The one about stamina

Yesterday I participated in and completed the Run350 race, 21km category. It has really been a while since I put on my running shoes, much less run a distance of 21km. Needless to say, I was exhausted by the time I came to the end of the race, and even now I’m still in the midst of race recovery — that godforsaken feeling of sore muscles constricting whenever I take a step forward, or, much worse, downwards! I never used to groan when I had to go downstairs to retrieve something, but today I caught myself doing so. Hopefully it is a temporary thing, and not because of my aging body.

Age, what is age, at 25?

My race timing gave me mixed feelings. Firstly, of course, I was disappointed because it was confirmation that, hey surprise surprise!, I’m no longer as fit as in the old days (let’s say 3 years ago.. Those ironman days). It was expected, definitely, so the pain was tolerable haha. I was however quite happy that I’m still able to run a distance of 21km under 3 hours! Okay that may be slow, but if you saw me in person you would instantly get that ‘a-ha!’ feeling and think to yourself, “this guy must not be a runner!” Hahha. My timing was between 2:30h to 2:40h thereabouts. In my heyday it was 1:50h to 2:00h. Not impressive still, but much better.

During the NUS biathlon a friend was explaining to me why he joined that race. It was a reflection of how he felt fitness was an important yet much-neglected part of student/anyone’s life in general. He said, “We may not feel it now, but when we’re 50, we will. And as we grow older and older, it’ll be harder and harder to start, so we should keep it up nowadays.” For some reason, this rang to me (is this proper phrasing?). I’ve always wanted to say something like this, but was unable to put it down in words. This is why I try my best to go for a swim or a run when I’m free, or at least when my alarm clock is able to wake me up haha. Exercise is an important aspect in life, and I feel everyone should get some. Get some exercise, cos “getting some” refers to another thing :j

Stamina. I’ve always thought there was some correlation between physical endurance and mental endurance. This seems to be conventional knowledge, but there hasn’t been much proof or evidence behind it, is there? I would like to think that there IS in fact some correlation, as motivation to exercise more! Haha.

Anyway, when I wanted to blog about stamina, I wanted to talk about how I don’t think I have the proper mental stamina to tackle problems. Did my slowing down of exercise cause this in some way? Or am I too distracted (for which there isn’t much of a direct solution imo)? I’ve told myself to do exam practices, to do my homework, simply to not procrastinate. And I fail.

This is one prominent area where I have ‘deproved’ in. ‘Deprove’ is not a word, apparently, but general usage of the word refers to the opposite of ‘improve’. I have deproved in this aspect from my secondary school and junior college days. Then, preparing for the GCE ‘O’ Levels and ‘A’ Levels, I was focused and did practices all the time. Note: I still didn’t do homework per se. Only after the lessons were over did it finally sink in to me that, omfg, I’m gonna take these big exams. It was only then that I started putting some effort into studying and learning and doing practices. And it worked. It may not have worked very well by the top students’ standards, but it worked fairly sufficiently for me at least.

In university, this is one aspect where I really suck at — the studying. I’m okay at projects, but when the time comes for me to study for finals/exams/quizzes, I won’t be able to sit still to complete practices. Thus my lousy grades hmph!

I attribute this to my lack of focus and stamina in running the full distance. In the past, I lauded myself when I was able to jog the whole distance of any race. The only time I truly walked in a race to take a break was in the ironman703 in ’09. It went downhill from there. Haha.

Slowly but surely, I hope my mental stamina will come back. Perhaps, like the seasoned runner who knows that his physical stamina can only be maintained by running regularly, I shall need to pursue different mental activities that would allow my mental stamina to improve and become my competitive advantage again! Hopefully it’ll be a sustainable one at that.

Stamina. I have a love-hate relationship with you. I may not like you at times, but I know you’ll do me good if I get to know you better. Hope we’ll have a nice time together as days go by.

The one about learning at a cost

Yesterday I lost my whole stack in one hand. The buy-in was $20 in this 10c/20c game, and I had chipped up to about $50 by the time this hand came.

Villain was a loose passive player, the ideal type that I would have liked to meet. UTG, I merely called with QJo, which was in itself a mistake already. Either open-raise it, or fold.

Another player raised to 4bb, and Villain re-raised to 9bb. Mistake #2: calling here. A raise and a reraise? No business for QJo UTG to be here. I called, and the other player called too. We come to the flop.

