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no, i don't actually have an uncontrollable urge to exterminate teenage girls
Hi, i can be boring sometimes. And i often sound evil to conceal life's banalities. But i really am a kind and peace-loving creature. That despite the URL. |
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about this blog
got neither analytical insights nor flashy pictures to offer just trying to make the mundane a little less mundane! tagboard
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Design: doughnutcrazyIcon: morphine_kissed |
just another week in the sometimes atypical, oftentimes boring life of the still-whiney armour infantry conscript, who still endlessly hankers for a touch of civilization every menial, slow-passing weekday, that despite that small spectre of light at the end of the tunnel finally coming to sight. oh yea, it's currently june 7 2008, 5 days post massive realization of my coming-of-age and 189 days pre-emancipation. and the past 541 days didn't exactly fleet pass, ok. everytime i stare at this blinking cursor, i wish i could say i let my inner wild child out over the weekend and went wakeboarding, hang-gliding, sky-diving, and also cheerleading, then splash a deluge of photos showing me and my well-dressed friends smiling radiantly at glitzy clubs and hipster restaurants, and proceed to add to that really big close up zoom-ins of the designer dishes i savoured for dinner. unfortunately, real life gets more mundane than that. and this week, since i'm neither into bloated pandas, geriatric skull-coveting heroes, nor mythical and also rather ugly creatures and princes, i purchased a copy of the savages dvd and watched it over the afternoon. and it was really good. how on earth do you delicately blend a subject as bleak as a dying, dementia-stricken father with an offbeat sense of humor generated by his estranged, bickering children without over-stepping into melodrama or just plain, mangled rubbish territory? let the savage siblings show you how.  the screenplay nicely reminded me of juno, which i have watched 3 times in full and probably 1700 times in bits, with its realistic eccentricity and quirkiness. realistic being, day-to-day human conversations which do not involve smart-ass characters that invariably possess abilities to speak wittily and coherently in long sentences that are impossible to generate without meticulous thought or at least, 192837474 seconds worth of reaction time. right, did i just describe juno? guess i just adore ellen page too much. the maid's leaving in a couple of weeks, and this one's truly the best we've come across in years. i mean, she doesn't lapse into comas when she opens the ziplocks worth of SOC-derived-sweat stained, and also hideous looking number fours every weekend. i think it's regrettable we couldn't share a deeper bond because we just cannot communicate. anyway, did i mention that i feel that maids are horribly underpaid? i'm surprised no one has brewed a major wage issue brouahaha in the ST forums yet. this, definitely more worthy of a brouhaha than some frantic parent's madcap complaints of examinations being too difficult for their precious children. right. anyway, does anyone even feel the same way? obviously, you could say i empathize with their meagre wage levels only because i'm not the employer. but speaking from a completely objective third person point of view, doesn't $300 odd a month for 12-16 hour working days with hardly an off day wedged out every month remotely remind you of the term exploitation? why is it even widely acceptable to have a wage level pegged at such an obscenely low level in the first place? it's almost as if people feel it's ok because it's been established normalcy since time immemorial. justifying it with currency rates and low cost of living in their home countries assumes that remittance takes place, but why should the assumption be valid the first place? what is the difference between the job nature of a maid and that of any other job that warrants and justifies such an enormous wage differential? i don't think the MRP theory, or a modified one at that, explains this. demand surely isn't low, and supply definitely does not outstrip demand. what else? it can't be that the working environment is too congenial for wage levels to be made less significant right? look no further than the royal mayhem that is my house. and speaking of ST forums, i kinda read it for selective entertainment value nowadays. do people wonder about the level of social weightage and significance that the letters have to carry in order to be published in a newspaper with reasonable credibility and widespread circulation? recently, i read one where a mother wrote in to complain that the trailers tagged to a movie she brought her child to were too scary to be acceptable. right. an indifferent parent wouldn't have cared. a more empathetic one would address. a slightly paranoid one would console. an angsty one would reflect it to the management. and this one took it one step further to the national level. it's plain ludicrous, the dreamily woven societal setting they think they can singlehandely construct and stifle their poor children in. and the worst part, i have a hunch it was probably just a CGI-generated beast which mildly roared for the narnia trailer or something. and one more wrote in just today to complain that the cinema she watched a movie in only had TWO exits, and the two other that were blocked constituted a fire hazard. she then went on this haranguing tirade, questioning if cinema staff had proper drills to evacuate moviegoers in case of fire. look, if everyone were to become worrywarts who vehemently try to pre-empt every single hazard that could probably arise from any form of structure in life, we would probably die from exhaustion, and not a fire. should we have drills for collapsing cinema screens? falling giant pin-ups? hot-dog machine malfunctions? or cinema counter staff who suddenly go berserk and threaten to eat patrons up? drills, drills, drills. i firmly believe that when shit happens, only instinct counts. another one of those surreal, safety-proof worlds people dream up during tea breaks. oh well, my condolences to the poor management team at the lido cinema, that has to take pains to politically correctly craft a reply, all the while madly suppressing the urge to set that patron on fire. lido cinema, incidentally the cinema that i'll be visiting quite a bit from now, now that i have the shaw cinemas birthday vouchers to spare. thank you to nan zai and ccc for that! and then, 38 gang for the xiao qing ge esque shoes, family for the sodagreen concert ticket, 2nd uncle for the $150 capitaland vouchers and ah ma for the angpow, and the countless people who bothered enough to remember. i am appreciative, contented and very much satisfied. and anyway, birthday #20 was a simple lunch-and-shopping affair with friends, much less melodramatic than starstudded birthday #19 (refer to june 2007 archives), though no less heartwarming or worthy of rememberance. i realized i haven't posted a picture of myself in a looong, looooong time. so here's a really justifiable narcissistic moment of weakness. second such moment encountered in my life, i think.  beloved alma mate. wish i could revisit it in those dull slimy greens, no less, someday. i need a breather from leafy greens, you see. till next moment of inspiration. |