I’d never thought I would see the day where Coldplay was being advertised on TV. Justin Timberlake in performing on my Thomson Life TV now. I taped the Grammys. I wanted to see Coldplay accept Record Of The Year. I regret it now, because I have ploughed through many inches of shit, and I’m nowhere near. And if it wasn’t for the Grammy [the gramophone icon] itself, the entire thing would have easily been mistaken for some version of MTV’s myriad awards shows.
pat's told me to try the SPCA--they might have Midget. i don't know--how many people in Chuan Park would expend their precious petrol to take a handsome, purebred, Papillion to the SPCA, when the can quietly keep him, and no-one will know? how many singaporeans, for that matter?
i don't know. can't hurt, can it? though disappointment does, and it looms/threatens.
and i get the feeling that if i ever should meet Midget being walked by whoever found him, i would be met with shameless accusations of dishonesty and 'anyhow saying' that person. that's just the sad truth of the people we live amongst.
let's hope whoever next finds him is an ang moh expat. so far the two families that have found him are Caucasian ones, the reason he escaped was once because of Midget being flight of foot, another being the Asian security guards [see below].
my father flew back last Monday. he went from Gate 16 direct to supper with his friends, coming back drunk.
drunk. this is how he chooses to meet his family after leaving last year and arriving twelve days late for lunar new year's, and going out to get pissed with friends before seeing his kids.
needless to say the replacement reunion dinner on the fifteenth/last day of lunar new year's did not go well.
remarks about what if i wasn't lucky in the Os, what about papua, my curt response that the singaporean government would take me first, his inquiry about my plans, back-and-forth, like as if our Cellini dining table was Wimbledon.
pre-dinner wasn't good, either. i was dispatched to go return our rented copy of the Homerun DVD to Video EZY Thomson, an experience not to be repeated. Firstly: Homerun?! Really?! Secondly: SBS Transit 130 travels in convoy. I spent three dollars and the same amount of hours getting on the wrong bus, going in the wrong direction, before getting there and spending all of three minutes returning the DVD.
So I schlep to the bus stop. And I wait. And I wait. I have been waiting for almost forty-five minutes. I am the only one at the bus stop. My paranoia has long since kicked in, and I wonder if the bus service has long since ended, if everyone there is looking at me, wondering what the hell I am doing there waiting. Am I a suicide bomber, going to tear Sin Ming Drive apart?
So I sit there, unsure of myself as usual, when a silver Aston Martin DB7 pulls right up at my feet. My imagination is ready to lurch me right into the Aston and speed off to Chuan Park. Then this teenage boy steps out of it [from the passenger seat, thank god] and promptly hails a cab to get him wherever he’s going. I can only assume he lives somewhere here and his presumed father in the Aston was simply giving him a lift to the main road [however, Sin Ming Drive is hardly a main road] to hail a cab.
By now, my jaw has been dropped for about fifteen minutes [I can tell the make and model of [almost?] every car I see on the road. I noticed the Aston before it even finished rounding the corner] and I averted my eyes the instant the door popped open so I didn’t look like my mother drove a Suzuki Swift GL and it was the first Aston I’ve ever seen on Singaporean roads [the capitalization on ‘singaporean’ is Microsoft’s fault. It was not intentional. It would probably make much more sense and save a lot more effort just to go back and change it instead of opening yet another set of parenthesis to explain, but I think this makes my point clearer].
The world is unfair. But I can take pleasure in the fact that that DB7 is actually American. It sits on a—very old--Jaguar XJ-S platform, and both Jag and Aston are owned by that Ford Motor Company. Ha!
So after the whole Aston thing, I went upstream and found an entire clump of Thomson-ers waiting for the same bus, one bus stop back. So I wait with them. I almost want to approach one of them to check if I am at the correct stop, where the bus heads on to Ang Mo Kio from here. But I don’t, even after spying a sign, that says 130A goes from Ang Mo Kio to somewhere along Sin Ming Drive and stops, that worries me.
So why am I not surprised that when 130 finally turns up, the sign on it proudly states that this bus is going to Shenton Way?
It takes me another two hours to get home, by which time half my fare card has been emptied. I can probably forget my usual long bus rides to nowhere and back from now onwards.
When I get home, my father harangues me for my [maternal] aunt Esther’s telephone number. I have it, but I won’t give it to him [he owes her money and wants to loan some more]. Of course, I do not tell him that, instead telling him pissed-offly that I do not even have my [maternal] grandfather’s telephone number [another unabashed lie], why would I have my her number?
So he asks me then, if I know his number? [“sarcastically”, of course—I believe there is no such thing as sarcastic mandarin]
I tell him, even more pissed off, that his number is MY number [and that he has no business running up a thousand dollars’ worth of calls on my line, either, but of course I don’t tell him that, mainly because my command of mandarin is OK, but not OK enough to mentally translate that in time].
NB: if you still have not realized, the above conversation was conducted in mandarin. God, I am so cheena.
My mom’s in bed, post-cry. I want to ask her what’s wrong, but she doesn’t look like she wants to talk right now, and wanting to be left well alone myself in situations like this, I go sit in the study room and wait for her to feel better, instead of going to the dining table the instant my father decrees it time to eat like my siblings.
ARGH! The Coldplay ad is playing a second time!
My father went to Taipei and took my SIM card with it over the weekend. Enough said.
When my landed on Monday, he passed me his broken Braun electric toothbrush and told me to get it repaired. Excuse me? He buys a three-hundred-dollar toothbrush for use over there while I poke along with manual ones and my ever-present halitosis? And he wants me to schlep to wherever the rurally-located service center to repair it? I told him that the company said it would take two weeks to repair it—without so much as calling the company first. he said he’d bring it back next trip, then. Which means I now have at least half a year to get it done, and if I get it done early, I can even use I for a bit.
Ha! 50 Cent just went up onstage to accept a prize he did not win.
We also counted our hongbao money recently [only after the fifteenth day—this tradition thing that my mom insists on. I strangely got $302, more than my siblings. But I got shanghaied into putting most of my money into the bank—I was originally only going to deposit $100. That should be fine, I hear you say, just take it out late at an ATM. My mom took away my ATM card sometime ago—long story. And I owe pat money. No way in hell I’m telling my mom I borrowed money to cover my bills, so I’m out of luck. At least I can pay pat back.
“We put the FUN back in dysFUNctional!”
"The lights go out and I can't be saved
Tides that I tried to swim against
Have brought me down upon my knees
Oh I beg, I beg and I plead
Singing
Come out of the things unsaid
Shoot an apple off my head
And a trouble that can't be named
A tiger's waiting to be tamed
Singing
You are
You are
Confusion that never stops
The closing walls and the ticking clocks
Gonna come back and take you home
I could not stop, that you now know
Singing
Come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities
Am I a part of the cure
Or am I part of the disease
Singing
You are, you are
You are, you are
You are, you are
You are, you are
And nothing else compares
And nothing else compares
And nothing else compares
And nothing else compares
You are, you are
Home, home where I wanted to go
Home, home where I wanted to go
Home, home where I wanted to go (You are)
Home, home where I wanted to go (You are)"
- "Clocks", Coldplay
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