Q T 5 rainbow

Of course I had to protect my top pair. I think I did okay here by betting 10bb. Maybe should have bet more, or just checked. The other player insta-folded, but Villain now raises to 20bb.

I smelt something fishy. This was a guy who was down 3 buy-ins already. He was playing conservative, at least relatively more so now. How could he reraise me? He HAD to have one of those AA KK or even AQ hands. I think my call here was fine, to re-evaluate on the turn.

The turn: 2

I checked, and he fired off 100bb, a ridiculously large amount. Everything told me to fold, fold, fold! He did that ‘strong sigh’, where you go ‘HAIZZZZZ’ as if you were disappointed at the flop. This was a strong tell that he had a strong hand actually. Another point was that he was already down by a lot and knew that I was interested in this pot (from calling his raise on the flop). He knew I was hooked. In retrospect it was a bad decision to have made the shove (I had very few chips left by then after calling, so might as well).

He flipped open KK. The river 6 didn’t help me, and I didn’t buy in again after that.

I learnt that sometimes I should trust my instincts. Learn to fold, all over again after that long hiatus without poker. Having only one pair on the turn facing aggression is likely not enough to win it, unless the villain is the type who pushes TT or mid pairs in uncoordinated, low boards. Oh well. Lesson learnt: one pair isn’t enough to call a shove, and loose passive players who raise preflop and on flops are dangerously polarised.

Ah, it’s gonna take longer than I expect to get back into the game

the one about less reputable schools

Today I was thinking about schools and how they shape school-children’s eventual lives. I’ve always thought that, when I became a parent, I would want my children to go to the best schools, or at least one with reputation within Singapore, or worldwide.

Today I realised a potential bad side to this. My friend, having come from the best schools from Singapore, was extremely stressed by her position as a student in NUS right now. NUS, to her past schoolmates, were where the ‘rejects’ went to, those deemed ‘incompetent’ to study abroad on scholarship. Having come from slightly more average schools, I was of course unable to really understand how she felt. According to her, she was indoctrinated the fact that she was the cream of the cream-of-the-crop, and for her to have come to NUS was a failure on her part to realize her full potential.

This was nonsensical to me. My personal definition of ‘smarts’ was more of the street-smart variant instead of the books-smart type that she probably refers to. I valued picking things up quickly as a very important skill. Personally I’ve been trying hard to equip myself with basic programming skills, and along with poker, these are the personal challenges to myself. I am glad I am not in the frame of mind that I’m only comparing myself to a standard model of ‘smart’, because then it would be too clear-cut. People work their ass off just to prove that. I don’t want to be like that.

Maybe I should start being more satisfied that I came from a more average school than the best ones. I would say with certainty that I would definitely develop a deeper sense of inferiority complex. At least now I’m able to still raise my head and say that I’m confident in who I am right now.

haha

this craigslist entry is so cool! made me laugh okay.
wish i had the writing bone and flair in me.
i must get it back (if it was ever there in the first place)!

anyway here it is for you lazy people who don’t even want to click on that link. haha. enjoy!

**************
I literally just got the message you put in my coffee… – m4w

Date: 2009-03-29, 3:26PM PDT

You–a cute barista who tried to save me from a bad date
Me–clueless

You probably won’t remember this, but I have thought about it every day since it happened, and although it happened about 10 years ago it only just occurred to me that your memory might also be haunted by the very same event, and that you likely have been waiting for a reciprocating sign all this time. Also, I may have inadvertently recently watched a suggestive Sandra Bullock movie, the kind that, in the right state of mind, makes otherwise implausible plot twists seem like personally directed cosmic prophecy.

