmates are rather unhappy with the way things are going now at school. and when they prodded for my opinion, i gave a rather balanced viewpoint of things (tsk, these librans... typical). what did they really want to do with the morning class lecturer. fire her? get the management to speak to her? send her back to UK (she previously worked and lived in the UK for an extensive period of time) to drink tea and nurse old ladies in Gingham dresses? basically, i told them to consider their moves before they made one.

of course i conveniently neglected to tell them that my uncle was the principle of the school, and because of that i got a whopping $9k discount for my education fees. well, i'm not one to bite the hand that feeds me.

Someone's mom

2008-01-19T10:31:00.000+08:00

i've always liked the whole concept of coincidence. two or more random events or circumstances of striking occurrence at just seemingly mere chance. i've come to embrace coincidence as the little Kinder Surprises that life hands out on a regular basis. perhaps to make sense of all the madness that's going on around us. perhaps to give us some form of meaning in our lives. or maybe i'm just a mere mortal thinking too big when coincidence is just Life's idea of a joke reserved for her stand-up routine at some dingy cafe ('And so i let those idiotic star-crossed lovers of Mr. Fate find out that they were siblings way after they like had sex. What? Don't look at me like that. Someone had to do something about that 'star-crossed' bit, no?') after all, coincidence could boil right down to being nothing more than a mere mathematical statistic.

i've always reckoned our small little red dot of a country to be like a constantly replaying indie film of sorts. an indie film about coincidence and the fates, heavily-censored by the Media Development Authority, no less. but still, an indie film talking about how in our densely populated island of 4.5 million, there's bound to be paths crossed and interlinked in ways that you would never have expected. like the Cabin Crew boyfriend whom i went out with for about three to four months. during that period of time his grandmother was admitted into my ward for lower limb infection. she passed away one month later. we broke up another month later. i would like to think that i was there in that period of time of the ex-Cabin Crew boyfriend's life for a reason - his grandmother.

but i'm guessing it probably nothing more than mere coincidence. and perhaps Life and her flailing attempts at a career in improv.

the hospital is one place that you normally wouldn't expect or want to bump into acquaintances of yore. generally it just means bad news. they could be having loved ones in the hospital for varied reasons; from accidents to cancer. it's not exactly great conversation topics to have after having not met them for such a long time. of course, it could also mean that they've decided to sell their souls to the health-care machine. they could be doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, HR, etc. you wouldn't want that to happen as well because the health-care machines eat you up. they leave you with no life. i'm one fine example. i'm so mentally-drained over the weekends that i would rather blast people with shotguns on my Xbox 360 than go out and blast real gay people with my 'shotgun'.

sadly enough, i've met several people in the course of my career in the hospital so far. like a sarge from my Brunei army days who was only 28 and in the pink of health when he was suddenly stricken with liver disease. i never was that close to him to begin with. but when i met him in the hospital, he was haggard, sallow, awfully jaundiced with tubes sticking out of him. some were draining bile, some were draining blood. mostly, you could see it wasn't helping him that much at all.

i bumped into him a second time when i was transferring a patient to a ward that he was residing in. by charming with one of the more gay-looking nurses there (okay, there was only one gay-looking nurse), i got to peek at his case notes. to summarize, he didn't have long to live. but in the face of death, he seemed rather brave on the surface. he made some really weird requests. he asked for a Quiksilver water bottle that i had with me (i was about to go for break after i transferred the patient to the new ward). he saw my N95 and also asked if he could have the fancy-looking casing that came with the phone. i said i would try my best to see if i had any spares left. i never followed-up from there. he passed away a week later.

well, just two weeks ago i bumped into another acquaintance from my secondary school days. an awfully intelligent and humble chap from my Music 'O' level classes. suffice to say, he was the discipline master's son. which gave him the extra burden of being a model student, to begin with. it's not exactly an easy feat. i mean, my dad teaches at Sunday school and i'm already guilty of six of the seven deadly sins (i'm not that prone to wrath) every sunday. he's a particularly funny chap. i have with me a postcard that he wrote to me during class. the postcard was an advert for a play named The Exodus by The Necessary Stage. the venue was at the Gay World Stadium, Geylang Road. Geylang is a street in Singapore that's famous for wholesome foods and well... not-so-wholesome Hos. don't ask about Gay World Stadium, it's prolly just from a time when 'Gay' really meant 'i'm truly happy'.

nonetheless, this particular chap of mine boxed up with words 'GAY WORLD' in the postcard and wrote: 'GAY WORLD, AT GEYLANG SOMEMORE! EXODUS! BLASPHEMOUS!'. funny people with great morals who can see context. you just gotta love them.

so there i was going for the night shift, rushing to work. i was particularly late because i couldn't decide whether to wear the Ben Sherman or the Benetton. i'm not usually like that. so there i was rushing for the lift when there he was, coming out of the lift. at that moment, i thought to myself: I'm late for work, if he's here, he'll be here for a few more days to visit a loved one. i'll just wave and say hi.' and thus i put my thoughts into action and just waved and said hi. of course, he responded back with the same. and you know what's the irony and coincidence?

the next day, i got a message from a friend saying that his mother had passed away. seven years of having not met in such a long time and all i could think of was to say hi and go away. and thus in times like these, i can't help but take up my quill and start writing bad poetry.

'tis an acquaintance of my youth
aye, in a corridor of life and death
paths intertwined for a moment brief
a faint proof of acquaintanceship didst crack upon our lips
and paths cross'd nary to meet again
never did i see
the grief beneath that facade of crack'd lips

how to link poetry and liver together in a single sentence

2008-01-12T10:05:00.000+08:00

i've always attributed the same set of sentiments for both poetry and liver: a certain sort of disdain, accompanied with distasteful faces and perhaps thoughts such as 'What is this shit?' or 'What in God's name is this?' that was what i was prolly thinking of when my mother fed me my first piece of liver at the tender age of five. it was from a packet of mee pok (fish balls with flat yet curly noodles, sometimes with pieces of nondescript meat thrown in for added value) of course, i hadn't learnt modern day descriptive language like 'shit' back then, so words like 'eeeeee' and 'yucks' aptly describe what i must have been thinking. none the less, after twenty-three years of living in this good Earth, i still have not understood how people can bring themselves to eat liver and listen to poetry. it's admittedly, like cat food and bestiality, an acquired taste.

frankly speaking, i blame it on our education system in Singapore and its obsessive need to break down enjoyable 'O' level subjects into no more than ten-year series questions. you see, i've always enjoyed literature. this comes from a childhood of endless amounts of reading Enid Blyton and Encyclopaedia Brown. it wasn't till secondary school that i had a really inspiring literature teacher who constantly asked me cheem questions whenever i submitted my book review assignments.

there was this one time when i did a review of Tolkien's The Hobbit. it was nothing more than a fantasy novel to me, and a really good one, i must add. in the review assignment, i wrote about how i was 'thrilled to discover Bilbo Baggin's impromptu heroics despite the fact that he was involuntarily thrown into war'. when she handed me back the assignment, she asked 'So what do you really think about The Hobbit?' my young and unmoulded mind could only think of two answers to such a question: 'Ok lor' or 'Good lor'. i answered with the latter.

with a slight look of disappointment on her face, she then suggested to me, 'true, Tolkien did liken the story to the First World War, that's good. but did you notice that he also emphasized on the individual growth of Bilbo himself? and he contrasted that against the thirteen dwarfs that were with him.' i likened it to a moment of revelation, just a notch lower than enlightenment. from that day on, that was my 'O' level answer whenever people ask me about The Hobbit. 'individual growth' and 'WWI heroics'. i guess i was trained in such a way that providing a standardized 'O' level question to every question in the world, one could never go wrong.

so you see, literature which was a lovely subject worth studying was marred by education. all i could think about was how to present the literary text in question, in a way that gets me the most marks for my preliminary exams. how i can tackle the 'O' levels and discover the various themes throughout the text and the various ways the writers uses puns, metaphors and etc. alas, the 'O' levels never did feature poetry, just plays and classics. so the school had very little emphasis placed on poetry. we did do a quick run-thru of Wordsworth's Daffodils, but that was all. it's a pity that i never got to understand what the big hoohah is over the great poets and their works. i did try when i was twenty-one, but poetry seems to pale in comparison to plays and stories. the damage has been done, i guess. you can throw me 'The Raven' and i can give you a great wikipedia answer about its gothic roots and many parodies in modern day culture.

none the less, the reason why i'm suddenly writing about poetry in perhaps that i felt inclined to start writing a poem after something that happened in the course of last week. i had a fleeting encounter with an acquaintance of mine that lasted no more than three seconds at best. but three seconds are enough to get you thinking about the past and apparently, inspire poetry in me. so, here's the poem:

'tis an acquaintance of my youth
aye, in a corridor of life and death
paths intertwined for a moment brief
a faint proof of acquaintanceship didst crack upon our lips
and paths cross'd nary to meet again
never did i see
the grief beneath that facade of crack'd lips

this may come across as really bad poetry, and OKAY, it is bad poetry. like what in the world is that about cracked lips? and where's the rhythm and pattern? throw all the rotten tomatoes and organic vegetables you want.

well, just don't fling those pieces of liver at me.

