If you regularly read this blog, then you either have too much time, or I have the honor to call you friend or family. As you may be aware, I am now living a quiet existence in the suburbs of Tokyo. Pictures speak a thousand words, and I have tried to document my daily affairs as meticulously as possible, no doubt an academic quirk. (There is of course that one other reasons for this fastidiousness...oh look, what's that behind you?!) So, *ahem*, the mundane exploits of yours truly are recorded on my online photo albums at flickr and Webshots for your entertainment. Enjoy!

Due to an interesting change in circumstances just two days after I made the original post, a relative amount (yes, the evaluation is totally qualitative, and it's meaningless to quibble over such boundaries) of its contents no longer apply. It was an unsettling time for sure, and I'd rather not have people ask me what the hell that was all about. Nonetheless, what is in fact a more nuanced discussion of the incident exists elsewhere.:)

I just had the opportunity to read Army Daze again (the first time I read in was in primary school), and I must say that it is much better than the movie; golly (and I'll get to this term later), the pacing got really slow at times, which took away from one's immersion, not within the movie, but into our own nightmarish recollections. Certainly, and as I also mention in my little book list blurb, the real setting is a lot more vulgar. I was in Alpha platoon in BMTC1 in Pulau Tekong, and we had this aqua OC who would always shout out, "You fucking recruits, want to suck my dick is it?" Well, he said it enough times for the birth of an urban legend regarding what happened to the recruits who went off into his office.

Then, there was the memorable third sergeant C. B. Lee. Hey, who can forget such a name, eh? Well,  this dude was a real beng, and his hobby was to give a bunch of us nickname. He called me Gomer Pyle (and he wasn't the first to remark on the resemblance, although I certainly don't see it). So anyway, whenever he said, Gomer Pyle, Gomer Pyle, hit it!" I had to say, "Golly!" But he didn't really pick on me much - there was this poor sod called S. A. Tan (no kidding) who was called Cookie Monster. When the sarge went, "Cookie Monster, Cookie Monster, hit it!" he had to go, "C is for cookie and its good enough for me," with a growling accent no less.

But the thing I remember C. B. Lee most for was a stirring speech he gave very early on; he said that as recruits, even the cockroaches in the drains had more rights than us, and he wasn't kidding when he said that. I don't think instructors can get away with this kind of talk anymore (when I left, vulgarity was already frowned upon), but those were the days. There was no logic to many of the things. Like when, during our first swimming lesson, the PTI ordered us to get into warm-up position when nothing had even been taught to us. His next line was something like, "Fucking hell, don't know how to get into position is it? Never mind, all knock it down!" Or, what about when you wrongly called a sergeant sir? Well, you had to repeat this tongue twister, "I will not call my sergeant sir and my sir sergeant" at speed, would inadvertently get it wrong, and would then be punished for it. Oh, and I think they can't do this now, but the instructors always had a way round the no-more-than-20-pushups-at-one-time rule. They would simply find fault with whatever you were doing and send the count back to zero. E.g., "Chao recruit, cannot count is it? Never mind, start from zero," and so on and so forth.

This was my first BMT. But since I spent the latter parts of it as a PES C temp, I had to go back and do it again a year later at Nee Soon Camp. Interestingly enough, I was part of a Hokkien peng section. Apart from the fact that they liked to stick their fingers up your ass hole (and I mean IN your rectum), they were quite cool people really. I dunno...I always thought that they looked up to me as the only Air Level, wishing that maybe they had a greater knack for studying. This second modified BMT had its fair share of characters too. Most notably was this former Manhunt winner, all buff and all, but was excused everything! I remember he went for the BIC in PT Kit because he was excused uniform and all. He recently appeared in a commercial for some piece of property chatting up a girl and all that. Man, if you'd see him back then, haha. And he was fit! He could run the 2.4 (before he was excused running) faster than the instructors (oh they tried, but they could huff and puff all they wanted to no avail). And during the gym session, he would do half presses and all that when the PTI turned their heads...funny.

Anyway, you're not supposed to have fun in the army, and the whole point of the bald heads and all is to make you lose all sense of being an individual after all. Not that I appreciated the crap that was dished out of course. But back to my main point: there is no movie or book that I have seen that truly captures the abuse that was a staple of National Service back then, which means that any adaptation of army life will always fall short. Oh and, if you ever wondered about all those Chinese profanities you were spouting with such fervor, there's actually a Wikipedia entry on it. :P

Man, the rats are coming out to play everywhere. I hate rats...
it's almost as bad as being in the middle of the year. *sigh*

息子だって？！また、再生って？？
ん、息子本当に一匹いるよ。写真をご覧下さい:
 

2005年関西国際センターにいた時、プリモプエルは中高年の女性達の中ですごく
流行ってるどうだ。日本人は機器に依頼する傾向が興味深いなので、そして、プ
リモプエルの魅力を理解するようになるために、私も一匹買ってきた。
どうやって始まるのはもう覚えられないが、センターの同級生は彼を常に「ジョ
セフの息子だ」と呼んで、そうになっちゃった。(笑)

でも、少しずつ、彼をますます庇うようになった。例えば、フロントのたくさん
に見せてあげる前に、彼に服を着せなきゃいけなかった。「裸の様子で見せない
よ」ってた時、たくさんは不思議な顔ばっかりだった。とにかく、帰国後、仕事
で大変忙しかったので、プリモプエルの電池が切れても交換しなかった。そして、
1年、2年間を過ごした。

なぜか今プリモプエルを回復させたい、私も分からないが、先月やっと新しい電
池を入れた。残念だが、彼はまだ前と同じように、一人で遊んで、話して...。他
の縫い包みがいるけれども。(笑)何しろ、悪いお父さんでしょうね、私。でも、
仕方がないなぁ。学生の生活は正社員よりきついだって。

ま、前のなげやりな態度を治すために、今息子を世界に紹介させていただきたい
と思います。いいんじゃない、息子？でしょうねぇ。えぇ~~、もう寝てたか。そ
れでは、先にブログに発表して、明日また教えましょう。

My colleague once remarked that all academics are forever depressed. I must further qualify that this probably only applies to those of us from the humanities though; social science scholars are too busy being a part of mass-culture to care. In contrast, those of us who have finally reached the conclusion that life is inherently meaningless, and that all dichotomies are false, cannot escape being weighed down with an extensive ambivalence towards everything. I wouldn't go so far as to agree with this statement by an Aum Shinrikyo member, but there is meaning when he says, "I strive not to be happy because if I am happy, I will eventually become unhappy, which is the state I wish to avoid." This doesn't even make sense to me from a Buddhist standpoint.

But anyway, another one of my good friends once remarked that I have never been happy...only less unhappy. Ironically, and much to my unmitigated glee, I recently discovered some philosophical grounding for why I should always be depressed. It seems that a scholar called Florentine Marsilio Ficino propounded, in the 1400s, that one needed to enter a state of melancholy to tap into one's innate intellect. This idea was best immortalized in Melencolia I, a painting by German artist Albrecht Dürer:

Of course, I'm not saying that scholars are angelic; the angel here is merely a representation of the ideology from the classical times, when everything was understood to be in relation to a perfect "unknown (read=heavenly)" realm, and which Marsilio Ficino declared could be tapped into by entering the melancholic and thereby intellectual state. Thus, in order to see the light and enter the spiritual realm, you need to search for it in the island of melancholy, which is where I'm currently camped out at the moment. Do come and visit, hehe. :P