Anyway, here is what happened: in 1999 I was a grad student at UCLA and made the mistake (or perhaps was guided by Destiny, which now in retrospect seems so obviously the case) of agreeing to a blind date, set up by this guy who worked in our IT department but who happened to be a grad student in the Slavic Languages department and whose girlfriend had a lonely friend who had recently moved to town and who wanted to meet someone. My apparent qualifications for this assignment were that 1) I was alive; 2) I had earlier helped this guy set up an amazing color laser printer in his office with the unspoken yet clearly implicit condition that I would thereafter have free access to color printouts (though future events prevented me from ever taking advantage of the opportunity) and he was therefore forever in my debt and felt that plugging back in the life-support system that my hospice-bound love life had been on was a suitable repayment for services rendered; and 3) I happened to be strolling along the hallway outside his office just as he received the plaintive call from his girlfriend demanding some sort of romantic intervention on her friend’s behalf immediately, lest his own well-being be threatened (this last bit I gathered myself as his door was open while I walked by). I had some time between resetting my experiments and while my data collection was cooking I thought “what the hell.” Hell, indeed. She was from Seattle and was also part of the Slavic Languages department (that was the last time I’ll be mentioning “slavic languages” by the way), she was very thin and pale, had multiple facial piercings, and seemed like someone who while having an instinctual ease around coffee also seemed to require regular doses of it in order to maintain her drollness and obvious contempt for the banal. And I had a calculator-watch. Thus, I suggested we take a walk over to the Kerkhoff coffee house on campus. That is where the divine hand of Fate intervened and I almost met you.

Now, I had been to that particular coffee shop many many times before, partly for the coffee and partly for these amazing chocolate croissants which really have nothing to do with this story except that they were almost good enough to warrant an expletive and have also left a lasting impression on me, to the point where I may have been distracted from noticing you, my lost love, the Universe’s true purpose in leading me there with promises of chocolate and caffeine. The point is, I was relatively familiar with the menu and had not previously experienced any untoward degree of surprise, consternation, or disappointment in food or beverage items that I had purchased there and so was totally unprepared for the significance of what would soon happen. So it was that with a degree of brazen ennui, my closest attempt at posing as a hip coffee aficionado in my present company, after the thin pale lady ordered something that seemed unnecessarily complicated for a Tuesday afternoon I approached the counter and placed my order. At what should have been one of the greatest most illuminating moments of my life, basking in the heavenly glory of your blue cap and apron like the halo and robes of an angel sent to Earth as a revelation just for me while the lights dimmed and Dreamweaver played for us in the sparkling universe of which we were the only two inhabitants, I was instead distracted and intimidated by the thin pale lady into ordering something whose name was not part of a language I spoke on a regular basis, but which I at least knew did not have anything to do with ice cream, as random as that fact may seem. You knew this as well, my sweet one, and this is how you tried to save me. I am only sorry that it has taken me so long to realize it.

After picking up our drinks (she paid for hers herself which I was more than happy to go along with, given how scary some of her piercings looked close up) we took a small table for two next to a wall and below one of the several speakers placed around the coffee house which happened to be playing something by Smashing Pumpkins, which also happened to be the description of an activity that I would have enjoyed far more than the ensuing coffee talk that I was now dreading. I’m not saying she was a horrible person–she seemed nice enough apart from her contempt for my attempt to order a sophisticated coffee drink at a university coffee shop a little after lunchtime on an otherwise nondescript weekday–but clearly the Universe knew, you knew, and I was slowly coming to realize that she was not only not The One but that I would have to come up with an entirely different strategy for getting free color printouts. The music was just loud enough that I could barely hear her as she went on and on about memes and phonemes, and as I sipped the coffee drink you had given me I began to become even more despondent as I realized that I would also have to find an alternate path instead of the hallway where the IT guy’s office was. That is when your message literally slapped me in the face and changed everything.

As I tipped my cup back for another sip, a perfectly formed scoop of jamoca almond fudge ice cream rolled out of the coffee, like Excalibur emerging from the depths, to the rim of the cup and onto my nose. Needless to say, I was shocked, stunned almost to the point of cardiac arrest. This had never happened to me before in my entire life! My “date” was clearly embarrassed and surely took it as yet another of the many vulgarities associated with my being a member of the untouchable caste when it came to coffee. But the point is, there was a scoop of ice cream in my coffee! I had not asked for such a thing, and in fact had never even heard of or known that such a thing was possible. It is true that there was an ice cream place in the same general area as the coffee place, but in the endless serial reconstructions narrated by my own internal F. Lee Bailey I simply cannot think of a way that a scoop of ice cream could have accidentally appeared in my coffee. It was only much later that I realized that you, my love, are the only one who could have put it there as a final effort to save me from thoughts of smashing pumpkins, to give me an out, and to let me know that you saw me, and I mean that in a Joy-Luck-Club kind of way. It had the effect both you and I were looking for, but I didn’t know it at the time. For the rest of the time we were there I could not stop marveling at how a scoop of ice cream had ended up in my coffee, I must have said exactly that at least a dozen times. I’m sure soon thereafter as the thin pale lady re-told stories of her worst dates I would come to be known as the ice cream guy. But now, so many years later it is with a Hemingway-esque regret that I think to myself late at night: why didn’t I look over to the coffee counter to see you there, my savior, my Lady of the Latte, my love? Would you have smiled and tipped your cap to let me know that everything was going to be ok? Would you have thrown off your apron and gone running barefoot with me through the grass of Meyerhoff park to that special place where the Bee girl from that Blind Melon video seemed to finally find acceptance and contentment? Instead, I wiped my nose, finished my coffee and ice cream, and accompanied the thin pale lady back to wherever it is that the Slavic peoples go. I never saw her again. But alas, I never saw you again either.

