ok, this is a lvl2000 term paper

yes it's been a while. while the whim to ramble is here i better get everything out before i inadvertently go click on the civ4 icon (yah i'm one of those civ4 anonymous groupies).

1. vietnam trip was.. well.. interesting. realised:
(a) singaporeans are dead boring ppl
(b) there's only so much you can force yourself to fabricate rapport-on-demand
(c) vietnam is muuuch larger -and diverse- than i'd imagined
(d) it's the little things, really, that you appreciate the most (oh how i miss the 50cent baguette sandwiches from the (mostly-)benign roadside aunties)
(e) the pinkerton virus is latent in all of us (i self-righteously reject the idea that it's just me). some have fought it and won, others don't even know they have it. i chillingly realised this was my virgin experience talking to angmohs as peers, and how incredibly uncomfortable i was doing it. this CMIO-SAP crap in our system has screwed us more than i'd imagined.
(f) the grand secret behind better sports performance, ladies and gentlemen, lies not in swanky stadiums or fantastical goals (ooh pun), but in "shit-i-mistimed-my-speed-fuc-"-bang-you're-dead traffic. want to improve hand-eye-body coordination of the entire nation overnight (whilst conveniently ridding the gene pool of the athletically-challenged)? trash all the traffic lights i say! that being said, going against the traffic in my not-too-manly bicycle clad in metrosexual pink poncho has never felt so exhilirating, liberating, and worryingly, right. on another fantastical(ly outofpoint) note, i imagine that in times of war, the vietnamese government just needs to issue a gun to every bike owner and voila! instant mobile light-strike division(ssss). yamashita would be proud.
(g) contrary to what your finely-tuned business acumen/adventurous spirit may impel you towards ("but the bus is so much cheaper! it'll be fun too!"), always choose train/plane over 24hr-bus rides. a-l-w-a-y-s.
(h) angmohs need to refine their benchmark of "good food". i swear i'll slap the next angmoh who proclaims that sorry piece of shriveled tau guah as "hmmm delicious" (ok i jest; i am but a law-fearing SPG-wannabe boring singaporean).
(i) i really should travel alone (and honestly, it's not him/her/them, it's me).
(j) we're exposed to so much american culture, but so little british. i wonder why.
(k) watching HK kungfu dramas dubbed over in vietnamese (by the same solitary female dubber - yes, for all characters. positively, the most sturdy iron ricebowl.) is actually very good alternative entertainment.
(l) i really don't like beer (hu da was not too bad though), and my capacity for alcohol is as pathetic as ever. according to beano (aussie dude; nice fellow), it's really the fault of my asian genes though.
(m) nothing makes you understand why some feel so strongly about the (arguably non-existent) "singaporean identity" than being asked "oh singapore doesn't have it's own language?" i feel a sudden sense of comradeship with talkingcock.com, and anger at our government's disdain for it. yet i also feel the shame of hypocrisy that this comes from me, who derides sMs-sPeAk and cringes at the ji-teh-ji-teh engrish uttered on our streets. i can't resolve this conflicting stance now, though i gather it reveals a somewhat snobbish elitist facet of me. for now, let me be typecast as a double-standards judgmental jock.
(n) as far as skindeep beauty goes, it's all in the nose really.
(o) despite feeling miserable with perpetually-cold hands and grimy feet, it still beats over-enthusiastic sun, anyday. it actually felt real fun, beanie over my drooping head, windbreaker zipped all the way up, chilly hands tucked as deep as possible into pockets, huddling along the almost-foggy hanoi streets being lightly pelted by the incessant drizzle. very american-drama, very shiok.
(p) backpacking (a term i find increasingly jarring; like, "oh i'm so cool i went backpacking what did you do?") is something which everyone should experience, simply because it, to coin qy, "forces you to grow". the bad news is that it's perhaps unlikely you'll ever get into any "before sunrise" situations, but it does set forth a series of changes in how you look at the world, and your life. singapore is really way too small a place for one to derive our entire worldview from. i can't place my finger on it exactly, but i know my lenses have been tweaked somewhat.
(q) we do, indeed, experience our own individual, unique realities. perhaps what's commonly termed as "soulmates" and their ilk simply boil down to people who share, or at least really understand, a slice of each other's realities.
(r) that one of the most insidious things our education system and culture have snuck into our malleable little brains is the visceral belief that there is one perfect way to play the game of life to attain that one perfect destination. i'm shocked that it took me all of 20+ years to figure out this now-blatant fallacy, but even more worried to think that there are still many who hold on to this belief without even realising it.
(s) it feels great to be able to think that you have friends in canada, england, australia, japan who will be glad to host you when you have enough money to visit
(t) you see the familiar signage within the airport, where the majority of ppl share your skin colour and speak the way only singaporeans can, but it isn't until you waltz into the duty-free store and be greeted with an overly-cheery but nonetheless heartwarming jingle of 财神到 that you finally say to yourself, "I'm home".

lots of other memories about the trip of course, but they're all in my trusty handwritten YEP journal (finally full yay) and to reproduce them here would be a serious drag (for all of us). a little cynical if our planned travelogue would ever come into fruition (i think i'm supposed to be in charge of that...), but oh well. it was never going to be a "harold and kumar goes to white castle" road trip anyway, and i imagine what i'd pen would be starkly different from what qy would, so perhaps there really is not much point to that. that, and the fact that i'm waistdeep in FYP manure, which leads me to..