Rueben

2008-01-10T17:07:00.000+08:00

the years between the onset of pubic hair to the end of acne were really horrible ones for me. admittedly, the teenage years were full of god-awful blunders and embarrassments that one could easily cross off under a heading labelled 'The Folly of Youth'. of course, it would be preferable that the heading in question be in font size 6 and perhaps in a nondescript font and language such as Wingdings and/or Swahili respectively. sometimes, i can't help but wonder what would life be like now if i redid the teenage years with all the confidence and charisma i've gained now. but that would be like playing an Xbox 360 game with the 'Invincibility' cheats turned on. and immortality can only be so fun for say... two centuries or so?

but as depressing as the teenage years were, you have to admit that it was always the friends and acquaintances that made things really fun. no matter how bad work, a social gathering or perhaps an orgy might turn out, it's always the people that make or break it in the end. not that i had a lot of good friends to begin with. but there were many bizarre acquaintances that i knew of. i was never with the good-looking idiots, the studious creeps or the cool pussies. i was part of what i called 'The Counter-Culture Geek Club'. 'club' consisting of only three people apparently: a plus-sized 'passing phase' Satanist (not sure whether she's still one) female whom i last heard married a Caucasian, a minus-sized geeky chap and well, me (i was plus-minus-sized, i guess). the three of us bonded over a self-drawn comic book which we constantly expanded. every three days or so, each of us would bring back the comic book and draw stories based on The Neverhood (a 1996 Microsoft adventure game made entirely out of clay). the other two club members came up with brilliant pictures and intriguing dialogue. my drawing skills were as good as a janitor's first day at a rocket manufacturing plant with the job title of 'rocket scientist'. i was thus in charge of spellchecking, grammar and coming up with oh-so-witty lines.

now, you might be wondering what's the point of all this sudden reminiscence? why is Jon suddenly going into all this nostalgic crap about the days of yore when Gameboy Advances, Alien Workshop jeans and the Spice Girls were still all the rage amongst the hormonal youths of the 21st Century. admittedly, i've never been one to ponder much about the past. more often than not, my past always seems to be rather embarrassing when looked upon from the perspective of the present. this of course, makes the future all that more enticing. still, sometimes, and just sometimes... i can't help but wonder about those acquaintances of yore: whatever are they doing now? have they found success? gotten pregnant? gotten into drugs? gotten divorced? or worse still, dead?

the recent debacle about Singaporean Dragonboaters drowning in the Tonle Sap river in Cambodia. i personally knew one of those guys who passed in the river. Rueben, that was his name. several words come to mind when i think about him. tall, tanned, athletic, talented, generous, sincere, creative and really, a sensitive soul through and through. i had the great privilege of working with him during our polytechnic days. he was with the Piano Ensemble while i, from the drama club, StageARTs. someone apparently came up with the brilliant initiative of working together to stage a musical of sorts that showcasted the talents from both groups. and thus, a musical of sorts was born.

suffice to say, it had a crappy script involving a strict mother, a girl with a benign cancerous growth, a boy who loved the girl with the benign cancerous growth, and a general load of 'star-crossed lovers' bull. it's a really horrid storyline that ranks amongst the equally bad ones that are a dime a dozen in our local Channel 8 dramas. the only saving grace? Rueben and his repertoire of self-composed piano pieces. i dare say that he's the main reason why anyone bothered attending the musical at all. till today, i still own a personal CD copy of all the piano pieces that he composed for the musical. aptly, the musical was the 'The Piano's Piece'.

it was whilst going through all my old .jpgs from Piano's Piece that i found this ironically poignant shot i captured of Rueben playing the piano. i wasn't like a buddy to him or anything like that. but we had a good working relationship and he was always very accommodating to all the changes that i, as the director, kept making. for that, i'm really grateful and appreciative. this may come across as very mushy, but hey, death and dying gives us plenty of excuses to say what we truly feel.

well, Rueb, the curtains may have closed, but you will always be playing that good music in my heart.

project 355: of cooks, cocks, broth & sex

2007-12-30T11:21:00.000+08:00

i have to confess that i have always loved Proverbs. not as in Old Testament Proverbs or a punny group of people who strongly support the usage of verbs in everyday conversation. no. what i'm referring to are phrases such as 'don't count your chickens until they hatch' or 'all's fair in love and war' or 'a stitch in time saves nine'. those intellectual-sounding sentences that mostly don't have much practical usage in daily conversation until 'the shit hits the fan' (which is not a proverb, by the way). if you ask me, proverbs are very apt for describing situations with more metaphorical terms than 'fuck' or 'shit' or 'chee bye'. 'tis true that us Singaporeans are very prone to use the vage (local Hokkien term better known as chee bye) to summarize the best and worst of everyday situations. like say... two gay men who meet up for a midnight rendezvous:

Gay Person A: Did you bring along the condoms?

Gay Person B: Darn! I've totally forgotten about it!

Gay Person A: Chee bye!

Gay Person B: I've also forgotten the lube!

Gay Person A: Chee bye!

this is despite the fact that neither persons in this short conversational excerpt have an iota of interest in the female genitalia. some better and more educated suggestions i have for chee bye are 'Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb' (if you're going to get into the same amount of trouble, you might as well commit the greater offense) or 'Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea' (to be stuck with two choices that are both undesirable). of course, even better alternatives i have for chee bye can range from an inflatable sex doll to anal sex with another man. but yeah... back to proverbs.

you know what i like best about these proverbs? the fact that they are summaries about the generalities of life makes them all the more flexible, malleable and contradictory to each other. take for example, they say that the stylus may be mightier than the sword, but what use is it in deflecting the noisy actions that are seemingly louder than words? or people always claiming that the bigger, the better. yet they also say that good things come in small packages.

which makes all of us wonder for sure: do you like it big or do you like it small?

they always say that 'too many cooks spoil the broth'. of course, good questions to ask when such a phrase is mentioned would be 'who are they?' and also 'what sort of broth?' or 'how many cooks are you talking about?' cooks and broth has always been one of my favourite proverbs. i've never liked having too many people around, it tends to make situations more complicated. too many people trying to help, too many people causing more trouble, too many people requiring more attention. all this thinking about having too many people around fell into place when i participated in my first ever pre-planned gathering of gay men in a hotel room with the intent of fulfilling their carnal desires. or simply put, an orgy.

this may come as a bit of a revelation, but yeah, i'm in virgin territory when it comes to orgies. suffice to say, i've given this issue quite the long thought prior to this. i mean, orgies are fun and all. but when you throw in the social mechanics of the gay men, it makes things go really awry. everybody wants the ones with the ones with the nice bodies, the cute faces, the charming personalities, the big endowments. the ugly, the not-so-fit, the not so well-endowed, they all get left out. and when men get left out in sex, there's bound to be some form of social and sexual tension in the air.

a regular of mine arranged for a session with me, but only popped the orgy question way after we checked into the hotel room. now this regular isn't exceptionally handsome or fit or anything like that. the only reason why i still meet up with him is because we make really good conversation and share good times together. that's the intimacy that i like when it comes to sex. but of course, i'm good for spicing up the old routine and since he's the one paying for the exorbitant hotel room, i don't have much say, do i? and thus 11pm came and two other people arrived. for generalization's sake, let's label them as 'Lean and tanned Dragonboater' and 'Hunky, average-looking, easy-going chap'.

being new to all this, it was awkward to get the ball rolling. so i did what i did best to ease social tensions, i offered cigarettes to everyone. apparently, only Hunky was a social smoker, to which i told him, 'Hey... this is a social setting, so please don't hesitate to help yourself to the cigarettes if you are up for it.' alas, before Hunky even had the chance to do so, my regular pounced upon him like a hyena devoid of food for several days. i've never seen such an immense want for sex before. maybe it was because he was tripping. but words like 'devour' and 'desperation' come to mind. with Hunky pre-occupying the regular, i was left with Dragonboater. so we made small talk which eventually led to sex. i bonked him and later on, he bonked me as well.

but truth be told, i was eyeing for Hunky. nice chest, nice abs, an admitted narcissist (quote: 'I like to sit in front of the mirror to get hard'), of a jovial nature and really, a nice guy all round. that's my kinda guy. the night was still young though, and i knew sooner or later, Hunky would come round to me. i spent the earlier part of the night dispensing silly little comments like 'Watch the porn, it helps' or 'i wonder what they are doing in the toilet' (the regular and Hunky made their way to the toilet for a rather extensive period of time). suffice to say, the regular exhausted Hunky with his insatiable appetite for sex. i think this is why Hunky called in for reinforcements at about 2am in the morning. and the Calvary came at 4am in the form of a lean good-looking chap that i've come across before on the local gay internet personals. let's label him as eh... 'Curved 6"', for obvious reasons.

Hunky was wise in the sense that he briefed Curved 6" on what had happened in the hotel room so far. and Curved 6" who was a seemingly pro on the social mechanics behind an orgy spent a good three to four hour satisfying the regular and his needs. within that time, i got to bonk Dragonboater again, i got to bonk Hunky, i got to bonk Curved 6", got bonked by Curved 6" and got bonked again by Dragonboater. Hunky was considerably well-endowed. alas, he had problems getting hard due to the fact that he was trippin' too. 6am came and went. and the regular was getting more and more desperate. i haven't really spent time with Curved 6" because the regular was taking up a whole lot of time with him. and when i did, the regular would go into a sulk and say things like 'No no... it's okay, you finish up with him first' in a sort of sour tone that threatened to call off the whole orgy. this is why i hate having too many people around.

i was rather disgusted at 9am though. Hunky who had problems maintaining an erection was forced to have one in the bathroom by the regular. it's one thing to be horny. but to be horny to the point of forcing people to have sex with you, that's seriously embarrassing. i kept saying stuff like 'Thanks Hunky, for making the effort' and 'Thanks Curved 6" for being so self-sacrificial' throughout the entire night. i ended the night by giving all three men my number upon request, with the intent of keeping contact with none of them. not because i didn't like having sex with them, but rather my 'one-night-only' policy, another reason why i hate having sex with too many people: the after-sex and having to reject their advances for more sex after the entire session.

but as for Hunky... well, he might be worth the effort.

too many cooks spoil the broth? indeed, too many cocks spoil the sex as well.

project 355: merry christmas, y'all!