I looked for you, from time to time, but looking back I never really knew what you looked like; I was only ever aware of the warmth I felt, much as when one sits in the sun on a Spring day, that I am absolutely positive had more to do with you than the steamers and kettles and lack of air conditioning. I always trusted that somehow I would just recognize you when I found you and know without doubt that it was you, much in the same way that people think about the afterlife or a really great pair of shoes, where everything seems right and seems to fit in a way it never has before.

To this day, with each cup of coffee I pause and wonder what will emerge as I tip the cup back for a sip, wondering if today will be the day that somehow I find you again, if not through a message in my coffee then maybe something more conventional although still just as original, coming from you. So far, every cup has been just another cup of coffee.

Anyway, if you remember a dorky looking science guy who came in every once in a while and who you took pity on and saved from a truly awkward social experience sometime shortly after Grunge had peaked and by whom you found yourself slightly intrigued, look me up. We’ll go for coffee. Or ice cream. Your choice.

************

The one about life after ORD

ORD is overrated. Sure, during the last 3 months of army life you are the kings in your unit, and you get to scream “ORD LO!” everywhere you go and there is nothing anyone else can do to you other than sulk and stare at their own ORD dates, hoping that maybe that “2010″ will magically turn to “2009″. Some sound advice to those people: It ain’t gonna happen, dude, so just suck it up and wait your turn to be able to rightfully proclaim your own “ORD LO!”

Anyway, as i was saying, ORD is extremely overrated. All that suspense and anticipation builds up in the final days and months before that one very day. When it comes, you realise, why the hell were you so happy in the first place? So many things change.

1. You don’t get money (however minuscule an amount, it is, after all, still money) for doing nothing, or pretty much nothing. Instead you get what you deserve — nothing!

2. You have to go out into the streets and go look for a job to get money. And it has to be a part-time one since you’re going to school in August anyway. This may sound easy. It was pretty damn easy to find a job pre-NS because the economy was booming. Now things are different.

3. In other words, ORD = Retrenchment. Retrenchment = No Money. No Money = No Honey No Entertainment. No Entertainment = Life sucks. And Life sucks = enough said. life sucks.

It’s kinda ironic the way i am now. I sulk and sulk everyday i have to appear at camp at 8am. I used to sulk and sulk whenever i was on duty, looking at myself in the mirror while brushing my teeth, thinking, oh man how good it would be to ORD just right bloody now. And then this very morning when i was brushing my teeth, i was thinking, damn, what the hell am i doing brushing my teeth only at 10am? How much am i earning nowadays? ZILCH! And i just needed to stand at the balcony to see the busy roads, and within each and every car was a person who was doing good hard work to put food on the table. I, on the other hand, was just staring at them from my balcony, such a distance away.

Many people have found good temporary jobs to work at to get some financial support/ pocket money for university. Others give tuition occasionally. If you are an NSF reading this, please please please try to find a job before you actually ORD, so at least you won’t be sitting at home doing nothing. Okay, strictly speaking, i’m not doing nothing — i am reading books, improving myself, yada yada, which in other words mean that i’m not economically productive, if you ignore the fact that it may contribute to future implied productivity (though i’m betting on the hope that it does!).

For the rest of us without jobs, just go to Facebook and see who does almost all the quizzes and tests, updates the Notes and actually DOES the Notes that they’re tagged to do. They are probably jobless/ reading books/ improving themselves/ yada yada too. So, yeah, they’re probably all jobless. Or soon-to-be-jobless slackers who use Facebook during their work hours. Haha. Facebook was actually found to have decreased workplace efficiency. And i can clearly see why.

