après eisen, le déluge

The taxi driver was an old, old man, probably past his sixties. His hands and face were full of wrinkles. His eyes were bloodshot. His left hand gripped the gearstick feebly. I had instructed him to make for the airport for another of my undercover activities. After a while I noticed he was casting glances at the tattoos on my arm.

“Are those temporary tattoos?” he asked in Mandarin.

“No, they are real,” I replied in halting Mandarin.

“They are real?” his eyebrows rose, but he was smiling at me.

“Yes,” I mumbled.

He drove on for a couple of minutes. “Now, we see tattoos as a form of art. Last time, cannot. It was seen as something worn only by gangsters.”

“Hmm.”

“I used to have lots of them. On my upper arms. And my body.”

I peered at his arm. True enough, just under his short-sleeved shirt, I could see the dark marks of an unrecognisable tattoo.

He continued: “I was once part of a gang… I got into a lot of trouble.” He briefly took his left hand off the steering wheel to mime a punching gesture. “The police would arrest you, and if they saw you had tattoos, they would beat you up. It was bad… very bad. They would beat me up worst than other rival gangs would beat me up.”

I could only nod in acknowledgement.

“That was so long ago… many decades ago. Now, tattoos is a form of art. Even young girls have them,” and he turned to grin at me, again. I smiled back at him.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t imagine him as one of those “young punks”, collecting protection money from poor shopkeepers and getting into drunken fights, like what I’ve watched on TV. Now he’s just a feeble old man driving a taxi. I just couldn’t make the link.

My first ever Tweet-up! With applesugarbomb, hai_ren, ladyxtel, preius, msvindicta and her beau! I’m glad we all hit off with each other relatively well, and demonstrated that we have some modicum of offline social skills to complement the online social skills.

It was amusing that halfway through dinner, more than half of us whipped out our iPhones and started tweeting about said tweet-up / checking Facebook updates / using some retarded app.

But the quote of the day goes to A, who picked me up at City Hall Starbucks from Equinox, at the nearby Swissotel:

“There was this SPG [at the bar] whose skirt was so short, if she sneezed I might just see her cunt.”

Nice!

You know you’re addicted to Foursquare when you contemplate taking public transport instead of a cab, so you can check-in at more locations.

HAHAHA!!!

While everyone’s transfixed on Haiti and its problems, Liberia’s gradually rotting away into nothingness too.

It hits you the moment you start watching.

“No Sex Please! We’re Just Kids!”

Retards rule the day again.

The Cafeteria Potential Well

This stunningly applied to the NUS Arts canteen too! Especially in the final semester of my university career, when I spent virtually all my time in school.

Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Civilization Called “Haiti”

Sad but true.

China bans Avatar 3D, then renames a mountain after the movie. Make up your fucking mind!

Demi Buddy has a new wagon!

Agelast: a neologism Rabelais coined from the Greek to describe people who are incapable of laughter, who do not understand joking…

There are people whose intelligence I admire, whose decency I respect, but with whom I feel ill at ease: I censor my remarks to avoid being misunderstood, to avoid seeming cynical, to avoid wounding them by some frivolous word. They do not live at peace with the comical. I do not blame them for it; their agelasty is deeply embedded in them, and they cannot help it. But neither can I help it and, while I do not detest them, I give them a wide berth…

People for whom life is sacred, wholly and unrestrictedly sacred, react with irritation, overt or hidden, to any joke at all, for any joke at all contains the comical, which is in itself an affront to the sacred nature of life.

Ask people the real reason for the 1914 war. No one will be able to answer, even though that gigantic slaughter is at the root of the whole past century and all its evil. If only someone could tell us that Europeans killed one another this time to redeem a cuckold’s honour!

You don’t take seriously a thing that makes no sense.

