San Francisco Part One

It's the night before we're scheduled to leave for LA, and I realized I should somehow cram everything San Francisco-related into this post.

Anyhow, for some reason we didn't go to bed till 4am the first night, so I only crawled out of bed at 12.30pm. It effectively meant that half the day was gone, which sucked. We decided to head for the "cool" neighborhoods like The Haight, Castro, and The Mission. I found out Cameron lived in The Haight, so it was our natural choice for the first stop.

There, Cameron brought us to what she called The Best Record Store In The World - Amoeba Records. It was a truly amazing place; a bowling alley converted into a record store, with aisles upon aisles of CDs, LPs and DVDs as far as the eye could see.



Weisheng went mad at the used jazz section, and raved about the huge selection of trance artists. I found all three volumes of The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs (I know they're not that rare in the US, but they're impossible to find in Singapore). Even Jingli got into the mood and grabbed a whole bunch of DVDs.



When we got out of Amoeba, the sky, which had been cloudy and grey the whole day, was beginning to get nice and bright. We debated whether or not to go to the Golden Gate Bridge, but decided against it because there might be fog. We were to dearly regret that decision in the coming days.

The rest of The Haight was pretty cool, with stores selling all kinds of trinkets, gifts, vintage clothing and shit like that. By the time we were done with the area it was already six-ish, and we decided to just do Castro then head home.

Castro is a street that is very gay-centric. The sidewalks are lined with stores selling gay videos, gay erotic art, sex toys, adult humor gifts, and so on. Of course, you'll find the odd dentist or home decor store, but by and large they were very very gay. Which meant they were a whole lot of fun, because gay also means happy.

We dropped by Fisherman's Wharf and it was mostly closed. Actually it was a good thing because the place is incredibly tourist-y and rather off-putting, in a way. We did manage to get a good deal at a seafood stall, paying only US$22 for a dinner for three. The owner even gave us extra food and free clam strips (which actually weren't good at all). But hey, it was free.





There are amazing chocolate stores too, selling Ghiradelli's chocolates. Their ridiculously large toffee apples are tempting as hell, too.



I'm rather proud of this next picture, because I had to use a half-second shutter speed and still managed to keep it relatively steady. Go me.



Somehow we also managed to drop by the Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco to Oakland. It's lit up at night and rather pretty.



At the Bay Bridge is also a rather silly looking sculpture of a huge bow and arrow. I'm sure it's meant to symbolize something good but for the life of me I can't imagine what. It's in the background of this picture.



It's now 2am, and I should be getting some sleep, since we have to get up at 8am tomorrow to drive to LA. I guess I'll have to continue there.

Stanford

After we touched down, we spent some time running around like headless chickens before we finally found Weisheng. Then it was a smooth drive to Stanford.

Yeah, I never liked the sound of the place. Too elitist for my liking. But the campus is pretty damn amazing, both in size and appearance.

First there's a crazy long driveway up with palm trees lining the sides, which they must've spent like a gazillion dollars on. And then a huge circle leading up to the grand old buildings with grand old pillars like these:



I could never resist pillars. Then there were courtyards with cool-looking statues, which might've looked much cooler had they not been surrounded by fucking tourists.



Then they also have their own church, not that I'm a big fan of Christianity in general. It tends to fuck me over in the strangest ways, which will be explained in a later post.





For a guy who doesn't deal well with Christianity, I sure have an eye for religious imagery.

Anyway, yeah, the whole campus was ridiculous like that.

We spent the rest of the first day exploring the campus and an outlet mall. Hooray for consumerism!

Flying From Narita

In case you're wondering, the times stated for all these posts are in the local time, wherever I might be at that moment.

While resizing my pictures for Flickr, I kinda used Photoshop blind. After I did a couple, I thought that if I saved all of them at the same "numerical quality" they would be of roughly the same size, and so didn't bother to check the file sizes of the rest before uploading. Let's just say I'll never do that again. Now I have no more bandwidth for the month and had to open a new account sneakily, with a different email address. I'll fix these next month and put the pictures in my regular account, not that it makes a huge difference to you. Meanwhile you can still enjoy the pictures. God, I miss the Preview program on my Mac.