Back to my jobless life.

it has been a while

It feels so difficult and so different to return to blogging after such a long, long hiatus. Sometimes in the past few days (or weeks actually) i do think about posting, but then when i get to the point where i’m in front of my desktop looking at the “Add New Post” screen forcing me to type it a title and a short piece of prose, stuff that i wanted to write about previously would suddenly evade my senses. The funny thing is that i’ve been thinking about that topic for a whole day (or week actually), and then when i finally get down to doing it, everything blanks out. Netizens have thus coined a very useful abbreviation for times like this:

WTF.

The Aviva Half-Ironman 70.3 Race was fun i know i must mentally perverted to see 70.3miles of swim/bike/run as “fun”, but i guess we are all pervertic in our own ways. There was a big hoo-ha over the bike route because apparently some asshole decided it was all in good fun to dispose a few pins of his along the road so that he (and many others) could have the pleasure of seeing cyclist after cyclist dismount from their bikes to inspect them, only to find that their tyres had been deflated. And who in their right minds would be carrying spare tyre rubbers around? Well, apparently everyone does so, but it’s not like in cars where you can carry it in your boot. For cyclists they just leave their spare tyres at the transition area so it is still possible to self-repair when the need arises.

One thing i learnt was that Race Nutrition is extremely important to the athlete. PowerGels are ESSENTIALS, really. But the next time i secure them to my bike it would do me a lot of good to really scotch-tape them well to my bike. This race, i loosely attached them to my bike so that i could grab them when i needed them. But after the first 30km of infrequent bumps and potholes, they were all gone. In retrospect i was kinda stupid actually. Haha. I couldn’t consume them while riding on the bike anyway (i hadn’t trained for that before!), so in all cases i would have had to stop to consume them. So why did i need to “grab them when i needed them”, as though i would be riding and eating them? Damn. $9 worth of PowerGels gone down the drain, and i mean it literally, down the damned drain by the roadside.

Yes, the past few weeks have been about training, training, and more training. It was to the point i felt exhausted at the end of every day, and when i did my bedtime readings i just wanted to sleep. And then there was the jadedness that tomorrow would be yet another day of, guess what? Training! Again! It really took its toll on myself i think. I stopped going out so much and spent as much time as i could in the comforts of my home. That was an opportunity cost, of course. And now that it’s over i can resume my previous life of eat-sleep-play again! Hey, it’s better than a pig who eats and sleeps okay.

My study of poker is improving everyday with the help of books, forums, and of course my own brain. But mostly books and forums lah. There are new things to learn every single time you play. There are things to learn from every individual, whether he’s a fish (that you can hook and gut every last organ out) or a shark (ever seen Jaws?). It’s a supremely complex game that is worth studying for, and that’s what i’m doing nowadays.

I have read that, much like how non-smokers will never understand what’s up with smoking, it would be pointless for a poker player to explain the intricacies of poker to a layman and expect him to get hooked to the game too. It just won’t happen. Maybe a little interest, okay, but to the layman, poker is cards, and cards is gambling, and gambling is bad. And that’s that. It won’t change. Maybe a little blackjack or big-two during Chinese New Year, all in the name of fun, would be reasonable, but to pursue poker outside this period of festivity would be deemed “gambler”. In Mandarin, a gambler is called a “du2 gui3″, which directly translates to a gambling devil. And of course i don’t need to tell you what kind of connotations go along with the word “devil”. It’s bad, to say the least. So i’ve decided to try my best to draw a line between my poker and my life. I’ve told friends that i play poker and evidently they see it as gambling, which made me come to this conclusion of drawing that line now. I’ll try my utmost best to never mention poker to people who don’t know that i love that game so much that i study it even harder than i did for any exam in my life. Maybe i can keep it cool like Phil Hellmuth who, when asked by a stranger whether he played poker, replied, “Yeah, a little.” And this is the guy who has won the most bracelets at the moment. And to say that he plays “a little” poker would be to say that Tiger Woods plays “a little” golf, that Michael Jordan played “a little” basketball.

