Seeing as how the crowning glory would be hacked down like an overgrown hedge in the army, I decided to bypass the step(hopefully earning myself some free time and itch-less hours) by shaving my head today. Needless to say, it was quite a hairrowing experience.

I cannot believe I just made that pun.

As it turns out, barbers will smile when you tell them "army cut", for one of three reasons :

1) It brings back memories of the old days when they shaved their heads to carry out the valiant act of defending the country. (of which I see no relation to anyway)

2) Shaves are the easiest jobs to do. Seriously. It takes something like 7 strokes to get everything off my head, even with my "so long it provides an emergency source of nutrition" hair.

3) When you tell them "army cut", they hear "please mutilate me".

Well, due to a lack of interesting happenenings, there's really not much for me to update on,for or about. But hey, it's about time I started wearing uniform again, even if it's patchy green, ugly as hell and probably really uncomfortable. Not to mention the high green socks, haven't worn high socks in a while.

Till next time, when you will probably read about goings-on on a suspicious offshore island which really should have been the film location for The Island, hopefully hilarious or painfully boring bunkmates along with the usual incoherent thoughts. Don't count on it being intelligent in any way though, you know what they say about the army.

Bye!

It has just occurred to me that the demons of national service are only 5 days away from inflicting impending doom on me. As you should already be able to tell, I'm not exactly happy about this ; If I wanted to be brainwashed, mind-wiped, or some other term in the thesauraus related to a pun about the cleaning of the inside of the skull, I would stick my head inside of a toilet bowl and flush a few times. It would achieve roughly the same effect, just that I wouldn't have to waste two years of my life doing it, and I can retain my hair and my dignity. When Bangla workers, Filipino maids and primary school children have nicer handphones than you, it's no wonder NS turns out to be a humbling experience.

The entire experience however, would give me something to fill the void with at the moment. Too often I've built something just to have something to look at later, or wrote a long meaningless entry for the sake of having something to read later on, because there isn't much in the way of intellectual content on the net these days, and having my own website where I throretically could, but decided not to for the sake of everyone who wants to keep their eyes, stick a picture of myself at the top or execute other narcissistic web-shenanigans, is no more than a bonus. In fact, I'm not even sure people read this anymore, so this is more for myself than anyone else.

Unlike most people, filling the void with people isn't something I'd consistently like to do, or completely not like to do at all - Because then the loss of said commodity would invalidate one's existence completely. I'm not the type to whine about being alone or complain about constantly being surrounded by people, because, in the end, everyone adjusts to their surroundings, just that I try not to seek consolation in adjusting.

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For reasons unknown, most probably my brain going on a vacation to Vanuatu, I attended the concert of Il Divo, victim of bad typos such as Ill Divo, Il Diva, Il Dive, Il TiVo and ilk Divo. To my surprise, they're actually not too bad, but I could've done with a little less vibrato - throughout the concert I felt like I was sitting on a giant ringing handphone. Aside from that, I had no idea why they did a costume change midway through ; Either the costume change was a good time to perform a guitar solo, or the guitar solo was a good time to do a costume change as opposed to standing around awkwardly for three minutes or so. Barring that, it was so-so. Fans will probably chastise me for this, but they're overrated, though not by much. If you throw enough handsome guys into a group, there will be people lapping it up.

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Note to self : When using a flip phone, do not get fingers in between.

Well, my tenure of work is going to be over in a matter of days. While it was fun improving, or rather, trying to, improve my suckery and baking, not to be confused with my sucking at bakery. Suffice to say I've learnt a lot during this period of time, including but not limited to how not to bake a cake, the pain of adult fare ecspecially when travelling halfway across the country and how to both be rude and get customers coming back. Though, to be fair, most of these are going to be about as useful to the rest of my life as Quentin Tarantino or Vincent van Gogh's work are to Helen Keller.