2007-12-25T17:04:00.000+08:00

well the attached .jpg says it all, doesn't it?

project 355: how my father nearly stole christmas away

2007-12-24T09:15:00.000+08:00

with twenty-three years (and an increasing waistline) under my belt, the festive season seems to bring about a new perspective. i know this sounds very evangelical and all, but it wasn't till several days ago that i started thinking about Christmas and what i meant to me. but okay, to be fair, i want you to think about it too: what does Christmas mean to you? a Nigella-inspired turkey (i'm seriously watching too much Discovery Travel & Living)? 'i-don't-want-to-spend-Christmas-alone' relationships (the air steward and me was such)? the frantic search for Christmas wish lists? an even more frantic search for marked-down purchases in the bargain bin? Christmas sex? Christmas albums? attending church services?

well, i can't help but love Christmas. and with a 13th month bonus this year, it's actually the only season whereby i bother spending a lot of money on people. for the most part of the year, i'm constantly living on tenterhooks, wondering whether i have enough to tide me through the day. call me a scrooge or just plain practical, but if you don't even have money for yourself, how are you going to have money for others? no matter what, this is the first Christmas whereby i blew close to $600 on colleagues, friends and loved ones. i bought Pangkeng a Crumpler (he bought me a Braun Buffel), several gay people New Urban Male vouchers, handbags for several girls and loads of candied foods for acquaintances.

indeed, Christmas is the only time when people are generous enough to pause and think of others. that perhaps, is one of the many things that Christmas means to me this year.

my paternal family have a yearly tradition that we started nearly a decade ago. and i think it's a really good one that every family should have. no i'm not talking about the Christmas gift exchange (we started this great tradition practically twenty-three years ago). every year, my paternal family would host a potluck at a random relative's place. there would be a different food theme every year. this year was a boring 'western cuisine' filled with meat from every four-legged creature that our good Lord created for farmlife (turkeys have four legs, just that two of them look like wings). the previous year was a Japanese christmas whereby my mom wowed the crowd away with her Golden Curry tonkatsu.

this year is very different for many of us cousins. as most of us are working or studying in tertiary institutions now, we are all expected to bring some object of worth to the potluck. one brought a girlfriend (no, we didn't have her for Christmas). another presented a Christmas compilation to the various families in the paternal side. while another generous one brought a decadent chocolate cake with an ice-cream filling that melts way before you could even put it in your mouth (it was a really messy and liquidated affair). me, you're asking? i brought a roll of honey-baked ham. or as i would like to call it in Hokkien terms: 'ji bu ham' (one roll of ham). it wasn't received at the potluck as turkey, beef and chicken had already made their presence at the affair. but i'm sure they will think of me during breakfast today.

the food at these potlucks is one thing. but i think most of the adults are looking forward to the portion after the food, what i would like to call 'The Sharing Sessions'. given that my entire paternal family is supposedly Christian, we are all wrestled into a time of counting our blessings for the year. 'supposedly Christian' because i can think of a few relatives who don't exactly exhibit the most 'Christianly' of behaviours. mainly though, it's just me. what usually happens is that we all pull up chairs and various bit of bric-a-brac that we can park our expanded asses on and start recollecting what the Lord has done for us this year.

it's quite a struggle for me every year as i think of something good to say. when The Sharing Sessions were first initiated, i focused on studies and health. the general lines of sharing would be like 'Ehrm.... thank God that i'm still alive and that i still have an education despite bad results this year.' the family would constantly interject with irritating bits of sentences like 'and what about a girlfriend?' it took them about five years of conditioning before they realized that i wasn't that interested in a relationship during this prime of my youth. of course, that's the 'official' statement. you guys and all my various male-gendered sex partners know the reality behind it.

these Sharing Sessions would normally be emotional for some of the relatives. it's a constant running joke that a tissue box would have to be present at these sessions. one random relative would throw a box of Kleenex to whoever that they think was about to unload a barrage of emotion onto the family. some of the really horrid excuses that these relatives use to cry are stuff like 'Oh! My child is so useless, always quarrelling with me!!!' or 'Oh my Children are crap in their studies!!' my parents take extra caution to never let on anything about the family. a decade of Sharing Sessions later, my parents have yet to shed an emo tear. inside i'm thinking 'Heng man!'

this year however, the atmosphere seems a little different. like i said, everybody's now a little more matured, a little more adult-like, a little more ploughed down by the realities of this world. the various cousins shared things that veered away from studies and health. some had more pressing issues like blessings for surviving through National Service, providing students (there are six teachers in the family, one of them a kindergarten principal), protection at work (four nurses), safety on the roads (one taxi-driver), good business (my uncle who opened the Nursing Degree education centre and a contractor uncle), greater understanding of the bible (one pastor), better health (my grandmother who's nearly a bionic woman now that she has had so many screws and metal bits implanted into her), etc.

my father however, had a more pressing concern. just as the Sharing Session was about to commence, he asked a relative (whose house we hosted this year's potluck at) for a Chinese bible. having lived with my father for many years, i have come to understand that this is not a sign to dread for. arm my father with a Bible, and he thinks he's invincible. just as about to start sharing his bit of prayers and thanksgiving, he started flipping to the book of Revelations. and if there's one thing that should never be brought up during Christmas, it's that the end of the world is near (which is basically what the Revelations are all about). and true to his evangelical and zealous nature, he started sharing with the family the eight signs that indicated the second coming of the Lord. i shall spare you the depressing details and instead tell you that there was this awkward mood after the father finished his twenty minute exhortation.

the only time of the year where people are comforted by the fact that they still have family that still bother to meet up for a Christmas dinner and my father ruins it by sharing with everyone that 'The world is coming to an end but we'll all meet again in Heaven, ha ha!' (he said that, seriously). i was tempted to interject with 'but your son will still be here consorting with men, ha ha!', but bit my tongue down and went into a foetal position until the whole Revelations episode tided over. my father ended up not sharing anything about blessings and thanksgiving after that as he was so immersed in his exhortation. and nobody bothered to ask him for any prayer requests for the next year. it was that bad, yeap.

that was not all however. like i said, with the Bible in one hand, my father seems to think that makes him a bit of a Deacon or a Pastor of sorts. with each sharing that the various relatives did from that point on, he started to chastise them for not giving them the glory. of course, this was done in a good-hearted nature. like say, my nursing cousin who's in the same nursing degree course as me asked for protection against the unseen forces during the night shifts. and straight away, my father reached for the bible and flipped to Job quoting that the Lord will not let the unseen forces attack Christians without permission. and even if He does, it's not something that we will not be able to withstand ('Ghosts need permits from God to scare you, ha ha!').

thank goodness all this zealousness was quelled when my uncle (the one who opened the nursing degree) said the following, 'Teo (my father's surname) ah, sorry to interrupt. but we need to carry on with the sharing as we're running out of time and some of our children need to go home.' (it was already 11pm then). indeed, there's a time to be Christianly, and there's a time to be secular.

inside, i'm going 'Heng ah!'

project 355: a gay man and his shoes

2007-12-22T09:40:00.000+08:00

i've always been one to believe that the only worthy reason of looking down (literally) at people are their shoes. of course, you would very much want to digress if you're gay, and rearrange certain bits of the previous sentence. rearrangements like 'the only worthy reason of looking down at men are their (insert area of interest that lies below the waist)'. but then again, some people like to look down at such things, while others prefer an eye-to-eye level when it comes to matters like these. so let's just leave it at that, eh?

well feet and dicks have always had plenty of connotations together. to begin with, the urban legend that goes about regarding men with size 11 feet have 'size 11' penises should defnitely remain as that, an urban legend. i once knew of a random guy i met at the spa whose huge feet (and nice body and rather chiselled-looking face) attracted me (not that i have a fetish for all things footy, mind you) into a random room with him. before i knew it, the towels were off and well... let's just say that it wasn't exactly 'size 11' to begin with. 'size 1' was more apt. i ended up bonking the poor chap.

the only good that i saw out of it was that he had very firm footing to counter my hard thrusts.

call me sentimental, possessive or just outright stingy, but i can't help but hold on to any pair of shoes that i own for an overly-extended period of time. to me, it's always the shoes that make or break an outfit. Mr. Timberlake has his sneakers. Ryan Stiles has his flamboyant 1950s footwear. Imelda Marcos has her famous collection in Marikina, Manila ('They went into my klosets looking for skeletonnes, but thunk Gawd, all they pound were shoes, beautipool shoes'). and my mother basically takes up a third of the shoe cabinet plus another half of the store room. just in case you're wondering, i take up only a third of the shoe cabinet. my father and brother take up the other miserly third, give and take. to tell the truth, i think my collection spills into my father's and brother's third.

when it comes to purchasing them, i'm very particular about my shoes. and all the gay men will tell you that men's shoes are not exactly cheap and of a wide variety to begin with. a shade too bright and you'll be considered flamboyant. a design too feminine and it just screams 'i'm a bottom! fuck me!' and don't get me started on local designers who plagiarize luxury brands to produce a bastard child of these shoes. all in all, shoes are quite an effort. and that is why, i take pride and give respect to men who can procure shoes that look good, feel good and make them last.

come to think of it, the last time i bought a new pair of shoes was a depressing eleven months ago. there's nothing new on the market that exactly entices me. Havianas are getting passe (and still, i bought a pair for Christmas on thirteenth month bonus money). Converses are a dime a dozen. and shoes that combine formal elements and the streets, still end up looking like they ought to be matched with businesswear. i did consider purchasing a pair of limited edition Puma sneakers. you know the type that are oh-so-in with the gay crowd these days. unfortunately, my endomorphic frame prevents me from looking good in them (i feel very 'unbalanced' in them). the only shoes that i truly feel comfortable in are apparently skater shoes. gimme a pair from Globe and you'll make a happy gay sk8erboi out of me.

same goes for those Nike Airforce Ones (Nike AF-1). these flat-soled things are just apt for my work. i can bring a patient to bathe in them and they are as waterproof as a condom in a shower scene. plus there's nothing that says 'street cred' and 'out of my way, bitch' when i run in those things to reach for the emergency trolley. which brings us round to the shoes that got me writing this particular post. apparently, my Nike AF-1s gave up the ghost about a month ago. now, my black AF-1s are a treasured pair that i've worn since my student nurse days. that practically makes about six years ago. of course that also means six years worth of accumulated bacteria and organisms residing in those things.

it was the soles that gave way. if you look at the picture on the left, you can see that right half of the shoe has no sole. yeap, it fell off mid-work. that gave me the perfect reason to take them off and put on my pair of brown Globe skater shoes at work. the only thing that prevented me from doing an ollie was the lack of a skateboard. and of course, my job. and my supervisor. and the complaints that i would get if i did an ollie. and not forgetting to mention that i don't know how to do an ollie (i tried once and i ended up with a bad back for about three days).

and thus began the search for the perfect black shoes to accompany my working attire. for one, i was not going to wear the black hospital-issued Hush Puppies. they are black, they are formal and they absorb water like a sponge. many a new staff have worn those shoes, only to realize that they crumble within three working months. apparently, water makes those leather shoes crack. and the more water they absorb, the faster they crack. and before you know it, you have a pair of shoes fit for a prop in a cheapskate production of Oliver Twist.