Okay i’m also currently jobless after just ORD-ing. It’s sad to ORD at such a period of time because of the bad economy and everything that you would have to have lived in a shell if you needed me to explain. But then i think of the fresh graduates and think, “They’re in a far worse spot than me! At least i can afford to be jobless for a while as i’m entering uni anyway, but what about them?” Let’s just hope the tough can tough their way through this period of hardship. As the going gets tough, the tough gets going. Haha, that’s a funny inspirational line i heard recently (yes, no doubt from one of those running websites that shows popular quotes of encouragement). As such i’m just gonna be a Geodude at home (stone), look forward to learning driving, and prepare for a few more races that are coming soon. Passion Run and Tribob, here i come.

5 things of the present

1.
i haven’t been blogging at all. there was this spam comment here that lasted for a week, advertising a site that could help “save your marriage”. it may come in useful in future, but nah, i’ve deleted it without a second thought. maybe that spammer’s son, a spammee, can come advertise for that site again in future when i really need it. but nope, useless to me now.

2.
aviva ironman 70.3 is in 2 weeks time, and i’ve been training like a mentally unstable dog of late. fell off my bike again yesterday on the wet, wet roads. lucky the traffic lights were red. if they weren’t i would have painted it permanently red. but oh well nothing’s happened so far so i’m happy.

3.
since my last entry, 3 teeth have been extracted from my mouth. and 3 teeth = ~10 days of medical leave. i didn’t want them to hurt like a bitch (like that last one did) so just extracted them without a second thought.

4.
You know it feels like crap to be invited to someone’s 21st birthday, and you have to reject them because of your own problems and schedules. There’s a certain majesty that comes along with being 21 years of age, and it’s a kinda expensive majesty too, no doubt. And then it has to be hyped up and everything and adds stress to everyone. But i guess that’s the price of really enjoying this fleetingly exciting coming-of-age. The very next morning, do they go, “is that it?”

5.
I kinda dislike Terminal 3 now. People fly, fly, fly away. No matter how well it went, guests would have to leave after a dinner, and it’s either we meet them again in the streets of life, or they just disappear into nothingness forever and ever.

The one about the redness

When i get married, there would be three things i would be worried about: finances, army mobilisations, and big groups of unmarried people visiting during Chinese New Year. The latter is, of course, the worst of the three. You know, being in the mindset that i am married, i am a horrid enough person to be biased for the married against the unmarried. The husbands against the bachelors. The wives against the spinsters.

Just today i made a date with a few other individuals with the same interests as mine to meet up and play a game of in-between. Yes, us gamblers. And, as you know, gambling in public is not so much as fun as when gambling in a house (especially when policemen come a-knockin’), so we went to a person’s house.

It is of chinoiserie interests to bring two mandarin oranges along with oneself whenever going to people’s houses during Chinese New Year, as a form of respect and sharing of luck. However, in return, or at least out of politeness, a married couple would have to give the unmarried a red packet, or angpow, which, more often that not, contains money. I’ve met certain people who give chocolate coins, but that’s not the point here, though i must say that i still do equally (ok, maybe not so equally. ok. not equally at all) appreciate the effort. Giving chocolate coins sort of imply that the person is going through some financial turmoil at the moment for him to resort to such a valiant action, so it would be extremely cruel to fault someone for giving chocolate coins instead of bank notes. Just hope he has better luck next year or something.

Anyway, if i were married, and have a kid or two, i would think it kind of weird for my son/daughter to bring his friends home to gamble, while i have to give my son’s/daughter’s friends angpow money, which i know would obviously end up on the gambling table throughout the course of the evening. When i give people money, i wouldn’t really want to know what they do with that money. Well, of course, if some dude tells me he’s gonna save it up in a bank account that would ultimately fund his university studies, then of course i would be delighted. Hell, i might even give him another angpow! As for the others, i really wouldn’t want to know what you do with that money. Perhaps at the other end of the spectrum is that, yes, i do know what’s going to happen with that money, and that, oh, no, it’s gonna be on the gambling table. What would i have perpetrated? What have i done, oh man! I’m giving someone money to gamble. Wouldn’t that be kinda evil? It’s like finding someone in a deserted house all alone and all tied up. He’s looking at you with those innocent, desperate “OMFG FINALLY A SANE PERSON! PLEASE MAN YOU GOTTA HELP ME OUT HELP MEEEEE!” eyes. Then you pick up a random stick from the ground and start poking him deliriously like the sadist that you are. You’re obviously driving him down the road to no where.