As you can see, we flew over the International Date Line, which tends to fuck with your concept of time a little. We gain a day when we fly to the US, but lose it on the way back. Sounds kinda like my weight.



Look at the hand, struggling to reach the food just in front of it. The tension is palpable.



The food grows colder by the minute. Yet, both hands refuse to move. Why?



Well, their master happens to be passed out at the moment.

Yes, a long flight does lead to extreme boredom, as evidenced by the pictures above.

The second part of our flight to San Francisco was in a shitty plane, and we were stuck next to an old Japanese guy with an aisle seat. I got the dreaded middle seat. Of course the old dude was really nice and accomodating and all, but still, I hate to get seats like that. It really makes me feel kinda bad, because I tend to get out of my seat for the most random reasons, like hunting for the perfect spot to take a picture like this:



I had to do it. I mean, it was dawn, and I'm not often awake at dawn to take pretty morning pictures. I found the spot right at the front of Business Class. It was very pretty. When I got back to my seat, the old guy was asleep. Oh well, too bad for him.

More Narita Notes

With the pictures, this might've been a helluva long post, so I'm breaking it up into sections. So what's left of The Narita Experience is gonna come first.

Like I said, we had four hours. That leads to serious boredom, and when you have someone trigger-happy like me, tons of random pictures.





Of course, I didn't take the first one myself.

Then Magic Hour came along, and it made everything very pretty.





And this is very cool. I think it embodies the nature of airport terminals perfectly.




Stupid American Kids

While eating an unagi bowl in a "restaurant" - I hesitate to use the term with any hint of legitimacy - I overheard the following. It was between two American college boys. Of course most of it was rather pointless, but there was one line in particular that stuck out.

Boy #1 had ordered an Ebi Tempura (shrimp tempura) Soba or Udon. By the time I got to my table, he'd finished all the noodles and soup. The shrimp tempura were left untouched. He refused to eat them. Which, to me, basically defeats the whole purpose of ordering the dish. I mean, he could've gotten plain noodles. He played around with the tempura in his bowl, laughing at how "weird" they looked.

Boy #2: Looks like yellow crap with a tail.

I rest my case.

Narita Scribbles

So this is Day One, and I'm stuck here at Narita Airport in Tokyo. It's a four hour transit, which is immensely annoying because it means that we'll be forced to walk around and spend money on things we don't really need, like US$3 for half an hour's worth of internet access, food, and Japanese porn. It doesn't help that things are pretty damned overpriced. This also means that we get to walk all over the terminal and explore it completely, something which I hadn't done before. It's beautiful, and fucking huge.

The smoking rooms are great compared to those in Hong Kong. I mean, there are automatic doors and decent ventilation and all that, and it actually looks semi-welcoming. In Hong Kong, you step in, and you enter this perpetually smoke-drenched corner of the universe. You don't even have to light up, you just need to breathe.

Maybe it's because I'm still recovering from my illness, but the descent into Narita just now was by far the worst I'd ever experienced in my life. As the plane descended, I began to feel this excrutiating pain in my sinuses, especially right above my right eye. Seriously, it felt like someone was using a rusty hand drill to bore right into my eyeball and socket. And then of course I began to tear and sneeze uncontrollably and all that. Ugh. I hope this doesn't happen again in San Francisco.

It's six in the morning. Outside the Arrival Hall at Changi Airport, a line of cabs sit patiently along the sidewalk. A cabbie gets out of his taxi and lights up. He sits on a metal railing. I step out of the air-conditioned comfort of the terminal. I light up too. Our eyes meet. There is a flicker of acknowledgement. We nod in greeting. For a moment, we are connected, fellow smokers puffing our lives away in the still of the morning. But only for that moment. Then we look away and try to ignore each other as we finish our cigarettes in stony silence.