thank goodness though i found my perfect black shoes within one sweep of two shopping centres. i've always wanted a pair of those wing-tipped shoes. one that would be suitable for work and clubbing. unfortunately i'm not a white-collared worker stuck in an office cubical from nine to five. so there's no reason for me to hop down to Aldo and get a pair. so i settled for some more practical. a pair of wing-tipped ones that looked like sneakers from the side and a formal pair if you looked down from my point of view (don't mind the big bulge blocking the view).

and since we're back to dicks, i guess this is the perfect way to end this post about shoes:
i'm a size 9 and have yet to disappoint.

project 355: my colleagues look like drug mules and hookers

2007-12-15T12:15:00.000+08:00

i'm only agreeable with the hooker bit actually, because the female colleagues in question are really pretty specimens of the health-care workforce. apparently, Kegal Laughs and another female colleague have just returned from a holiday in Brisbane about a fortnight and a week ago respectively. both of them were held up at customs for suspected prostitution and drug charges, respectively as well. admittedly, they seemed rather cool about what happened at customs. but my guess is that they were initially rather traumatized. after all, getting arrested in a foreign land where you have nothing but a suitcase packed to the brim with clothes, undies and toiletries in ziplock bags is not exactly the most ideal of ways to deal with a customs hold-up. it is now a running joke that Kegal Laughs moonlights as a red-light district worker.

my 'drug mule' colleague was held up for about an hour while she as getting frisked by a very 'she looks like a butch' customs officer. the only thing that crossed my mind while she related her unfortunate customs story was the fact that she's Pangkeng's one-time love interest and her very slim supermodel waistline. any drug cartel would be able to tell you that it's not exactly profitable to ship drugs in her.

Kegal Laugh's account is the funnier of the two, however. what happened was that the customs officer stopped her just as she was about to trod her first official step onto Brisbane soil. and she's quite the pretty thing to look at actually. she's young, she's sweet, she's slim, and she has flawless skin accompanied with really great make-up. the only thing is that she likes to wear pants most of the time. come to think of it, she's every bit eligible for the dime a dozen career of flight stewarding. but she picked nursing in the end. and that's earns my respect.

they ruffled through her suitcase and get this... they were looking for dresses. of course, Kegal Laughs who endorses Levis had nothing to show for it. 'Where's your dress?' the female customs officer asked. 'Eh... i don't like to wear dresses.' so great make-up, a slim body shape, flawless skin and dresses, that's what 'constitutes a prostitute' (i've always wanted to use that line) in the land of down under. Kegal Laughs is not exactly the most knowledgeable of persons when it comes to geography, so the customs had a hard time getting convinced that she's not a hooker. in fact, here's an excerpt:

Customs: Name me several streets in Brisbane.

KL: Ehrm... i dunno King street?

Customs: So tell me, where do you do your dirty work in Brisbane?

KL: Queen street? (there really is a Queen Street in Brissy)

Customs: What?

Kegal Laughs is also the same person who spelt 'Gastro' (as in Gastrology) as 'Gasturo'. bless her soul, but maybe she's cut out for flight stewarding after all.

project 355: put a law on my anus, but don't you dare put one on my console games

2007-12-04T10:00:00.000+08:00

when it comes to the world of gaming, Singapore is rather comparative to say... a drain along the side walks. it's plain, it's boring and mostly filled with crap. it's not exactly that pleasant to begin with, sometimes a little funky on the smells, but nonetheless, mostly well-maintained as with everything else in the nanny state. on a typical day, nobody takes notice of the drain unless it starts to flood or some random curiosity floats by like a badly-stained sanitary pad or a bloated corpse. apparently, that's the only time when people start taking notice of our 'gaming industry', when some horrendous curiosity has been unearthed from the depths of our drains.

and just as a bit of a fun fact, the drain is also what the locals call a 'longkang' in the Hokkien dialect. apparently, the longkang is also the same word that pervies like Pangkeng and I occasionally use to describe other sexual derivatives. stuff like 'Hey Pangkeng, can you call maintenance to come and clean out my longkangs?' but yeah. digress.

it's apparent though, that the nanny state has been trying really hard to cause ripples in our longkangs. we've pumped in quite a fair bit of dollars to rope in the brightest and the most creative minds in the industry (read: Lucas Entertainment Singapore). we've tried hosting the World Cyber Games at Suntec City Convention Centre in 2005. and we've most definitely tried to produce our very own games. actually... hold on. i'm not that sure about that last point. i've read that some local gaming developer was trying to produce something somewhere several years ago. but that's all very vague, isn't it? up till now, all i've been seeing in my console gaming life is the trademark American brand of violence and humongous Japanese boobs.

which actually makes me wonder aloud to myself as i sit at a Starbucks with my 10% untouched Cafe Mocha (i spilt the other 90% on the floor; embarrassingly so), 'what would a typical Singaporean-made game be like?' we can't endorse stealing random vehicles off the street like the Grand Theft Auto series. we have 'liberalising' parents who retain their 'strong, conservative core(s)' (read: anal-retentive cores), so that rules out violence-themed games like Manhunt. we are very good though, at taking the ideas of others and polishing and priming them to the point of moral perfection. so i'm actually thinking something more SIMS-related or a standard level-based MMORPG. something with no violence, no crime and a governmental mark of approval that even your Civics & Moral Ed. teacher would applaud.

truth be told, it's not the technological or financial barriers that hold the gaming industry back. it's the mindset of the ones holding the technological and financial purse strings.

no wonder nobody has yet to hear of a Singaporean-made console game.

SINGAPORE: First M18 video game out in shops today
Media Development Authority requires retailers to enforce age restriction on new Xbox 360 game 'Mass Effect'
The Straits Times
Friday, November 23, 2007

By Leung Wai-Leng

Controversial video game Mass Effect goes on sale here today -- with an M18 sticker on the package.

It is the first game here to carry a rating, in this case M18, which means someone under 18 cannot buy it.

The Microsoft Xbox 360 game went on sale worldwide on Tuesday.

Although the Media Development Authority (MDA) has not revealed its full rating scale for games, it is likely to be similar to the five-category scheme for movie titles which come under the Films Act.

Mass Effect, a role-play game, was initially banned by the MDA because of a brief love scene between a human and an alien, both female.

The MDA later changed its mind, and effectively fast-forwarded its video-game rating scheme meant to kick in only next year.

As with movie videos, game retailers selling Mass Effect are required to enforce the age restriction and check a customer's ID when in doubt.

The MDA did not specify the penalties for selling the game to a minor, saying it 'will work closely with the distributors to facilitate a smooth implementation of the system'.

Six industry figures who attended consultation sessions to gather feedback on a tentative scheme for games classification expect the model will be that for films.

There is also the American six-category games rating, or the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) model, which they said influenced the local model.

The American rating system is voluntary and the non-government ESRB has no legal authority to prevent a game rated for adults being sold to a child.

In Singapore, the proposed system will see a distributor logging onto a website to declare the contents of a yet-to-be-rated game. An appropriate rating will then be auto-generated.

The distributor can then collect the ratings sticker from the MDA, which will impose a charge for its production.

Distributors and game developers are uncertain about how this charge will be levied.

Said one distributor: 'Depending on the cost and whether there's a fixed fee, it may not be worthwhile to bring in niche titles, which have smaller audiences.'

Ms Chetra S., deputy director, Board of Film Censors, said less than 1per cent of games brought into Singapore this year have been banned.

This was largely for 'adult themes or content such as nudity, excessive violence and excessive coarse language'.

More than 600 game titles -- for both console and personal computer versions -- are brought into Singapore each year, including parallel imports, with over two million units sold here annually.

However, even with a rating scheme, there may be a loophole: games sold and downloaded on the Internet.

Online games like World Of WarCraft are usually accessed from foreign websites, so it is difficult to impose or enforce ratings on them.

According to a study by research firm DFC, East Asia, which includes China and South Korea, is the leading region for online games and games downloaded online. It accounts for about 50 per cent of worldwide revenue.

The worldwide online game market is expected to be worth more than US$13 billion (S$19 billion) in 2012.

In Singapore alone, online game MapleStory -- which can be downloaded from websites -- is estimated to have more than 500,000 players, according to its publisher, AsiaSoft.

While local websites for online games could display a rating -- as with online games overseas -- they will not be able to prevent children from downloading the game without parental consent.

Madam Tee Pei Ling, 33, a mother of two, said that while ratings would be hard to enforce in online games, 'it is still better to have guidelines for parents'.

i've been stuck with writer's block at the following portion for several days to come. mainly because i'm quite a shit-head when it comes to writing stuff that revolves around the argumentative. so forgive the horrific attempt at doing so. all that said, i'll be the first to admit that i'm one of those suckers who loitered around the nearest Xbox 360 outlet from home at 10.45am the day Mass Effect was released. Mass Effect, in case you haven't been following the news or just couldn't be bothered to read the attached ST report above, is the first controversial game in Singapore to be given an M18 label. it was initially slated for a November 23rd release. however, an inquiry into girl-on-girl action in the game between an alien species and a human led to an initial ban of the game. we have our Media Development Authority to thank for that.

of course, we can't take everything at face value can we? we need to look at context. the alien species we're talking about here in the game are the Asari, an all-female alien species with really swell-looking butts and even 'sweller' boobs. the have the ability to mate with any species in space by attuning their reproductive systems to suit the opposite party. it's difficult to explain, really. so i'm going to quote from the in-game encyclopaedia:

The asari were the first species to discover the Citadel. When the salarians
arrived, it was the asari who proposed the establishment of the Citadel
Council to maintain peace throughout the galaxy. Since then, the asari have
served as the mediators and centrists of the councils.

An all-female race, the asari reproduce through a form of parthenogenesis. 
Each asari can attune her nervous system to a that of another individual of 
any gender, and of any species, to reproduce. This capability has led to 
unseemly and inaccurate rumors about asari promiscuity.