Anyway, since i was five, or maybe even younger than that, i’ve been thinking about how little children meet up with their cliques and start going around to one another’s houses to collect red packets. Like, “Let those adults pay for having given birth to their children! Mwahahhaah! I’m young and i’m powerful, and boy do i love these opportunities for free money. Now i can afford that Nintendo DSi thing i’ve been eyeing all year. MWahhaha!” And that sure looked like the case to me. I mean, what could the grown ups actually say to a group of children who come visiting? There isn’t much to catch up on. It’s probably the first time meeting each other anyway. What are your grades? What hobbies do you have? Which secondary school are you intending to go to? Ah, sounds kinda bland to me. And after they’re bored (let’s give that a guess.. maybe a grand total of 7 seconds?), they sort of give these body language signals that scream, “I WANNA GET OUTTA HERE AND GO GET MORE MONEY AT GABRIEL’S HOUSE! NOWWWWW!” and it would be a torture to both you and the small kids to detain them in your nicely decorated house that they fail to appreciate the value and thought involved. They probably think those decorations miraculously grow out of nothing out of nowhere. Or maybe out of a seed. You know, one of those seeds from Jack and the Beanstalk?

It would be so awkward! If the parents came too, i would feel less awkward, for like, maybe 1% less of the time. I would think, “Dude, you and i know why you brought your kid here. Just give me what you think i want, and i’ll give your kid what he very much wants, and let’s be on our ways.”

Okay, maybe rarely, very rarely, “Oh, thanks for the compliment on the house, i think they’re lovely too. Yes, yes, i put in a lot of effort for them. Here, okay i don’t usually do this but please take off your shoes and come in and be my guest, please. No one ever says those bloody decorations that i spend 6 hours on every year are any good, so please, make yourself at home!” Ah, that would be nice, really. Haha.

Anyway, i just wanted to say that Chinese New Year is an economist’s nightmare (or any person who studied secondary school maths, really). Like seriously. Two mandarin oranges that cost at most $1, could be exchanged for an angpow that is worth a minimum of $2! Well, maybe the occasional two chocolate coins, but then again it’s a one-in-a-hundred-or-more chance, so why not take it? It’s a 100% profit, or more! Usually more! Well, in any case, if i ever become a miserly economist I would 1) disallow any visitors of any kind to my houses, 2) only allow my children visit my friends who are married with one or no children, 3) buy ten cartons of mandarin oranges (remember the 100% profit! omg how can i let this go easily!), 4) let my children team up with his clique and force him to psycho everyone to visit everyone’s houses (except my house, of course, which would be off-limits to everyone!) to claim the angpows (it’s kinda like how people in World Of Warcraft use the term “raid”. It rather aptly explains it, really). This might have future repercussions on the psychology and mentality of my child, but, oh well, a small sacrifice for a greater good, eh? haha. And then last but not least, 5) buy new shoes before the New Year, so i can visit enough families during the CNY period to exchange my mandarins for monaaaaaay. Shoe spoil never mind, i got moooooolahhhhh!!

Okay, i shouldn’t say any other bad things people can do during the CNY period. They should all be kept as secrets. Secrets i would protect with all my heart, soul and bak kwa.

Hope you guys have a happy Chinese New Year.
Gong Xi Fa Cai!

lol

funny facebook conversation

a resolution

Hmm i was going through posts from 2005 and i realised i used to be able to compose much much much much (x 100) more creative posts when i was in JC. Nowadays i still simply write everything off my mind, but everything seems so much more serious now. in other words, BORING! and oh-my-god i do hate fervently such blogposts because they’re such a bloody bore to read through. if taking a brief glance through a blogpost allows me to gain as much knowledge as when i actually go down to read every single sentence, then, my dear blogger, you have FAILED! well at least that’s my perception of the whole idea of blogging. boring is bad. boring will never be the new black. never ever. and perhaps that’s the reason why i have zero readers nowadays. perhaps playing poker and mahjong by the book has made me so much less creative. and then again we can always go back to the scapegoat #1, NATIONAL SERVICE! ^^

Oh well, one thing’s for sure: this must NOT go on.

resolution: to create more readable and enjoyable posts instead of simply narrating my boring existence in this high fantastical world! customer loyalty is important! haha business readings do get ingrained after a while.