The timer says I have seven minutes left. Time to end this. Stay tuned for the next post, which will be from Stanford.

The Night Before

I fly tomorrow morning at an unearthly hour.

I haven't packed yet.

I always seem to end up doing this. Ah well, it keeps me up the whole night, and makes me sleep better on the plane.

Lotsa stuff to do. Besides the packing, I gotta make sure my iPod, camera, laptop, etc. are all fully charged. All the accessories need to be packed. Shit like that.

Thank God I'm only going for two weeks and not like going back to school. At least it's not like packing my whole life into a suitcase.

Coming home was such a pain the last time. It's so sad to pack up your life for a couple of years and sending it all away. And so difficult too - what do you keep, what do you throw? Not to mention the whole hassle of boxing and mailing and God knows what else.

Enough of this. I'll see you in the States.

This blog will continue. Until then.

New Hair

Behold.



The eagle-eyed among you might notice that I've removed the earring on my cartilage. It got caught in stuff and was just really annoying. When I found it bleeding after it got bruised on my pillows one morning after I woke up, enough was enough. I got the hairstylist to take it out for me. Might as well, I'm paying her more than enough.

On another note, here's a sign that this relationship is on the rocks:

On the MRT, the guy plays mahjong on his mobile, oblivious to his girlfriend. She holds onto his shirt and stares blankly ahead. This continues for the entire journey.

Just an observation I made yesterday on the way home.

It's a little bizarre to hear my voice over the speakers as I'm ordering pineapple rice with teriyaki chicken in a food court. I can thank my little VO sessions for that. And it was kinda amusing to note that no one was paying any attention to the TV screens.

Stinker of the Year

This is frightfully bizarre. When I got sick before, a loss of appetite usually came along with the whole deal. But this time around, I'm actually hungry. Incredibly, fucking hungry. I ate like a pig today. Meal after meal, snack after snack. Of course, I couldn't taste anything - which had both negative and positive effects, depending on the original taste of the foods consumed. I just munched and munched and swallowed. Very strange indeed.

Managed to sneak in Howl's Moving Castle today, since I was feeling slightly better. Still, a Miyazaki film always takes its own sweet time getting around to things, and it feels even longer when you're groggy from illness and medication. I guess this was probably the reason why I didn't enjoy it as much as Spirited Away. It feels very similar to the latter though, and there's only one thing that I didn't really like - the whole war theme seemed tacked on and unsatisfactorily explored. Yeah, there are warships and bombers going about their business, but no one seems to know why there was a war in the first place, and why they suddenly decided to end it. Or maybe I missed something as a result of being groggy.

Oh yes, and I said I'd blog about Avatar.

My God, what a piece of shit.

I have a lot of respect for Kuo Pao Kun. After all, he was an extremely important figure in the local theatre scene. That respect, however, does not unconditionally extend to members of his family, and it certainly does not extend to his daughter, who has brought this demonic spawn screaming and kicking into the world.

Where does one start a movie? With a good script, something Ms. Kuo should have learnt. This muddled, half-assed sci-fi mumbo-jumbo crap is not a script. At best, it'll make a mediocre TV movie with desperate actors trying to break out of soaps. At worst, when your talent doesn't even have the ability of desperate soap actors, it becomes fetid sewage. First there are tons of needlessly complicated twists and turns, then entire scenes filled with bad exposition, then scenes with just plain bad dialogue, then... at this point you pretty much wanna blind yourself.

It feels like a filmed theatre production. This doesn't come as too big of a surprise, since many of the cast and creative personnel are from the stage. However, someone also needs to teach them the lesson that what works on stage may not necessarily work out for film. Lighting, for example, was way too theatrical and unrealistic. It seemed like they just tossed the concept of motivated lighting entirely out the window. This even translated to acting style, where everyone was doing everything so over-the-top. Every gesture, every eyebrow raise, took on Loads of Meaning. Ugh.