Asari can live for over 1000 years, passing through three stages of life. In
the Maiden stage, they wander restlessly, seeking new knowledge and
experience. When the Matron stage begins, they 'meld' with interesting
partners to produce their offspring. This ends when they reach the Matriarch
stage, where they assume the roles of leaders and councilors.

i've yet to see any girl-on-girl action in the game. maybe that's because i picked a hunky soldier to represent my character in saving the universe from aliens with evil intents (you get the option to mate with an Asari 'consort', but i politely declined in the game). but really, after putting a law on our anuses (read: Section 377a), is it really necessary to put a stop to lezzies in video gaming as well?

context people... context.

project 355: fucking with the brains of the public enemy

2007-11-17T08:07:00.000+08:00

i find it very hard to hate people. dislike, yes. but not hate. simply because in every single 'disliked' person that i know of, there's bound to be some goodness somewhere that i can focus on. take for example, a stingy person can simply be interpreted as someone who's perhaps just thrifty. or someone who's irritatingly talkative at work can be a real party person in a social setting. i'm thinking that it's all due to my libran nature. i'm sure somewhere deep with the core of my 'libranism', there's an idiot that's dying to please everyone. the cool part about this is that i don't look at people by their skin colour, size, eye colour, penis size, breath odour, funny ethnic smells and choice of cologne. i tend to judge a person by their characteristic qualities than their physical appearance.

but of course, this world is filled with people of varying degrees of characteristic qualities. some are simply filled with so much goodness that they deserve a Golden Ticket to heaven delivered to their mailbox the next available working day. while others, are just filled with enough of the bad stuff that you wonder if their existence on Earth is simply to bring misery to the human race. for some other really fucked up people, this misery unfortunately extends even to the animal kingdom. yeap, this world is quite a horrid place to live in, ain't it?

all that said, i've just recently discovered a new ability within myself. nope it's not cellular regeneration or telekinesis or muscle memory or whatever new abilities they are coming up next on Heroes. but rather, an ability to actually hate someone at work. and hate with such a passion that post-work, i actually envision applying the various methods of death in my dreams to this particular colleague. and colleague is not even the word i would like to use on this particular person. simply because she's a mercenary, not a team player. then again, there are many mercenaries in the ward that don't bother helping others despite the fact that their colleagues are drowning in discharges, medication, urinals and shit.

from what i gathered from people who have worked with her, she draws the line when it comes to the handing over of a shift. and not only does she draw the line, she highlights it with magic markers, re-draws it with a thick black marker, and completes it with fencing and a high-tech security system on it. it's easier to cross the Mexican border than to cross that line of hers.

this particular colleague hates me even though in the entirety of our careers in the hospital, we've spoken less than perhaps a hundred words. and we've been in the same ward for nearly 1.5 years coming. it's surprising, isn't it? that one can actually hate without having to talk to each other that much. and the silliest bit is, i'm not even sure what she hates or dislikes about me. but there's enough animosity between us to prevent us from talking to each other. but let's not talk about what causes this hate. let's focus on what results from this petty little hate-hate affair between this particular colleague and me. and just to cut down on me having to keep calling her 'this particular colleague' or 'mercenary', let's just label her as 'public enemy'.

yes, the entire ward hates her.

sometimes, the hospital can be conspiring against you working as a staff nurse. suddenly, one can get an influx of calls from Bed Management requesting to send a patient stat, the operating theatre to fetch two patients stat, the pharmacist to collect medications stat, etc. everything in the hospital's stat stat stat. when the nurse wants to go for her break stat though, you see a whole lot of negative words being labelled on her. this is why help from one's colleagues are really appreciated. this is where everyone puts aside their differences and concentrate on helping what matters most to the hospital and us: the PATIENTS.

i was working with the 53 year-old virgin several days ago. amidst admitting several new patients into the ward and settling administrative issues, we suddenly received two phone calls to fetch our patients back from two surgical centres, both within the span of less than five minutes. one had to be sent to the Intensive Care (it was a major operation), the other was a simple day surgery case which just required at least an Enrolled Nurse (one rank below the Registered Nurse) to personally accompany back to the general ward. the 53 year-old virgin is unfortunately a patient care attendant, two ranks below the RN. so he couldn't fetch anyone back. i prioritized and decided to send the Intensive Care case back first.

53 was nice enough to actually ask around the ward for help to fetch the very simple case back. alas, he asked the public enemy who happened to be very free on that particular day. and according to 53 who has a very good memory and is very objective about most things, this is what she said to him:

'I like you, but i don't like your in-charge (which is me)'

and with that, she couldn't care less about fetching my patient back. when 53 told me about what happened, the first thing that came out of my mouth is 'what the fuck?!'. and i seldom use crude language with 53 because he gives me a look of disdain whenever i do. but this was a special occasion that only 'F' words could describe. besides, behind his grandpa glasses, i could detect a hint of agreement. now, it's one thing to dislike someone. but it's another when this 'dislike' extends to the patients under my care, it's seriously fucked up. thank goodness, 53 was resourceful enough to get someone else to help. i followed-up with a bottle of green tea as a token of appreciation to that colleague. 53 and i agreed to just shrug it off and attribute this selfish behaviour as part of the public enemy's nature. the word that we agreed on this time was, 'we'll take it like real gentlemen'.

the really silly thing between the public enemy and me is that she's actually afraid of physical confrontation. or at least that's what i think. whenever we are working in the same shift and she picks up a phone call for me, she will NEVER ever pass me the phone personally. she will despatch a random student nurse to do the awkward job. there was this one time where i actually saw her spending nearly a minute looking for a student. is she insecure? is she afraid of me? what's her problem?

there was this other time when i was at the Endoscopy centre waiting for a porter to send an Oesophagodudenoscopy case back to the ward. i bumped into her along the corridor. she was sending a patient for what i assumed must have been a scope as well. as we crossed paths with each other, i could feel World War Three happening. it was a short war, but i think i won. you see, the Endoscopy centre has basically two entrances: the front and the back. the back exit is mainly for staff to send and fetch their patients. i spent nearly ten minutes waiting for a porter to send my case back with me. when i was back in the ward fifteen minutes after the WWIII confrontation with the public enemy, i found her happily chit-chatting away with her student nurses along the ward corridors. suffice to say, she actually took the front entrance (AKA the longer route) just to avoid another encounter with me.

this was when i realized that she's actually afraid of me. inside, i was laughing my balls so out that i could patent a new non-surgical technique to replace an Orchidectomy. i spent the rest of the shift relating this incident to the rest of my ward colleagues. i also spent the rest of the shift giving her stares that simply said 'i know you're afraid of me'.

i've got to admit that i enjoy fucking with the brains of someone i hate.

project 355: the problem with family-run education

2007-11-11T10:00:00.000+08:00

i have to admit that studying has never been one of my better traits. especially not in the sunny little red dot where such strong emphasis has been placed on education. i mean, which other country in the world acutally publishes an annual update of 'Top 100 Secondary Schools' in their local papers? hell, i wouldn't be surprised if our local publications are coming up with the primary school or even kindergarten versions of these annual lists. 'Rote memory' seems to be the keyword of the day. i remember a secondary school education of various teachers reminding us to MEMORIZE pre-set answers to predicted questions for the GCE 'O' level exams. this is the sole reason why till today, i still can remember how ox-bow lakes are formed and the comic relief Shakespeare used in Romeo & Juliet (Mercutio: draw thy tool!).

there's another wonderful keyword that the education system here encourages as well: 'thinking out of the box'. all is fine and dandy of course, until you realize that there's actually another box outside the original box. i wish i could say that it was something fun (like an Xbox 360), something artsy (black box theatre anyone?) or something kinky (a porn video booth). but alas it's just another containment to prevent one's thoughts from going too out of hand. it's a bit like a Matryoshka doll in reverse, to keep you realizing that there will always be boxes outside boxes.

no matter what, since one lives and exists in the world, therefore one still has to play by the rules of the world to a cetain extent. further education and the paper chase is still a national hobby in Singapore. and since we're still waiting for more interesting recreational activites and spots to be built (eg. the Marina Bay Sands), why not throw some money into improving our futures? so let's gather round, raise our glasses of Integrated Resort-inspired drinks, and say 'ganbei' to my next step on the healthcare career ladder - a Bachelor of Nursing.

when you're gay and open to the whole world except your relatives, things are definitely going to get tricky. this is especially so in Singapore where everybody seems to be connected. if i actually took the time to sit down and draw out a diagram of sorts, i would soon enough realize that cousin A is connected to random person A via friendster who is a business contact of random person B that was involved in an orgy with gay persons A, B, C and me. and don't get me started on the intricate web of connections revolving around gay persons A, B and C.

there are many things about me that the parents are constantly hiding from the relatives. some things that i can name off the top of my head are the usual taboos like homosexuality, my smoking habit and my faith in the Lord (or the lack thereof). all this became really poignant when i recently signed up for a Nursing degree in my paternal uncle's education centre. a simple form requesting for personal particulars soon became a set of hurdles in itself. i spent several minutes pondering upon the outcome of the answer of the blank space beside the words 'Religion' . ditto that for a drug-related declaration. i was kinda grateful for another declaration that said something like 'I have answered these questions to the best of my knowledge and they are the truth'. i have a very bad memory when it comes to certain parts of my life.

my smoking habit comes into question as well when i think about the fact that my ardent Christian of a cousin has enrolled into the same course as me. to further complicate things, a colleague of mine from the ward is in this same course as well. and everbody in the ward knows that i'm a smoker. note to self: breath mints, listerine, a lot of cologne, minimal 'tea-breaks' in between classes and a little 'chat' with this particular colleague of mine. i've got a premonition though, that the cat's bound to be out of the bag after the end of the first semester.

where then, do the complications of my homosexuality come into this whole platter of secrets and lies? aaah.... here's the interesting bit. you see, the members of the paternal family have been secretly hoping and wishing that i bring home a girlfriend before i hit the big 2-5. however, the more likely truth is that i'm bound to be bringing home a boyfriend by the time i hit the even bigger 3-0 or 4-0, for that matter. so imagine the big huzzah it caused when a paternal auntie (John Chua's mother) brought back office gossip fresh from the education center of the paternal uncle (John Chua's father). apparently, there's a certain someone in the office that has developed a somewhat big crush on me. not helping is the fact that she's my education counsellor and in charge of student welfare. the news is that her father is a major investor in the uncle's education center and she got the job as a counsellor through pulled strings. that's all just rumours and water cooler talk though.

