One Day Goodbye will become Farewell

One can't stay hidden from the radar of the blogosphere forever. I've moved to gdy2shoez.wordpress.com and discovered a world of widgets, trackbacks and tags. Hopefully I won't get tired of this new toy soon as I have with the Xbox 360. The best-ofs will be ported over, but some glum gems will remain. I also couldn't think of a more ironic or imaginative title.


Epitaph

Call me overindulgent but these are the last few entries before Geocities ceases its hosting services in the face of the bludgeoning social network and blogging tools available. I always thought my words would be immortal, like an artist's painting in a famous museum, that at my deathbed I would have a sleek notebook by my side reminding me of the life I had and the quotable quotes I managed to come up all these years. It's like saying goodbye to a soulmate always eager to listen but never prone to judgment. Transferring data is like downloading its soul into a SD card and implanting it into some stranger, someone who speaks the same words but with a different voice and volume.

Every travel lesson brought back ends with a somber realisation of the cultural graveyard we currently live in. Singapore is unquestionably void of a soul, an island turning into a monstrous cliche, where the only character left is in its people, not its landscape or buildings which lack a lingering memory of a once distinctive past. And even that character, neurotic in its KS-ness is dissipating. Aside the depressing pandemic news the past 2 weeks, we have people abusing animals, we have men marrying women young enough to be their daughters, and desperate catch-up rhetoric about integrated resorts, F1 bids and falling out of the top 2 airport charts. I can't help being cynical, even more so with the solar whipping we've been having these days. The house has become a mini aureola borealis, and in my absence has been molested by some prying, unnecessary hands leading to it feeling less a welcoming home than it should be.

I'm not one to ask for favours, I only ask for help. And if I ask for neither I hate it when others render their favours upon me. I have no regrets about Spain, but I do have some regrets of leaving home.


Longing

How long can I pretend it doesn't exist, how long can self-justification stem this tide of yesterday, how long can I believe that those memories are history, how long can I deny that the actions I take have come to nothing, how long will I persist in this delusion of grandeur, how long can I refrain from doing exactly what will hurt myself in the end, how long will I wait before I decide to end this, how many lies will I tell myself before I pull the cord, drop the bomb, cut to the chase, or terminate it for good, how long will I be deceived by this idea of an absolute perfect, how long will I spend explaining away all the sentimental violence, the emotional cacophony, the tirade of bewildering passions, the catastrophe of playful nuance, all the little things and hiding places, the secrets and lies, the political envy, the unspoken alliances and animosities, the what if and what to become of us. How long?

The irony of saying you don't mean to hurt someone who loves you is that it hurts more than saying you actually intended to.

Culinary therapy: Hub is in the House sandwich
Lightly toast sliced bread over low heat, just before charring add Kraft cheese on top and allow to melt till it just sticks to the bread. Do this only for one side of each sandwich. Meanwhile beat two eggs, add salt. Add shaved ham to pan, followed by crabmeat and push the mix to one side of pan. While at low heat, add slab of butter to unused side, then add egg mixture, gently centralise the meat evenly while allowing the egg to settle nicely around it. When egg is nicely formed, fold the omelette in half. This takes some skill. Cut omelette in half, serve on top of cheesy side of bread, add a dollop of mayonnaise, add top half and serve.

Verdict: Can't go wrong with melted cheese and fatty buttered egg. My pantry is depleted. Time to experiment with instant noodles.

Terminator Salvation is the cinematic equivalent of whipped cream, high in calories but tasteless. Transporter 3 had more brains than this Transformers foreplay of a flick. Saturated in grimy khaki, overloaded with testosterone and awash with gunmetal and napalam, there's not a single takeaway line worth remembering, not a joke worth chuckling over, and the finale battle with a robot artifact of the last 2 movies just felt dated and wrought with unnecessary tribute. It just felt like heroes fighting WWE wrestlers in a robot costumes. The machines could have easily overwhelmed the hapless humans, but the only behemoth appeared in the middle of the film and never returned since. Not enough giant robots and too much sweaty armpit machismo. The only thing that needed salvation here was the script.


Crabby

I've got a tub of expensive pasteurised crabmeat and the weekend was spent inventing new ways of utilising it. No thanks to a pampered palate, I concede that crabmeat is the new canned tuna. Versatile, sweet, with that occassional surprising crunch factor and none of that fishy odour. This is the true taste of the sea right in the kitchen. Here are some ideas from dinner to breakfast.

Dinner(Crabmeat linguine): Boil linguine till al dente then strain. Fry garlic with a slab of fatty butter for 3-5 minutes. Remove from pan. Add more butter, light fry crabmeat. Remove from pan. Add garlic back into pan, add canned chopped tomatoes, a tablespoon of tomato paste. Add crabmeat. Add a dash of cheap white wine, Chardonnay for example. Add linguine, toss and serve with ground black pepper.