The sound design was just plain awful. Whoever did it should be shot. A couple of thuds when cups are placed on a table does not mean that your sound design is complete. It's really sloppy work when your actors' voices have the same quality no matter what surroundings they're in - open air, elevator, penthouse apartment. Add annoying music to the mix and you have something that makes me sick.

I don't even want to mention the "special effects". Groan. If I can do similar stuff on AfterEffects, you should be able to do better.

All in all, this looks like it's shaping up to be the Stinker of the Year.

Before I saw it, I was complaining that no one seemed to want to take a chance on Singapore films and screen it publicly. Now I take it all back. Thank you, distributors, for not giving this crap a chance to inflict its full horror upon the public. Honestly, I'd rather see (*shudder*) Bringing Down the House.

A Belated Swedish Post and Other Such Notes

A very late post about the Swedish Film Festival which I attended a few weeks ago.

I started off with Songs From the Second Floor, which I'm kinda ambivalent about. It was gorgeous, with scenes played out in single takes against crazy tableaus. There were great bits and socio-political comments and stuff like that. My personal favorite scene was when a crucifix salesman was getting rid of his stock at a junkyard and complaining about his big mistake, "putting his faith in some guy on a cross". He then drives over a couple of crucifixes as he leaves in his truck, and the resultant cracking sound made me laugh pretty loudly. The thing is, everything seems so calculated and theatrical that you never seem to be able to get into anything, since they're determined to keep you at a distance.

Persona was great, as usual, and like all great movies, you get a little more out of it every time you re-watch it.

Cries and Whispers was Intense, with a capital I. Bergman's character studies of women are scarily real and almost emotionally scarring. Either the guy really loves them, or he hates them with a passion.

Ondskan (Evil) was pedestrian. I might've liked it more had it been amongst lesser company, but here it seemed like a case of treading all too familiar territory. Perhaps I'm sadistic, but I didn't really find the tortures inflicted on the main character all that torturous. So my reaction to the whole thing was just "feh".

But My Life as a Dog... They don't make movies like this anymore. Funny and painfully truthful and so amazingly real, it's one of the best coming-of-age tales ever made. Loved it, loved it, loved it.

Um, yeah, I can't get more detailed about a lot of stuff because it's been a while and I forgot. Plus I'm sick so I'm also not entirely coherent.

Some other movie stuff:

Team America: World Police is fucking hilarious. The villains always get the best songs, like Saddam Hussein in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and Kim Jong Il this time around. I'm Ronery will definitely stick in your head for a while.

Closer is scathing and depressing, and well, basically is an examination of the fucked-up human condition. There's a beautiful opening sequence where everyone falls in love with Natalie Portman, and then it all goes downhill from there. You can tell how uncomfortable an audience is when they giggle at Clive Owen's interrogation of Julia Roberts - they giggle because they want to convince themselves it's supposed to be funny, because they can't handle it, but they're dead wrong and they know it. Stylistically, it also feels very theatrical because of the long, dialogue heavy scenes. Unfortunately, I can't decide yet if that's a plus or minus point.

The Machinist is slow and dark and depressing. Nice production design, although eventually there's inevitable disappointment at the "twist" ending. When you set up something so much, the payoff seems so tiny in comparison. I don't think the overall quality justified Christian Bale's commitment though... Losing 60 lbs for a role like this isn't really worth it.

I loved Sideways so much though, that it more than made up for The Machinist. There are so many amazing moments in Sideways, the ensemble is so pitch-perfect, I'd watch it again and again. The moment Paul Giamatti's character slips into his mother's bedroom and steals money from her secret stash, you know this is not going to be your typical movie. My favorite moment, and a truly amazing one, is when Virginia Madsen is describing why she loves wine, and through the deft use of sound and shot selection, Payne makes you fall in love with her, then realize that Paul Giamatti's also falling in love with her at the same time. It's beautiful.