It's kind of disheartening to know that at this point of time we stop learning and developing ourselves and spend the rest our lives in a mix of monotony, apathy and altruism. The higher-ups are going to make people think otherwise with terrible slogans such as "learning never ends", which is only true because some people never start in the first place, "life begins at 40/60", which only serves to console old ministers with self-esteem problems by undermining the existence of everyone below their age, or "vote PAP or die", a political slogan used in a more subtle manner sometime in the near future, but cheesy slogans do not change reality, but merely our perception of it. People could say things like "It's all in the mind", but the body exists to take a hit for the mind. You can change the way you see reality, you can change the way you feel reality and you can change the way you say reality(possibly with a Chinaman or Hispanic accent) but you can't really ever hope to change reality itself as a whole.

On a side note, how is Fuchsia pronounced? "Fooch-sia", "Foo-sia" and "Fau-sia" all sound horribly wrong, and "Fuck sia" is just well.... an excuse to scream vulgarities if nothing else.

I wonder why Miss Universe has a question and answer section.

Beauty and brains, it's what every guy would want in a girl, right? Well, quite possibly not. As sexy as brains can be, it's been proven that the more brains a person has the more vices and undesirable acts are likely to be committed. And with enough brains he/she would be able to cover his/her tracks fairly well. And quite technically you'd think about it and realise that you're as unlikely to find a decent set of brains on a beauty paegant as you are to find a unicorn atop a Himalayan mountain. Not to mention that prestige of having the most beautiful woman in the world is in fact a farce, I'd rather be in a country with overall decent-looking girls than one beautiful women backed up by a throng of Abigail Chays.

In fact, the smartest and incidentally beautiful women in the world(which seems like an oxymoron no matter how I look at it) would know better than to join a beauty paegent. There are some things in this world just not meant to go together, and one of them is beauty and brains, along with its semi-rhyming iteration, beauty and games. There are probably several terms you can use here that doesn't exactly fit well with beauty, making beauty a rather grotesque feature of nature since it doesn't fit in like it should. Beauty and Canes? Beauty and Sane?Only if said person is attached, there's a "two out of three" rule on these things. Beauty and Danes? Probably not, at the risk of sounding racist. Beauty and pain, however, go together like bricks and cement.

In fact, it's almost guaranteed that pain can be manufactured out of almost every experience. Yet, with so much pain in the world, it's not going anywhere, proving almost certainly that "no pain, no gain" is a lie manufactured by people who produce those cheap motivational postcards you see in bookstores or even an overzealous primary school teacher looking for a way to make students willingly accept punishment. Hard work may pay off in the long run, but working hard for 65 years to enjoy life when I look more like a prune than a person isn't exactly my idea of living. Heck, living to 65 isn't even very appealing, given that rheumatism starts kicking in and you can't walk ten metres without popping a kneecap. I'm sure there's a joke to be made about rheumatism "kicking" in somewhere. Laziness, however, provides you immediate rewards, and working hard becomes an option when you sit up and realise that laziness isn't working out too well when you don't have money to buy a packet of tissue. However, slacking off in the midst of working will cause you to be your own undoing, effectively screwing yourself over and looking like an idiot. My taste may not be mainstream, but I'm sure public embarassment isn't really an "in" thing right now, no matter how Ah LiAnzzzzzz 4eVa~ may make it look so.

Hard work pays off in the long run, but laziness pays off now!

It has been an oddly uncanny day.

It seems that one by one, my soon-to-be comrades are going off to the land of no return this week. Well, most of them anyway. The inner bastard in me would laugh and point at their predicament, but my current situation now isn't nearly as rosy as I would like it to be. See, when I'm not at work, which is half the time, I'm staring at either a) a computer screen or b) the ceiling. Which makes life pretty damn meaningless.

At least the army would take my mind off things for a while.

It's what armies do.

