As Written

Letting Go

Constantly.

They Look Like They're Having Fun!

Monkeys doing Riverdance!

Sports Channels

I recently relented and gave in to the Starhub sports channel monopoly.

Bo pian. I really want to watch sports on tv and ever since Mediacorp became too cheap to buy coverage of sports events, there does not seem to be much of an alternative.

Truth is, ever since Starhub managed to get exclusive rights to all the football programmes via ESPN and Star Sports and in the process creating their sports monopoly, there has been less and less sports coverage on normal free-to-air television.

Is this how our intellectual property and competition laws have affected us? We are now forced to pay for things we used to get free?

According to received wisdom (from the creators of intellectual property and anti-competition laws), our lives are supposed to improve. Well, mine hasn't! So some people out there must have shit for brains.

That aside, I have recently been picking up tennis again. I now try to play weekly with folks from my office. Bought a new racket too. Am so pleased.

Woohoo!

Reality Bites. Deal with it.

In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a Prince breaks the spell cast on Snow White. They fall in love and live happily ever after.

In Cinderella, Prince Charming finds Cinderella after a long search and they fall in love and live happily ever after.

In Sleeping Beauty, Sleeping Beauty is woken up by a kiss from a Prince. They fall in love and live happily ever after.

You see the problem? Time and time again, the story is the same. Girl overcomes hardship and adversity and falls in love with a Prince and they live happily ever after. Time and time again, little girls all over the world are fed such nonsense and they grow up thinking that they will one day similarly meet their Prince and they will fall in love and live happily ever after. Time and time again, girls are taken in by such fantasies, ignoring the bloody blatant signs of falsehoods - the magical pumpkins, the sleeping spells, the fucking dwarfs.

They're fucking fairy tale for heaven's sake! They're NOT TRUE! From the protagonists (who the hell would call herself "Sleeping Beauty"?) to the poison apples (if Evil Stepmother is a witch, do you think she'd make a poison apple whose spell can be broken by a fucking kiss from a Prince? I'd have fucking made it POISONOUS!) to the Happily Ever Afters!

A whole load of nonsense! None of it is true. If ever someone told you "don't worry, some day you will find the one" (which incidentally sounds like a line right out of Cinderella - "some day my Prince will come") or "the perfect one is just around the corner" is fucking out of his/her mind. Has the world suddenly become filled with part-time fortune tellers.

The truth is, the world is a harsh place. Good things sometimes happen to people but they don't ALWAYS happen. Actually, most of the time, they don't happen. Take a look around you the next time you sit at a coffee shop. You will find that NOBODY is totally happy with life. Everyone is at the least dissatisfied with something. Nothing is perfect. Nobody is perfect. Nobody will be perfect. There are no fairy tales in life. Reality Bites. Deal with it.

And mothers who don't advise their children accordingly are doing them a great disservice.

People should be content with what they have. This does not mean that they don't work to better what they have, or lose hope for good things to come. But precisely that they should WORK towards betterment and keep hope as just that - hope, not expectation. It means that to always appreciate and enjoy the joys that one currently has. And therein appreciate and enjoy life for what it is. Not yearn for what it should be.

In a way, life is lot like reading a book. The reward is not in knowing the ending but in the slow, sometimes tedious process of reading itself. Through the ups and downs in the plot, over which you, the reader, has no control. Sometimes it will end in Happily Ever After. Sometimes it will end in a tragedy. But it will always be a good book if you enjoy the reading.

p.s - No, my rant has nothing to do with me. It is rant against self-absorbed, immature and deluded persons that I've recently had the displeasure of having to encounter.

Growing

Yet another year has gone by.

I wonder where it went. I really don't remember much of it.

Hmm...

I finally moved out. And renovated my house (my new hobby is DIY and house decorating). I did two reservist ICTs. Reconnected with some friends, built on some others. Spent at one entire fruitful year in my new job. Learned a lot. Enjoy it much. Have finally made an effort to be nicer to my folks (the moving out helps).

Hmm...

I have grown.

It has been a quiet year.

New friends, Old friends

I had the first of what will seem like a series of housewarmings yesterday. It wasn't the first time friends have visited my place, but it was the first time I actually sent out proper invites and prepared proper food. Anyway, Mom actually did all the cooking for my Poh Piah Pie Tee Party (PPPTP) and when all the food was laid out on my dining table, it really looked quite good.



I kinda planned my apartment to be party-friendly and I think everything did turn out quite well, so I'm quite pleased. There were some teething problems though, like the aircon not working properly, so I gotta get that fixed. My next party is on Christmas Eve, co-hosted by my friends L and Mess (who's camping out at my place for now). There are about 25 people on the invite, more than twice the number for the PPPTP, so that will surely be a challenge. Hope it goes well.

Anyway, in the evening, I met up with my old scout friends for dinner and drinks. I've known these friends for 20 years or more and for a while in secondary school, we truly were the best of friends. We went through a lot together - a lot of tekaning, a lot of mischief, a lot of blood sweat and tears, a lot of camps, hikes, pioneering sessions, footdrill, a lot of fun. And although we drifted apart as we grew older, 20 years on, meeting some of them for the first time in many years, most married, some with kids, it felt as if we all hadn't changed much even though we clearly have.

So much of who we are now as persons were shaped by each other and our lives as scouts. Like how L, Washington Patrol leader and multiple-time finisher of the Ironman, commented on how he was first introduced to bikes by D, the Livingstone Patrol leader. And how D started out fiddling with PA systems during school assemblies is now tech guru and ubergeek (I mean this as a compliment). And how, at the end of the day, when my car battery went flat, K, the Mitchell Patrol leader, now Army logistics officer and ever the scout, was prepared with jump cables. And D, my best friend in school and still helpful as ever, drove all the way back from Thomson to assist.

Friends like them are hard to beat. I don't think any of us back then could have imagined us gathering again after 20 years. We certainly could not know how diverse our paths would take us. But in all of us yesterday, I sensed how similar we all in fact are in the unwavering principles we live by - the law and promise we made to each other and to ourselves as scouts. And I'm glad to have known them.

Till we meet again...