The Woodsman was not amazing, but a decent try by a first-time director. It does have an unbearably intense climax that consists of nothing but a dialogue between two people sitting on a park bench. Now that's pretty damn balls-ey if you ask me, which is why I respect this film.

That's it for now.

Zonked-Out

I am sick and zonked-out by medication. Someone replaced me for the second half of the day on the shoot.

I don't know what I'm doing here. I'll write more next time, when I'm more coherent.

Is zonked-out even a word? Or did I just invent that in my delirium?

I'm Still Up

So yeah, I'm still up.

In fact, I just got home at 3.30am.

I still have work tomorrow.

Why then, did I do that? Well, after I saw Sideways with my senior - wonderful little movie, by the way, but will write more about that next time - we decided on the spur of the moment to go karaoke. And this lasted until 3am.

I'm justifying it because somehow, magically, things seem to have been falling into place regarding my next shoot. I now have three schools to choose from for a location, and my swimming pool location seems to be coming along pretty OK. A casting crisis was averted, so we don't have to switch leads (fucking kids, they're nothing but trouble), and even a flat owner that I visited four times with no luck finally called me and said yes. So now I pretty much just have to keep my fingers crossed and hope everything goes well from Saturday.

Oh yes, and make some props tomorrow. But that isn't too hard. I'm sure I can squeeze in a nap somewhere.

I also went to karaoke because I knew I probably won't have time to do so before my US trip, and I really wanted to have a session since I hadn't had one in a while.

I now have two projects I can work on (tentatively) after my vacation, and that's not even including the docudrama stuff. Hooray. And a writer's interested in formulating a sketch comedy show with me. Fun stuff, but you know, nothing's really definite in this biz till you see people actually getting cast and production starting. And even then, who knows when the plug's gonna be pulled? I'll take it a day at a time.

All in all, I can see the light at the end of the fucking tunnel.

At least, I hope it's a light and not just one of those angler fishes waiting to devour me.

Random Picture Blog

To make myself feel better, I shall blog some pictures.

Here are two from the beach last Saturday. Yes, the beach where I heard one of the most inane conversations in the world.


You talkin' to me?


Damn Poser

This sign just amuses me. I don't know why.



I chanced upon this amazingly cool place while location scouting in the Jalan Sultan area, and I just had to take a picture of it.



These next two I took when I was in my old secondary school Dunman High a couple of weeks ago. It was so incredibly fucking lame I just had to record it for posterity.


The words mean: Part of a Good Image - Neat and Clean Shoes, Socks, Shirt, Pants/Skirt.

This I can kinda take. It's the same kind of propagandistic shit they put up in schools everywhere. What takes the cake for lameness though, were the pictures they used as an illustration of the "ideal":



Yes. A department store sale ad. How sad.

I Hate...

I hate being an AD. It is the most thankless job in the entire fucking world. My boss gets on my back about me taking cabs to scout for locations. If she used her fucking head and actually thought about it, hiring a bus for the entire duration would be more expensive. I'm actually saving her money, and she nags me about it.

I hate the fact that she's too cheap to hire a location scout and makes the ADs do it. Seriously, with the peanuts they pay freelancers, it's really no big deal at all to get a person to just focus on finding locations. They'd be much nicer locations too.

I hate the mountains of paperwork that I have to do, and all of it internal. You can't just say "I want this, this, and this," anymore, now you have to fill out form after form for it, and then get charged by other departments within the same fucking company for using their stuff. What the fuck? How is this competitive? How is this smoothening the process? How is this efficient?

I hate that she's so unappreciative of her team. Someone's grandmother passes away, she gives the girl a day off. Then immediately bugs her the next day for trivial shit. She needs to take lessons in how to be a fucking human being.

I am sick and tired of the bad shit that we do. The same crap over and over and over again, the same tired format, the same over-writing, the same smashing the point in your face repeatedly, the same... the same... the same...

I wanna make a T-shirt that says, "Docu-Drama: Same Shit, Different Flavors".