none the less, there's was this particle-charged air of excitement over dinner at the relatives' when the auntie announced this bit of gossip (she arrived at 5.30pm; apparently, she had been withholding this bit of information till i arrived at 6.45pm). if i could do a Matt Parkmen of Heroes fame, the random thoughts that would be bouncing around the dining table would be along the lines of 'thank goodness, there's hope for this child!' and 'finally!'.

of course, i neglected to mention that i knew all about this way before the auntie even heard about it. Rich Girl apparently, took the guts to initiate the traditional Singaporean courtship ritual text message of 'Can i get to know you better?'. and you know how i feel about 'Can i get to know you better' SMSes. the fates were basically against her right from the start. even if i were straight, she would never have been my material. to be fair to her, she's a good office girl, decent-looking and really sweet. the type that one would go for if one listens to a lot of Jay Chou, Jolin Tsai and Mayday or thinks that TyPin LIkE daT oN FriEnDstEr iS d@mN kEwl (where do they get the energy and time to type like that?). but then again, i'm somewhat a potato beneath that banana skin. so like i said, the fates against the Rich Girl.

i gave Rich Girl a non-commital answer. under normal circumstances, i would have administered a strong dose of 'honey, i'm gay' to the unsuspecting female species. alas, these circumstances that i'm in currently are abnormal. i mean, even the auntie knows of the local gossip that goes on in the office. what more the developments of my little tryst with the rich office girl? things were rather awkward between her and me when i headed back to the office to collect my course materials on Friday. or at least, she was the one who felt rather awkward. one could see that she was averting her eyes from my line of sight.

girls and rejection. i should have told her that i have a girlfriend.

project 355: indie MTVs that the mainstream should learn from

2007-11-10T22:02:00.000+08:00

maybe it's the low budget and all that creativity stemming from the minds of the world's best indie bands, but you've got to admit that they more often than not, have the most awesome of music videos. just take indie folk singer, Beirut for example. who would have thought that you could film a cumulative video of band members along a stairwell and churn it out as an MTV? and all done within one shot as well. now if only Madonna would do the same with her lawyer, manager, agent, chef, three nannies, assistant, driver, jet, trainer, butler, five bodyguards, gardener and stylist.

do you think she's satisfied?

project 355: i dreamt of death by menstrual cramps (pain score: 8)

2007-11-02T12:51:00.000+08:00

my dreams are very much fluid by nature. what type of fluid, you say?

well to clear all the perversion in the air, i can assure you that it's not seminal. it doesn't stick and it doesn't taste salty with a mix of whatever one had for lunch (i've persoanlly tasted potato-chip-flavoured cum before). it's definitely not seminal because it doesn't congeal upon contact with water and leave behind an awful mess when it sticks along hairy limbs. what about blood? nah... it doesn't have that smell of iron and irony to it. honey? not that viscous. i can't remember half my dreams and metaphorically, they just don't stick in my mind as well as honey ought to. Benedict's solution perhaps? nope. none of my dreams are anywhere near being sweet. no reaction there.

i guess the closest comparison would have to be alcohol. pure, untainted, alcohol. on the rocks. preferably Gray Goose. my dreams always make me light-headed and they almost always seem unreal. and the worst part? they evaporate faster than you can grab a dream diary and jot down your dreams. it's extremely rare that i can recall what i dream about. the only things that i know after i wake from a dream are:

1) i just had a dream
2) i need to pee
3) it's a dream about (insert random topic)
4) seriously, i need to pee now

can i continue this after i pee?

to me, dreams are never good or bad dreams. they are just bizarre adventures in really random places. i dream in full technicolour vision. and of course, i have recurring dreams. okay, one recurring dream. it's a fifteen second dream of me in a ballroom being overwhelmed by a huge black ball that rolls towards me. it's hard to put down in words. which is why i don't bother with all that dream diary crap. the furthest entry i ever got in my dream diary were the words 'wet' and 'dream'. and technically, that doesn't even count as a dream.

one thing i can be sure about my dreams though, is that i dream of many things. at least i seem to recall dreaming of many things in my entire life. vague things like graduations, buying my first bike, sex, even marriage to a woman (??). for some reason apparently, the only dreams that i can clearly recall, are the ones where i die. and really, i'm always dreaming that i die. with the brilliance of information technology and the internet in hand, i once googled up 'death dreams' out of curiousity's sake. the dream dictionary of course, hushes it down to mean nothing more than the 'death of a cycle or a process'. i can only imagine that if i were a woman equipped with healthy, 'let's clear some endometrium and cause some cramps at the same time!' ovaries, i would be dreaming of a lot more deaths than i am currently dreaming now.

you have to believe me when i say that i've practically dreamt of most methods of death. i have been decapitated by Amazon tribals. i've been stabbed to death by a Chucky-like ventriloquist's doll. i've been shot to death by insurgents. i've been mummified by a psychotic killer. i've been burnt to death while trapped in a fiery building (useless firemen). i died of boredom while being trapped in the collapsed rubble of the Chrysler Building. i've been bitten multiple times by some poisonous Australian snake (i was in an episode of Crocodile Hunter apparently). there was even this weird dream where i dreamt that i was a village of people massacred to death by what seemed like Huns or barbarians of sorts. it's hard to explain this one, but i dreamt that i was a 'village of people'.

you might be wondering whether i feel any pain in these death dreams at all. curiously, i do. but on a pain scale of one to ten whereby one is 'very minute pain' and ten is 'menstrual cramps', i would have to say that the pain is about a four to five. and this is coming from someone who's rather resistant to pain. after all, i pierced my own nipples once, didn't i? no, make that twice. i've gotten both nipples pierced by myself before.

the thing is... these death dreams are so vivid and so real. like the dream when i was a woman and had such excruciating menstrual cramps that i eventually died from the pain. this is despite having taken quite a fair amount of Synflex. and i'm not sure whether this is true with the women, but menstrual cramps (to me) feel like someone has shoved a very strong suction into my vage and turned on pressure to full blast. substitute the ovaries for a man's gonads and prolly the male species can relate to what i mean. or how about the time when i was bitten by that Australian snake. i could taste that salty taste of iron when i went through several strong bout of bloody vomit. i felt breathless. i could feel abdominal cramps (i seem to dream a lot about cramps, don't i?)

strangely though, when i googled up snake bite symptoms, there was no sign of vomiting blood or cramps.
so if the deaths are not really 'real' deaths, then what is the point of these dreams?

project 355: even 'free' has a motive

2007-10-30T21:51:00.000+08:00

there's a sort of unwritten code amongst smokers to offer cigarettes to their fellow like-minded people when asked for one. well, i'm not sure whether it's an unwritten code amongst our local smokers, but i follow it none the less. for the sake of karma and people helping me out in times of dire need. the usual routine would be a stranger approaching a smoker (while in the act of smoking), asking to sell a single stick of cigarette for a nominal token sum, say.... a dollar. a typical pack of smokes costs anything between nine dollars (crappy brands like 'Halftime' or 'Texas') to twelve (premium brands like 'Davidoff' and 'Dunhills'). so let's put the average at roughly ten bucks for a pack of fags. that equates to roughly fifty cents for a stick (it comes in twenty sticks a pack).

a dollar for a single stick therefore, is really worth the price and really all that tempting to take. but i always refuse out of empathy. i'm almost always out of cigarettes on the 24th of every month (payday is on the 25th) and i really need all the help that i can get when it comes to nicotine. true enough, karma always pays me back when i ask random strangers for cigarettes with this token payment of a dollar. they generally refuse payment and gladly hand over that precious stick of goodness. i've even had nice people who gave me an extra cigarette with the good tidings of 'one for the road'. not once has the door been slammed shut in my face when i ask for a stick.

of course, this is a practice that goes well with strangers that chances are, you will never ever see again in your life. during the days of the green, brown and black combat boots, there were selfish creeps who kept asking for free fags. i'm all fine with acquaintances asking for cigarettes. but i'm not fine if they KEEP asking for cigarettes every few days. Pangkeng and i call these people 'buay zi dong eh chee byes' (which loosely translated from Hokkien, means 'chee byes with no initiatives'; ask your local Singaporean friend what 'chee bye' means). apparently, karma will deal justice and vengeance in due time because as word gets round the work place that these people are parasitic by nature, they will eventually be blacklisted from the smokers' list. it's another of those unwritten codes amongst smokers.

you simply gotta love these unwritten codes, eh?

it's not everyday that one gets free cigarettes from strangers. it's not everyday even that one gets free cigarettes from one's neighbours. and it's definitely not commonplace for your neighbour who's a Satanist to give out free cigarettes. but it's happening to me.

it's not everyday that one's father suffers from tinnitus. it's not everyday that one's father suffers from macular degeneration. it's absolutely not everyday that one's father suffers from insomnia and constant migraines. but then again, my father is forty-five and fast reaching a mid-life crisis. it's all happening to my father.

it's not everyday that one has irritating neighbours who do the most bizarre things. bizarre like shouting 'ZHU BA JIE' in the most absurd hours of the afternoon (refer to project 355: all smokers are friends, a post that i wrote in early January this year). bizarre like gibberish words. sometimes these things irritate my father who comes equipped with a strong sense of justice and a copy of the King James bible in the other hand. my father seems to be constantly at loggerheads with the neighbours who live above us. and for a good reason actually. they crank up their karaoke on saturday afternoons and sing horrendous versions of chinese pop tunes. they have an eighteen-year old son who smokes like a chimney and tosses cigarettes from the balcony, most of which end up along our corridors.

and guess what? their son is a Satanist who practices the dark arts and gives me free cigarettes.
or at least that's what he tells me.
it's all kinda falling in place now, isn't it?

i stepped out of my home for my usual post-siesta smoke yesterday. that was when i bumped into the kid who always gave me a free cigarette without fail. i have already taken seven cigarettes from him in my entire life and seven is a lot. though as to why i've never returned any of the favours back to him, i'm not sure why. as usual, he offered me a single stick once again. and i gladly accepted it. for the first time in our lives, we sat along the corridor and smoked away. i couldn't help but think that he looked like a church mate of mine, Norman (Norm: he looks like you with the uncombed, ruffled hair and the fair skin).

we talked. in mandarin. about religion. he claimed to be a practising Satanist who curses his classmates ('have you heard me chanting before when i'm doing curses?'). we talked more. about my father. he said that he thinks my father has something against his family. of course, i neglected to mention the tossed cigarettes butts and the incessant bursts of 'ZHU BA JIE'. we talked even more. about his family moving out at the end of the next month. moving away to Bukit Panjang. and how he would 'miss me'. to which i agreed as well.