Verdict: Crabmeat lost some of that sweetness, lacks a certain seafood tang that would have been fulfilled by some homemade crab stock, which I haven't the time to conjure. Still, better than tuna pasta.

Breakfast(Ham and crabmeat sandwich): Hard boil two eggs. Mash with margarine, mayo and a dash of mustard. Add crabmeat, 1 teaspoon of tomato paste, more mayo if required. Layer bread with shaved smoked ham, top off with crabmeat spread and hunk of blue cheese.

Verdict: Great texture, you can't go wrong with shaved ham. Interesting mix of flavours, salt to sweet with splendid eggy filler. Tuna is henceforth banished from my kitchen.


My Maudlin Career - Camera Obscura

Titles

I'm not so much a fan of Morrissey/Smiths than of his song titles. Here's my favourite list.

My Life is an Endless Succession of People Saying Goodbye
One Day Goodbye will be Farewell
The More you Ignore me the Closer I Get
We Hate It When our Friends become Successful
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now
Please Please Please Let me Get what I Want
Work is a Four Letter Word


There Is A Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths

Ferris

Perhaps the most incongruous TV theme ever. When I think Green Giant I think pounding drum score or stadium screeching cock-rock, not music box fodder. Today was the perfect example of my classic vocal mistiming. I shut up at work most of the time, but when I break loose, I tend to say the wrong things at the wrong time. No embarrassment comes without uncanny coincidence, and carelessless outside the men's room led to 30 seconds of stunned awkwardness as the person I was making casual fun of happened to be taking a piss just as I opened the door still talking. So happens this guy is one of the directors with whom I have a somewhat unnerving, uncomfortable acquaintance. It was inevitable that all the inaudible, suppressed office gossip would leak eventually, and I, of all people, turned out to be among those unlucky bastards with a lingering Oops! thought bubble above my head.Fucking fuck fuck!


The Incredible Hulk - songs

Just watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Life was so much better in the 80's. People call each other at home not on the train or the streets. People exhibit their personalities through bedroom posters not sleek Mac wallpapers. There's a sense of ebullient carnival, the music is pure and simple, and in an era free of cellphones or Blackberries and Instant Messenger, people connected in a way the people today have utterly forgotten, with warmth, heart and a joie de vivre that can be summoned even when they're alone. We are truly a modern, sad lot, scared to death of loneliness, pursuing dreams with an ardor infected by some lucky others, wary of our neighbours, scalded by this melting pot of immigrants, paranoid over nuclear war and influenza, and constantly afraid to be left behind in a world where no one has the time to wait for you.


I Dream Of Jeannie - SERIES

Tightwad

There's always this valiant attempt to start a Monday on a perky note but the problem of that is it's pretty much downhill all the way since then. It's just a bland, dismal day ahead with no one in your vicinity having the courage to admit the shittiness of it all. Fuck this cubicle life. All I hear are inaudible mutterings of feigned busyness and mugs chinking upon refill after refill from the coffee machine. There's no end in sight. My emotions are at a standstill, and I need something so bad to whip it into racehorse shape. This job never engages me emotionally, it's just one paper chase after another, the kind where people who can't handle cases due to certain commitments are offloaded and despite you taking on the extra burden nobody really tracks the reassignments, and if you're past your deadline people forget that yours was a last minute case, hence unfairly affecting your performance bonus despite you actually doing, gasp, more work. Then they push you and you try your darnedest, then they run you down at presentations, telling you to be more careful in your reporting in their usual tightwad anal-clenching nitpicking ways. Like fuck, it's a no win situation, and they're people who just sit there giving their two cents worth, having reached a certain seniority where evaluation work is beneath their celestial feet, and the same seniority grants them some form of matriarchy over their 'baby' projects which no one ever has the right to touch or question.

I'm stuck with a fucking dossier which I can't cut and paste from and have to type everything from scratch, and the boss doesn't give a llama's ass about it when I humbly broached the topic because there's nothing that can be done, giving a unhelpful shrug that would not only cause a hurricane in Kansas thousands of miles away but rip the space time continuum apart. And don't get me started on those on some kind of compulsive competitive streak who wants to know the status of everyone else's cases and is always the first one to initiate stimulating conversations of work during lunch, and then you are forced into being cordial and ignore such electioneering behaviour and realise why such maniacs are senior and you're just, I don't know, a thud on the blank wall at the back of everyone's minds.

The idea of watching a horror movie and scaring yourself is confronting what you can only leave to your imagination, the thrill of coming to terms with something you dare not know or ask, and the uncertainty of whether you'll have a good night's sleep after watching one. It's like a surrogate experience of something so familiar it's creepy, that feeling of knowing you shouldn't do or ask something because you're afraid of the result or the answer, yet you're dying to know and you go ahead and risk the nightmare anyway.