I hate that what I thought would be the easiest location to get would turn out to be the biggest pain in the ass. I need a living room of a flat for two fucking hours. That's all. I thought, "I'll just ask my friends, it shouldn't be a problem." Guess what? Apparently it's a huge fucking problem. Getting something like ten rejections in a row from people I know just makes me more fucking pissed on top of all the pissed-off-ness I'm feeling. Reasons range from Messiness to Superstition to Personification of Homes. If you're one of the ones I asked, I'm sure you had your reasons for rejecting me, and I'm sure they're perfectly valid. It's just that right now, I really don't give a fuck about any of them because they are fucking up my life. I'd use my place, except my dad is fucking mental and my brother leaves his fucking toys all over the place and between the both of them, I don't even feel like I should be living here, much less shooting a scene.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

I hate being so tired all the time.

I hate the fact that some asshole stole my Puma shoes from my doorstep. I hadn't worn them in a week because I don't wear them on shoots. So I don't even know when they were taken.

You fucker. I hope piranhas rip your genitalia from your body with their tiny, jagged teeth. I hope your ass gets impaled on a vacuum cleaner. I hope you get gang-raped by a pride of lions.

I will be much happier next week. Perhaps I should refrain from blogging till then.

Thoughts Before I Go to Work

Before I forget, the Old Inane Conversationalist from my last shoot said this of me during the shoot.

"Oh, you're carrying him so well. He's not even crying. I give you 95 marks. Pass. Can be a father already."

I was carrying a toddler that lived in the flat we were using in one arm, which isn't that big of an accomplishment when you consider that he's two years old and doesn't really cry that much anymore.

Coming from anyone else, that might've been a compliment, but I just wanted to punch him in the nose.

Anyhow, from the shoot, I now have a huge deficit in my bank account from paying for too much stuff. Locations, props, shit like that. It came out to almost a thousand bucks, a thousand bucks which I can't really afford - hence the shitty condition of my finances. At one point, I had the ATM tell me I wasn't allowed to withdraw any money because I simply didn't have enough in there.

Right now I've gotten about half of it back, and I plan to get the rest of it today. Hooray for claims.

Besides a financial deficit, the shoot has also given me some pretty ridiculous tan lines. I now have maybe four or five regions of various tanning intensities on me, including Swimsuit, Sleeveless Tee, Normal Tee, Shorts and Sandals. It's kind of disturbing, I look like a piece of patchwork.

Gotta get to work now. Five more days of prep time till my next shoot (which, coincidentally, will probably be my final shoot as an AD. Yay!).

Inane Conversationalists

What's a foolproof way to fall sick?

Work long hours for four days straight, with the last day ending at 1am. Then wake up at 8am the next morning to return a rental pickup truck. Follow that up with an insanely hot day at the beach. My nose was dripping continuously, which really makes the beach not much fun at all; I couldn't even nap. It got to the point where I used up all my tissues and had to resort to buying a pack of napkins at the 7-11.

But that's not the main point of this post. This post is about Inane Conversationalists.

While trying my damnedest to fall asleep, I had the privilege to overhear some scintillating conversation. It was an exchange between a guy and a girl sitting nearby. Apparently they didn't really know each other before today, but had mutual friends. So the guy seemed to be either really trying very hard to make conversation, or he was trying to pick her up - none too successfully, I might add.

In fact, it made me want to take my pen and pierce my eardrums so I wouldn't have to hear them any more.

An example:

Guy: (referring to his job) I mean, I like it, but I just get sick of it sometimes. Like when I've worked two or three weekends in a row. Then it just irks me.
Girl: So you don't really have regular hours?
Guy: No, not really. It's in cycles. Sometimes there's a long cycle, sometimes there's a short cycle. Sometimes there's more time, sometimes less.
Girl: So there are different periods-
Guy: Yes, it's periodic.

Kill me now. I mean, what the fuck is he talking about? His sentences don't make sense at all. And it was really obvious he was trying very hard to impress the girl. Ugh. Pathetic.