and that was when it all clicked into place. or at least the possibility of a theory clicked into place.
nobody gives away free cigarettes out of pure, good intentions. i give them away out of selfish intents based on karma. which makes me wonder why Satan's child is giving me cigarettes. am i the missing link between my father's health-problems and the upstairs neighbours?

or maybe i'm just thinking too much into it?

project 355: better luck with the girls

2007-10-29T11:43:00.000+08:00

i have a confession to make: i can't help it but attract more women than men.

maybe it's my character or perhaps it's just my physical appearance. either way, if i got a dime for each time a woman tries to get to know me better, i would have enough money for lunch and dinner. if i used the same ideology and applied it to the men instead, i would have enough money for a packet of tissue papers. so it sounds more profitable for this homosexual to get fresh with the ladies now, doesn't it?

but of course, this latent ability is not exactly helping when one of my main objectives in life is to attract more men than women. there are times, and perhaps just a few small inkling times when i kinda i wish that my orientation was more attuned towards the heterosexuals. for starters, i wouldn't have to worry about repealing section 377a of the penal code and its aftermath. i wouldn't have to worry that much about being HIV positive. i wouldn't have to have sex in dark alleys and corridors filled with the occasional bodily fluid. but most of all, it would be darn easy for me to get the best out of the opposite sex.

you see, i find myself very much at ease communicating and in general, being around the opposite sex. apart from dropping my pants and exposing my privates, there's very little that i can't do with the female species that i can't get away with. actually, i think i can get away with dropping my pants in front of my female colleagues at work. exposing my privates is prolly reserved for the special few. point is, i'm as smooth as a criminal when it comes to charming women. but am i interested in women? well, yes. but not in a 'let's get physical, let me hear your body talk' kinda way. the closest i can think of is prolly a Dionne Warwick kinda interest (cue harmonica opening in 'That's What Friends Are For').

when it comes to men though, i become the world's most socially-inept gay person. i hem and haw my way around the men i take a liking to or around the 'fruit tarts'. it's a silly word that stuck in my mind when i discovered that the older people used 'fruit' as a derogatory term for the homos back in the day. none the less, i say stupid things like 'spork and foon' and 'appendiciti-citis' (this happens a lot in my ward to me). this always results me wanting to bury my head in the ground when really... i would rather bury my head in the perineal area of some other hot doctor.

one perfect incident actually comes to mind whenever i talk about my dilemma of better luck with the women than men. there was this one time when i went clubbing with two gal pals, April and her uber-good friend, Gina. we were at dbl O partying our hearts out. and as much as i love partying with the girls, i always end up a bit of a loser when they get snitched up by other guys on the dancefloor. so it always ends up with me dancing with one of the girls and her behind while she is dancing with another guy who has taken an interest in her. this is when i will head to the bar, get a drink and puff away.

on this particular trip to the club, April got snitched away by some tall guy in a goatee wearing a trucker cap while i ended up dancing with Gina. after a half-hour of irritatingly bubble-gum pop tunes like Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan, we decided we had better start looking for April. my guess was that the guy must have plied her with enough alcohol to get her dancing to trance and techno (which all three of us seriously hated). and sure enough we found her a little tipsy, drinking up her (insert random number)th shot of Tequila with goateed trucker hat. unsurprisingly, goateed trucker was still rather rationale and clear-headed.

it was roughly 3.30am then and the party at dbl O had ended, so trucker hat offered to take all of us to the VIP lounge in MOS for more drinks. and i admit, i had quite a few drinks as well and wasn't really thinking properly. i also admit that i offered to be April and Gina's 'cock block' in case anything untoward was going to happen to then. with that, we found ourselves in MOS within a half-hour. it was there that i discovered the uncanny concoction of Chivas and green tea. i thought it was a horrid waste of good liquor and requested that they plied me with unadulterated Chivas instead. of course, with that amount of Chivas in me, it wasn't exactly easy being a 'cock block'. by then, the two girls were already fast falling asleep at the VIP lounge.

it was then that i started making conversation with another girl who was dragged into the VIP lounge by the guy who opened the bottles of Chivas and mixed it with Pokka Green Tea. maybe it was the soft lighting, or maybe it was the good conversation or maybe it was the fact that we were rather tipsy. but just as we were about to leave MOS with trucker hat who offered the girls a ride home (he didn't offer me one... chee bye), the girl pulled me aside and asked me the all-traditional local question that begins the ritual of courtship:

'Hey, can i get to know you better?'

i can't help but connect this particular question in my mind with three kids, a five-room HDB apartment, some in-laws and a hell of a boring time at the Registry of Marriages. and besides, i'm gay and she has breasts. it's okay, i'm not interested. to which i told her that and hoped that she would just leave it at that. but she just had to ask the next question of 'but, why??' which signifies rejection, being scorned and a whole lot of other negative feelings. and this is my killer line which i have only used only once on anybody till this day. do note that i was tipsy and wasn't thinking straight (not that i was ever thinking straight to begin with... but you get the point).

'Honey, i'm gay'

'Huh... you're gay ah. but you don't look like one!'

sigh, maybe it's time i started wearing sassy pink tank-tops and tight shorts that say 'you want some of this?' on the behind.

(NB: i didn't fulfil my duties as a cock block in the end. i was ego-tripping on the whole experience and a whole lot of alcohol. i let trucker hat give the girls a ride home. according to April and Gina, he tried to bring them to the nearest Hotel 81. the good thing was that April managed to muster up some vomit and threatened to vomit in the car. and for some people, Hos may come before Bros. but for others, their Hondas, come before their Hos)

project 355: a nurse counts his blessings

2007-10-27T14:47:00.000+08:00

do you believe in destiny and the fates? do you believe that somehow, there's a Guy up there who arranges our life in nice chronological order so that all things work out together for the better good of us? do you even believe that somehow, you are reading this post right now, not by random chance but because of a series of fortunate events that led you to this point in time? these days, i'm somehow inclined to believe in this ideology. you see, picking nursing as a career choice has been one of the best decisions i have made for myself in this life. not only because the salary's somewhat decent (i will never agree that it's competent with the amount of work that we do), but i get to do some good in this selfish world while at it. a job that pays and racks up a whole lot of karma points, where else can you find something like that?

after my 'O' levels, i took up the first job i've ever worked in my entire life. what's that you say? oh, you want to get technical eh? right right, given my perverse nature it was prolly the second job that i've ever done (the first being a 'blow' job). none the less, it was ironically an administrative job at the current hospital that i'm employed with. i worked as a medical records clerk in 2004 for several months. it was mindless, back-breaking work that involved looking for dusty medical records in dusty shelves in an even dustier medical records office. it was there that i learned several things about the big picture of the hospital and the working world.

like for example, i learned that there were petty people who didn't like others to help them with their work despite the fact that they were swamped. i also learned that going for lunch with someone else's girlfriend is a criminial act. of course 'someone else' here is with reference back to the same group of petty people who were swamped with work and refused my help and were thus unable to go for lunch with their girlfriend. one of these petty people pulled me aside one fine working day and told me to stop 'breaking their rice bowl'. and so i did just that. i stuck to polishing my own rice bowl till it shined like a black guy's ass on a nudist beach. eh... wait. how often do you see black people tanning on a nudist beach? there's an irony to this though. the lunchtime girlfriend? she took up nursing too and we got to see each other occasionally during our course of education. good times, good times.

more importantly, it was during this time that i got to explore the hospital inside-out. i learned of the underground routes the hospital used to transport dead people to the mortuary. i learned what happened administratively after a patient was discharged. i got to see the place where all the hospital charges were keyed in and tabulated. i basically got to see the clockwork of the hospital and how everything was run. but the most important life-changing bit of all was that i discovered the hospital and their offer of a three-year bond/scholarship. they were offering three years of employment with a bond of $32,000 for people who decided to make nursing their career choice. i was immediately hooked. money, as you might have already known, is a very strong incentive in life.

at that point of time, nursing wasn't exactly a very popular choice. the general thinking of the local population went something like 'why be a nurse when you can be a doctor?' in fact, there were only two types of people who took up nursing: people with the passion for saving lives, and people with a passion for bad results during their GCE 'O' levels. i belong to the latter category. i had horrid results, was aiming for an education in Mass Communications and only managed to get an interview with the course that offered a diploma in 'Film, Sound and Video'. i preferred the written word more than the visual. so i rejected FSV and took a random gamble for nursing. i figured that i was not going to waste my life with the mainstream by gunning for course in business & finance, marketing, engineering or IT.

and life can sometimes have quite a bizarre sense of humour. you see, i've never got to take up mass communications as an education, but i've managed to get quite a good taste of it. my best friend Sunanthar, had to complete a radio interview with an interesting person of sorts as an assignment. and what other interesting person than a male nurse? it was there that i sit in a somewhat professional radio studio for the first time in my life. cut the long story short, Sunanthar got an 'A' for her assignment and i got a compliment from the lecturer that my voice was very 'well-suited for the radio'. and the irony of it all? i got to do this radio interview thing twice. another acquaintance from secondary school was doing the same project and decided to rope me in about a year after i did the first interview. you've got to hand it to the Guy up there and his arrangements.

the blessings of nursing didn't just stop there apparently. during the days of National Service with the army, i made quite a substantial amount of cash. i was enrolled into the Medical Corps as a combat medic. it was there that i volunteered for a thirteen month overseas posting. i went to Brunei, served my time as a medic and went on plenty of adventures. i got the once-in-a-lifetime chance to ride in combat helicopters, see the sultan of Brunei, climb mountains, mingle with all sorts of snakes, scorpions and reptiles, walk round half an army encampment in boxer shorts and singlet and generally have a hell of a time with other like-minded servicemen. and i did all this with quite a substantial salary labelled 'overseas allowance'.

fast-forward to today. i have been employed and working for this current hospital for quite a few years. and as much as i dislike some of the systems and process of the way things are done here, i can't help but still love the hospital. it's a bit like a love-hate relationship with more lovely good times than bad. i have kinda influenced a lot of people in my family to make nursing a career or business choice. one cousin has taken up nursing because of me. my brother has taken up nursing because he saw the grotesque amount of money that i made during my schooling day. unfortunately, he didn't get a bond because of his results that were even more grotesque than mine. he took up nursing at a time when it was becoming popular.