Somehow, sitting around and talking about what I want to do is a whole lot easier than actually getting down to doing it. The plan for the holidays was :

1. Get a job.
2. Amass a large sum of money, such that I can have a bath in one-cent coins.
3. Pick up a new hobby that requires you to be either outdoors or on your feet to do it without the use of an electronic screen.
4. Catch up with everyone I have not spoken to in a long long time.
5. Learn how to cook with minimal resources, such that in cases that food in the army turns out to be poisonous I can cook my own food. (This has been scrapped, after I realised bringing food to camp wasn't allowed.)
6. Learn a musical instrument, or resurrect a fallen musical career.
7. Write lots and lots of articles so I can wow(read:trick) newspapers into wanting to hire me in the near future. Think they have a column for lazybums?
8. Get a blueprint of Tekong, in the event that breaking out becomes a more enticing option than it already is.
9. Do something really adventurous, and still remain injury free. I think I'm due some luck since the A levels promise to send me on a downward spiral en route to creating a new basement in hell. You know, below the one where all the chariots park.
10. Become a celestial being. That failing, have intelligent conversation with one, that doesn't go "if you don't worship me you can go to hell!" and actually mean that literally. On a side note, if more than one religion says something along these lines, wouldn't everyone then go to hell? And if yes, wouldn't that make all gods liars anyway?

After about one and a half months of freedom, I shall now address these issues in order :

1. Done. Though it's only part time, and I'm paid somewhere more than peanuts and less than olives.
2. As it turns out, having a bathtub of one-cent coins is roughly equivalent to having a blue note in your wallet.
3. I've been saying "I'll think of something" for about a month now.
4. Not for lack of wanting, but sloth to me could be all the seven sins together.
5. Half done I guess, I've learnt cooking but all I do is bake bread. Last I heard, recruits weren't allowed to go anywhere the kitchen, lest the officers find extra protein in their food.
6. Well, the rest of the neighbourhood has done it already, so I guess I could hide the fact that I haven't. The clarinet player, however, seems to be getting better. The juvenile band, however, seems to be getting worse.
7. Do these count as articles? To be honest they aren't much more than bad puns and obscure references to pop culture.
8. Not done. Then again, there aren't much blueprints to collect, seeing as how escaping Tekong consists of brushing past shrubs and tearing through a forest, or shoving hapless recruits out of the way and sneaking on board a ferry. Which is kind of hard to do in plain sight, but if pulled off with sufficient timing would create a new army ghost story for the ages. "Wilfred the 359672976397693476979th might be nice.
9. Not done to the max. Not only have I been doing relatively docile things, I've managed to get injured doing it. A simple trip down the stairs with the lights off becomes a mad 720 degree axel flip ending with a head smash against the coffee table that would make Tony Hawk proud. A walk-and-talk routine somehow ended with me managing to split my body in half, one half landing in a drain while the other remains on land. Yes, it was painful. A walk on a grass patch on New Year's Eve culminated with me getting caught in quicksand masqerading as soil, my relatively new Vans shoes turning a darker shade of brown as a result.
10. Nay. The closes thing I've seen to God was when I was watching Family Guy on Youtube.

As you can see, I am going to go into NS feeling very unfulfilled.

If this isn't boredom, I don't know what is.

Other than several incidents of stupidity that have made themselves permanent residents in my life, there really isn't any progress to speak of.

Time for a break.

It's a new day!

It's a new start!

It's a life with the beating of a, young heart!

ahem. Now that I'm done spewing lyrics randomly, a happy new year to everyone! Even if sufficient doubt does exist that "happy" is an inappropriate term to use here. Let's look at a calendar for 2007 :

End Jan

So I pack my bags, I'm ready to go,
I heading towards, Pulau tekong...

Feb to Dec
-Work my ass off at the stellar rate of 50 cents an hour, hopefully not too hard
-Be in a constant state of alertness, mostly so the soap doesn't slip out of my hands
-Take legal breaks and some illegal ones as well
-Shall not get my hopes up where enjoying life is concerned

The bright side however is that I get paid!

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I now pay adult fare for public transport.

Fuck.

Coming soon, only because I'm too lazy : a play-by-play of new year's eve!