Another example:

Guy: I listen to many different kinds of music. Like trance, Chinese music, pop, rock... There's no hard and fast rule. The only thing I can't stand is R&B.

Everyone should just keep this rule of thumb in mind: If ever in doubt, please do not use a phrase at all. Almost anything can be replaced with another word or phrase - it's called a fucking synonym. If it's used in blatant error (Hard and fast rule? What the fuck?), it just makes you look like a bloody moron.

So not only was he inane, he annoyed me with his bad English.

And apparently he'd studied in the UK for several years. What are they teaching them over there?

Inane Convesationalists like these grow up to become Old Inane Conversationalists, like one of the actors on my recent shoot.

The scenario: Me, the director, and this part-time actor sit around a table having some coffee, waiting for the crew to arrive.

Actor: So, now that you're one company, how does all this affect you guys?

Awkward pause. He doesn't seem to notice.

Me: Um, not too much.

The director sips his coffee and looks away.

Actor: But now there's only one English channel. You have to take in their staff and all that.

I shrug.

Actor: Maybe it's not too bad at your side. I heard they have it pretty bad over there. Lots of retrenchments.

Director sips his coffee. I drag on my cigarette.

Me: It happens.

I can take no more. I get up and walk away.

My god. How can he be so fucking oblivious? Does the word "inappropriate" not exist in his dictionary? Yes, I know he's in his fifties, but advanced age shouldn't be equal to social stupidity.

Another example: We are in a flat. The actress playing his wife has brought along a friend from London. She's a black woman who looks very cool and has a very sexy British accent. But anyhow, he spends over half an hour talking to her on various topics, which include the following:

IQ, EQ and CQ (Don't ask me what that is, I don't know).
The proper way to address black people.
Why people who work out are "selfish".
And other such gems.

Reading the papers a lot does not make one more knowledgeable. It just makes people like him think they are knowledgeable and they become complete pricks. The poor woman was trying so hard to put an end to the conversation, but she was too polite to just tell him to shut the fuck up. Me and the director looked at each other and just grimaced. We felt sorry for her, but in a way, we were glad he was otherwise preoccupied so we had him off our backs.

One thing though, the more he went on, the more shame he made me feel. Shame that I was a Singaporean, like him.

There is only one way to stop these Inane Conversationalists before they take over the world. We should all be equipped with handguns, so whenever we come across someone so completely inane, we can just shoot them in the head.

The same thing goes for people who simply do not have the ability but insist on using erroneous phrases that they don't understand in their correspondence or speech. Just fucking shoot them all.

One last thing. I know the use of the word "conversationalist" isn't entirely accurate here, according to its dictionary definition (I actually do look words up if I have doubts about their proper usage), but in my defense, I have one word for you.

Irony.

Priapism Sucks

My poor cellphone is sick. Very, very sick.

It has this spring-loaded pop-open function, see? This makes it very cool to use. Unfortunately, it also makes it a magnet for bored people with itchy fingers, who pop it open non-stop for a few minutes on end.

If you are one of these people, I hope you're feeling sorry now.

Because my phone is suffering from priapism.



Which means it looks like the phone on the left. It's stuck in permanent "erection" mode, fully open, and won't shut. The spring is broken, as is the microphone.

I brought it to the Nokia Service Centre, and they wanted to charge me S$200 for that, the reason being my warranty is void because I bought the phone in Malaysia. I thought, fuck them, and brought it to my neighborhood ah beng repair stall instead. They're charging me S$70, although it'll take a few days. My 8910 is with them now.

Hooray for ah bengs. You gotta love them.

I'm on shoot these few days, and I've been missing my phone greatly. Not least because all my numbers from work are in it. When people SMS me, I have no idea who they are and have to look it up, since all the numbers are stored in my phone. This makes me sad. And tired.

Please, people. No more playing with my phone after I get it back. I can't afford to send it for repairs every couple of months. My support of ah bengs notwithstanding.