2. there's always this inexplicable euphoria during the first hour when returning to your motherland (yeah go go socialist) after an extended absence (which for me is simply anything >14 days); suddenly the perfect Queen's English on the noticeboards, the sleek interiors of the Pride Of Our Motherland (aka Changi Airport; cue stirring national anthem), the straight, orderly and honk-less roads all induce a feeling akin to pleasant surprise, followed tightly by spontaneous swelling of nationalistic pride, as if these things had just popped up while you were gone. "look at our flawlessly-black tarmac roads; look at the dainty bougainvillas upon the aesthetically-presented road dividers! it is a good day to be a singaporean, yes yes!" this transient cheeriness lasts of course right till about the time when your trusty coursemate dutifully informs you that you have 3 working days to submit an interim report/presentation for your FYP which you haven't touched in the past 2 months (and hence have nothing to write) since, oh, vietnam beckoned. that, plus screwed-up-module-choice and most recently, missing the tutorial bidding window equals a great way to start the sem.

3. people often say our memory romanticises the past, where the sepia hues whiteout all the crap and make us go all teary-eyed with all the misplaced positive nostalgia. lately though i think that perhaps this is our subconscious' gentle way of telling us that pain and misery is often temporary and insignificant (at least for most of us in our pampered singaporean context), that we're tougher than we think we are. or to put it in more straightforward terms, that we should stop whining and fucking grow up. seriously, think about it: many of us think back of our army days (myself included) and think:"man, i actually miss ex spade. remember that time when we spontaneously fell asleep in mid conversation? that was wicked man haha ocs actually quite fun lah" only for our venerably-wise friend to knock us on our head and tell us to wake up from our sanitised mirage. on the other hand, i don't imagine we'll find the average psychologically-balanced veteran go:"man, all those cu chi charlies back in 'nam were a bitch, but hell yeah that was a great experience!" it's all hyperbole bullshit (but the falling asleep mid conversation story is real heh), but the difference really is that often our oh-it's-so-tragic-kill-me-now situations are honestly nothing. peanuts. and while we can sometimes hoodwink our friends with a little imaginative storytelling to hype things up a bit (like i did with my FYP thing up there), you can't fool your subconscious. your "traumatic" experience really counts for nothing, so it doesn't even register a few months (even weeks) down the road. so to balance things out a bit, my point is simple: true that your memory isn't exactly the best data archiver, but also acknowledge that your memory concurrently acts as a filter which chooses to remember what it deems most important and chucks out all the fluff. if our experiences are largely responsible for who we are today, then our memories are the screenshots summarising these episodes. what is featured in the individual shots are important, but why we (or rather, our subconscious) chose to take those shots, in that particular lighting and angle whilst leaving out some others, are similarly reflective of our individual characters.

4. through some characteristic finger-tweedling and hemming and hawing, i put off buying tickets for corrinne may's upcoming concert, and now it's sold out. i feel sadder than i'd thought i would. bah.

5. the thing with all this "hello world i'm back after an absence of 2.5 months" blogging is that on one hand you think backlogging is pointless, yet on the other hand you think "isn't that the point of blogging in the first place?". says a lot of my motivations behind blogging huh. but anyway, just to humour both sides, a quick mishmash run-through of all i can remember regarding the past months:

(a) ladder theory; "nice is a four-letter word"
(b) absolute morality
(c) telling some jc oh-i'm-full-of-witty-remarks punk to shut up during harry potter (forgive me whilst i turn a crimson hue of pride)
(d) six feet under
(e) now that i know the storyline, watching matrix revolutions again makes it seem more tacky than mindblowing.
(f) house-hopping

6. as hinted above, i'm moving soon (physically, for once). going to be a buangkok boy (yah sorry it sounds very wrong i apologise). looking forward to it actually, esp now that our nice little kitchen roof is finally giving way completely. very 屋漏偏缝连夜雨, very tragi-comedic. maybe i'd only start missing this place after it's gone (i'd bet on that actually), but for now i can't wait to greet the fresh air and a little scenery on the 14th level of somewhere in buangkok.

7. ran into P at the road junction near engin; i haven't seen her for, what, 2+ years? she had to rush off to "meet a friend" though, so it was a 5sec recognition-surprise-hi-sorry-bye incident. some part of me braces for the familiar sting of sadness at the apparent demise of a once-thriving friendship, but it never comes. nothing, in fact. i chuckle in slight bewilderment to myself, half in mirth and half in wistfulness, and move on.

8. mantra of the moment (essence courtesy of my bro): no matter how fucked up you think you are, there'll always be someone who thinks you're the prize designer piece amonst the heap which all the other aunties overlooked. granted, (i) you may ultimately still be in the league of ThisFashion rather than Zara (ii) the one who chose you, alas, is yet another auntie, but it is heartening to acknowledge that value judgments are arbitrary and incongruous, which means i still have some hope apart from Plan B (vaguely involving a US$3500 vietnamese mail-order bride).

9. a recurring thought throughout vietnam was the significance of this year; for most of the 2B guys our academic roads end (boo for some, fistpump yay for me) and the working life begins. but this is not about "oh what is my destiny", but rather, about how great it feels to be at the cusp of it all, at this focused point of time where everything still hangs in the balance, where the future is still (largely) pristine and full of hope. smacks of naivete perhaps, but this is really what i see now. this will of course all fade in time and possibly be replaced by the lifeless pallour of a mechanised drone (yeah you can smack me in the face when i'm having a solitary smoke in a seedy bar trapped in a deadend job and hitting my forties still saving up for my mail-order bride and laugh at me for typing this entry then), but for now the exuberance is supremely uplifting. sweet.

10. so instead of a uber senang final sem i find myself carrying 24MCs yet again in a last gambit to haul my flagging CAP into the last cabin of the Honours Train. it's darkly comic, thinking about The Plan and The Vision back in Year One, where "overloading in the early sems and guaranteeing a second-upper before taking it easy in the final year" seemed so real, so attainable. now i can't wait to just graduate, though hopefully with a little prize of salvaged pride, if not glittery transcripts.