From every viewpoint – political, juridical, moral – the deserter looks unpleasant, blameworthy, akin to cowards and traitors. The novelist’s eye sees him otherwise: the deserter is one who refuses to grant meaning to the battles of his contemporaries. Who refuses to see a tragic grandeur in massacres. Who is loathe to participate as a clown in History’s comedy. His vision of things is often lucid, very lucid, but it makes his position difficult to maintain: it loosens his solidarity with his people; it distances him from mankind.

When History stirs up masses up masses, armies, sufferings, and vengeances, we can no longer distinguish individual wills; tragedy is entirely engulfed by the sewer overflow drowning the world…

Hell (hell on earth) is not tragic; what’s hell is horror that has not a trace of the tragic.

… A general rule: the existential import of a social phenomenon is most sharply perceptible not as it expands but when it is just beginning, incomparably fainter than it will soon become. Nietzsche remarks that in the 16th century nowhere in the world was the Church less corrupt than in Germany and that was the reason the Reformation started precisely there, because the mere “beginnings of corruption were felt to be intolerable.” Bureaucracy in Kafka’s time was an innocent babe compared to today, and yet it was Kafka who revealed its monstrous nature, which since then has become routine and no longer commands anyone’s interest. In the 1960s brilliant philosophers subjected the “consumer society” to a critique that over the years has been so cartoonishly outstripped by reality that we are embarrassed to refer to it. For we must recall another general rule: reality is utterly unashamed to repeat itself, but confronted with reality’s perception, thought always ends by falling silent.

- Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay In Seven Parts

You are a lovely, streetsmart chap, and you’ve been a great worker over the last few months. But your utter ignorance towards your religion disappoints me. Don’t confuse ignorance with subservience – I know people who are very devout worshippers, yet are fully aware of their religions’ tumultuous and at times controversial histories. In fact, it makes them stronger spiritually and more alert to the modern-day problems that might arise as a result of fanatical, fundamentalist worshippers making use of God’s name to commit atrocities against others. I doubt you have that sensibility, simply because you have no regard whatsoever as to the history of your religion. Do you know your religion was once decried as a cult, and its followers persecuted and executed as freaks? Do you know how many massacres and atrocities were committed in your deity’s honour? Do you know how much your religion has interfered with politics, and vice versa, and that again, decisions made in your deity’s honour were actually for very much human wants and motives? Do you know how the holy book you so venerate was put together? Do you know how the rituals you blindly practice week after week came about? No, you have no idea, and you have no intention on finding out – you are just content on revelling in the closed cocoon of a set of beliefs that has no past and no future by virtue of your rejection of its long and checkered history. It could have been crack and you would be none the wiser. I feel sad for you. You feel you and your co-religionists can do no harm, but it’s not because your deity told all of you to love one another. It’s because of the natural sheep-like goodness of your hearts. Religious fanatics have done far, far worse invoking the very same prayers you mumble to yourself over meals. But I guess that’s none of your concern, right.

After tonight’s conversation with a couple of members of academia, I can safely conclude that academia isn’t the rosy paradise one makes it out to be. Flawed characters lie everywhere, usually behind the veneer of supposedly superior knowledge. But just because one knows more about a certain specific topic, and just because one is able to speak well and sound relatively intelligent to a class of wide-eyed youths, doesn’t give one the license to act like an asshole or a twat. Unfortunately, that little nugget of wisdom has been lost since the Middle Ages.

Ah well. Puts a little perspective in the whole business.

I still am considering going into academia after my bond with SPH is up, since History will always remain my first love, but at least I know what to expect now. Not a bed of roses, but just like everywhere else. Sharks, wolves, snakes and porcupines lurking in every nook and cranny.

The World Cup isn’t coming to Singapore?

Horror!!!

The Government won’t fund the World Cup? The World Cup doesn’t “promote social objectives and national harmony”? Screw them!!!

Malaysia to get the matches in HD? Oh my God fuck me I just want to bury myself in a hole now.

Mediacorp to step in with a bid for key matches? Very, very sneaky!

“Half a loaf is better than none, isn’t it?” – typical mentality of a Singaporean who’s willing to swallow anything!

I will vote for whichever political party can give me the World Cup!