my mother, she's an enrolled nurse with a different hospital from mine. she's applying for an extension of contract with a diploma course at a local polytechnic currently. she's an efficient worker and her boss likes her. chances are that she will get the contract extension. and one of my paternal uncles, John Chua's father to be precise, has just opened his very own post-basic education centre offering tie-in courses with various overseas universities. one of these post-basic courses is a direct-honours nursing degree with a relatively reputable UK university. and since blood is thicker than water or any other bodily fluids that come to mind, the uncle has offered me a place with an outrageous discount to boot. plus, the first batch of students get a free Dell laptop as an incentive (i'm giving this new laptop to the father).

so you see, it seems that as long as i follow the path of nursing, i have nothing much to worry about. i have many other jobs that i'm passionate about. i want to be a writer for a local publication. i want to do stage management. there was even a time when i wanted to be a dancer (that was after watching 'Honey'). but destiny and the fates work in really mysterious ways. everything and everyone in life seems to be connected in some sort of way.

if i didn't work in the hospital as a medical records clerk, i wouldn't have found out about the bond. if i never discovered the bond, i wouldn't have taken up nursing. if i never took up nursing, i wouldn't have become the person i am today. if i were never the person today, i would never have had the guts to write so much scandalous stuff about myself. if i never wrote so much scandalous stuff about myself, i wouldn't have started www.spankthemalenurse.blogspot.com.

and if i never started spankthemalenurse, you wouldn't be reading this post right now.

project 355: perhaps there's a bigger blueprint out there

2007-10-22T18:28:00.000+08:00

frankly speaking, i've never thought of birthdays as really exciting things to happen in one's life.

of course, this is coming from a person who has yet to celebrate his birthday with a party. believe me when i tell you that i have never, and will less likely plan an official gathering of acquaintances, friends and loved ones around champagne, canapes, confectioneries and candles. because, really... who needs another reminder that they are officially one years older and perhaps one step closer to their deathbeds? plus it'll be really awkward gathering all my different group of friends together. the gay people will clump together. the englishy crowd will less likely mix with the cheena-piang. and don't get me started on the 95% of colleagues in the hospital who don't know that i'm a cock-sucking homo. there's gonna be booze and cigarettes at my party (if i ever have one). it's gonna be hard to explain a drunken gay acquaintance butt-grinding against Pangkeng, though when i think of it, i'm sure Pangkeng wouldn't mind, really. still, some things just shouldn't mix.

well, this is one of them.

truth be told, i can name you more exciting aspects of my 23 years of living than a birthday. like gay sex for instance. or perhaps the 25th of every month - payday. or the day i started smoking (18th or the 19th of August 2006, i think). or how about the first time i saw a tray of cadaveric feet during my nursing biology lessons ALA Saw-style? point is, perhaps the whole idea of a birthday is a tad overrated. be it 21, 22, 23 or even 40. you can go celebrate your birthday with a bang or with a gang (or even with both). but i don't think i'll really make a big bonanza out of it or force people to accompany me and sing that dratted birthday song.

i'm not saying no to the birthday gifts though. after all, if a birthday blog post nets you 45 comments, then i'm all for monthly if not even weekly birthdays. all that said, sex coupons with labels like 'one free blowjob in (insert public place here)' or 'free one-hour full-bodied session' are most welcome. keep them coming.

and i will keep you coming.

i spent my birthday doing the night shift with two permanent night staff and another favourite colleague of mine. i have never related any stories about this particular colleague before. i mean, you've read about Pangkeng. you've read about Fat Boy Slim. you've even got to know about Plain Jane, The Blurness (she's resigning as of this month and i'm partly to blame for it; another story for another time) and My Beautiful Preceptee. well, now let me introduce to you someone new: The 53-year old Virgin.

now, The 53-year old Virgin holds a special place in my heart. i don't really know how to put it down in words, but V53 is the kinda guy that you would want to take care of you when you're old and dependant. he's patient, he's kind, and he will do things outside of his job scope. he's prolly like that because he has led a really, for lack of a better word, 'deprived' kind of life. he took care of his aged and dying mother till she passed away from cancer several years ago. he's unmarried, fifty-three years old and living by himself religiously. and now, his daily lifestyle goes something like this (and this is really what he tells me):

V53 starts the days with his morning prayers (he's Indian and a devout Hindu), followed by a meal of Gardenia Fruit & Nut Loaf slices (he has this for breakfast every morning). he has vegetarian meals on the religion-specified days. when he's on the afternoon shift which starts at 1300 hours, he arrives in the hospital at 1115 hours for a forty-five minute lunch. he'll arrive at work forty-five minutes earlier than the stipulated time. there's always a competition between him and me regarding arrival timings. i'll normally start work thirty minutes earlier to socialize and poke fun at colleagues and catch up on the latest word in the ward. V53 will arrive at 1215 hours to WORK. and he's a really good worker. because of his age, people respect him. and he always has a wise word to say, mostly stuff that he has learned from his 'guru'. yeap, he's religious, like i said. so you see, what's not to like about him?

and this is the most interesting bit about him. he doesn't earn that much as a Patient Care Assistant (the lowest-ranked staff of the health-care setting), but he invested in his own Portable Pulse Oximeter. he spent $1,200 on his very own Oxygen Saturation machine! he has his own stethescope. he comes with his own tympanic thermometer. he even buys his own thermometer sheaths. he's not willing to spend on himself, but he's willing to spend on the patients. this is truly the kind of guy i would like to take care of me when i die of cancer or AIDs or some deserving death that i have coming.

and karma truly repays him for all his good deeds and intents. he strikes the lottery on a monthly basis. it may be a token sum or the occasional large sum. he buys 4D (lottery based on guessing four random single digits) with inspiration from the hospital settings. a patient that he took care of once dreamt of four numbers. he told V53 the next day. V53 bought the lottery ticket with the relevant numbers and won a thousand dollars the next week. both Pangkeng and i got a treat from him at Delifrance the following week.

that's the 53 year-old virgin in a nutshell. i have always enjoyed working with V53 as he's the dependable sort of guy whom you know will do his utmost for the patients. doing the night shift with him is bliss, because we will take turns to answer the callbells in the fastest possible time. i have done the night shift with him before and we've never had any major problems. he doesn't go for breaks. and neither do i. so we just sit around and share life stories and wise sayings from his guru. so why am i sharing with you about V53 then?

well, here's the coincidence that i've never expected: my birthday is on the 16th of October. V53's birthday is on the 17th of October. you've really got to hand it to the Guy up there who works out the most bizarre of coincidences in the blueprints of our lives. my night shift and birthday were very peaceful because of V53. in fact, V53 treated the permanent night staff and me to McDonald's (they deliver fast food at night). to which V53 had this to say: 'the last time i had McDonald's was six months ago, and i only had an apple pie'. on my insistence, he had McNuggets and an ice lemon tea this time.

so this is an ode to The 53-year Old Virgin. happy birthday. without him, the 23rd birthday and night shift would have been hell and boring.

project 355: go shorty, it's your birthday

2007-10-15T15:56:00.000+08:00

every time i think of birthdays, i can't help but get myself all confused and perplexed. let's say one's birthday is on the 16th of October (which is tomorrow) 1984 (which is technically twenty-three years ago), is one allowed to say sexually-innuendoed sentences like 'having had twenty-three years of experience under my belt' or should it be more like 'i have twenty-one under my belt and when the clock reaches 00:00AM on 16th October 2007, i will be having twenty-two.' because of my horrible logic skills (i actually have trouble winning at Solitaire & Hearts) and the fact that i've garnered a B4 for my 'Elementary' Mathematics during the GCE 'O' Levels, i take at least half a day to figure out that if one starts out at 0 years in 16th October 1984, he/she will surely be considered twenty-three in the year 2007.

which then gets me thinking again, can a 1984-born person really be considered 23 in 2007 if you factor in the fact that most people do not actually remember anything from year 0 to the end of the first year? i mean, do you actually remember memories of breast-feeding or formula milk (fun fact: i was formula-fed)? or diapers? or being throw around by relatives? or being kissed by your local Parliament Representative? come to think of it, the beginning of my memories has always been a mediocre trip to the Genting Highlands Indoor Theme Park when i was four years of age. that was in 1988... meaning a whole memory filled with bad fashion, bad music, pinball machines and too much neon lighting. it's a tad like Rodriguez/Tarantino's Grindhouse, minus the zombies, spurting pustules and paralytic wrists.

so back to the point of years of experience. it's technically incorrect therefore to say that one has 23 years of experience under one's belt in 2007 because of the fact that one can't remember one's childhood memories, no? perhaps, perhaps. and okay for the sake of the famous jazz number - perhaps. all was fine until i one day learned in nursing class the concept of 'conditioning'. not as in shampoo and conditioner (i don't need nursing classes to learn about the perils of dry hair) bur rather, of dogs and bells and Pavlov. we were discussing about the memories we had of our childhood. few could remember, if not a handful. we concluded that the childhood years were perhaps, a time of conditioning and learning innate responses that enabled us to survive society in the later years. infants can identify subtle facial expressions and emotions better than your average Sensitive New Age Guy. '23 years of experience under my belt' doesn't sound so bad now, does it?

i can identify groups of people who beg to differ though. some think that 23 years of experience is nothing. it's peanuts compared to the fact that they have lived for 40, 50 or even 60 years. and anyways, 'what do the young people of this generation know about? we have seen hardship and war and poverty. will the internet help save their lives in times of trial?' yeah, perhaps 23 years of experience is a bit of a boastful statement which makes one seem too puffed up in the ego department. logic fails me at this point. and so does math, Pavlov and Grindhouse. it wasn't until i realized that 'hey, 16th of October is my day!' to simply paraphrase in the words of Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind, 'Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn'

yeap. i was born on the 16th of October, 1984. which once again, loosely translated/paraphrased in the language of today:

'go shorty, it's your birthday'.

project 355: the bizarre things i see everyday

2007-10-14T22:25:00.000+08:00

it's not the drugs talking, that's for sure.