The Loss of A Friend

He died in his sleep this morning. 11 Nov 08, Time of discovery, 7 am. I knew something was amiss the moment I called out to him. Because usually I didn't have to - I would only have to walk up to the glass door and there he would be, pawing the glass and urging us to open the sliding door to the balcony. Once the heavy darkened glass door slid open, he would slowly saunter out and give us a frazzled stare, urging for his breakfast to be brought to him. Usually, that would be the case.

I hesitated when I called out his name a second time. Something was more than amiss. By the time I slid open the door, I had expected the death. When I peered in, it was confirmed. I saw a limp head, too tired to carry any more life within him, lying against the edge of his bed.

I wonder if he grew too cold in the night, knowing that death was near. I wonder if he sensed that someone, something was calling him out of the house, beyond his physical confines. The problem with having a job you are unable to like anymore is that it is too easy to let the mind wander away and begin considering every possibility around. Twice before lunch, I let an email be sent with a click of my fingers even before my mind had said alright, let it go. I wonder about how it happened, and why it happened. He had fought bronchial asthma for a good two years, fighting with vets and enduring coughing fits and inhalers thrust into his face. I wonder if his lungs had finally failed because of our amateurish attempts at health care. I wonder if he had just gone because he decided that this was a meaningless existence. I wonder if my father killed him in a drunken and misunderstood rage. I wonder if God just wanted us to learn some lesson and decided to use him to teach us.

My mother peered in after me - She has a knack for these things. She knows before any of us when something has gone terribly, horribly wrong. She followed my eyes and covered her mouth when she saw him. Somehow, I didn't know - All I knew was that something was amiss and I had to verify, as if I would know better, the death. Slowly I walked to his bed and knelt down, whispering his name again and again. I wasn't terrified, nor was I dreading anything. I was merely curious.

His body was curled up in that familiar form of sleep, on his cushion, his tail tucked neatly at his side. "Get a towel", my mother said to me."Get his towel, the one that you use to bathe him on Sundays." It's funny now how everything seems like a dream. I walked to the toilet, held on to his towel (I call it the technicolor dreamcoat now and then because of the rainbow design), came back and slowly unfurled the length of the towel over him. The family was in the dining room by now, all dressed and ready for the day. From the corner of the window facing the dining room, the first rays of sunlight began to cast their warm glow into the house.

"Well... I think firstly we need to get him to Mount Vernon. Get him cremated." I spoke, with a voice that wasn't mine. "We need a shoebox." My mum said, in a quiet and mellow tone. "No." With a sort of firmness that wasn't me, I replied,"We'll carry him in his bed. It's almost a complete box. It's only fitting that he goes in it." For some reason, a sort of silence came over all of us at the dining table and we looked at the bed. Bathed in a gentle morning yellow glow, his greyish white fur again took the form of gentle, undisturbed sleep. His eyes were shut, his body tilted now to a side, and I half expected him to twitch a whisker in that small but sure sign of a pleasant dream. But there was nothing.

"Mum and I will take care of this." My dad spoke. It was the first line that he had said so far. I looked at my watch, and saw that rush hour was coming - By now traffic would have begun to pull up and crowd the roads leading into town. "Go now. It's ok, it's ok." He tried to brush me off with his hand. I regained my composure and said, "Alright, but you know the way to Mount Pleasant right? Take the PIE and exit via Whitley road." I stopped conversation short and got out to carry the bed out the door. I still have no idea why I did it. Perhaps I thought it would make the work easier for dad and mum later. Perhaps I just wanted to make it look like I had done enough as a friend. I don't know. "We know." said dad. "Go to work now." And in that continued daze of a morning, I left the house.

I carried work out in a daze. There was a meeting to attend at Rendezvous Hotel by 8 that morning, where I had to catch a superior and gather comments on the latest draft of an exhibition plan. There was also subsequently a meeting to attend for drafting of costs and consideration of suppliers for another project. Then there were templates and formats to amend, and fresh papers to draft for activities pending next week. The day continued rolling over me, slowly consuming me and forcing me to put up a false front of strength. Twice I stopped typing at my desk, glancing at nothing, feeling tears well up. The timing for both sessions was 10 am and 3 pm.

10am - My mother messaged me on my handphone. "They say the cremation will cost 128 dollars. That's the common one, where he'll be put together with others." Put together with others? Didn't literature have that as the pauper's grave? I'll have none of that, I thought. The phone's messaging alert went off again, and I checked. It was mum. "The private one will cost 522 dollars. It has two times for private witnessing sessions - 3 pm or 10 am (we missed it)". She wasn't trying to be funny - She was serious. And so was I. I was angry - Angry that I somehow, couldn't afford to live up to my principles. I didn't want him cremated without all of us being there, but yet it was firstly incredibly and unreasonably expensive for him to be cremated in private, and secondly impossible for any of us to be present. At first I rationalised it, and thought that I wanted a private cremation so that we could rest assured that his ashes were separate from others and it could be brought home (That's where my mum messaged me and told me that it was best to just leave it all there. In the furnace.) But more than that, I had heard stories (which arguably I can't verify and could well be another urban legend) that the crematorium staff would chortle and accept your hard earned dollars for cremating him and then once you were out the door, it would be the rubbish disposal doing the cremation for your beloved. You just HAD to be there.

That's where my mum is really psychic, cause just as I was about to take the plunge and sell my possessions to cremate him in private and heck with the cost of it all or the element of private reassurance that he was being given dignity in death - she messaged again. "His ashes will be placed at the well outside the pet hospital."

I broke down. I broke down and wept when i saw that message because for the first time, his death hit home. I felt the cold deep canyon that his absence left behind, and at a time where I so needed him, he was gone.

"Let it go." - End of message. It was good advice. I messaged back that we would have to take the 'cheaper' option (I still hate myself and cannot understand my own logic), and be forced to accept that we would have to go to that well near the hospital and imagine, praying that there has been honesty and integrity in dealing with the dead, so that we drop off flowers with the safe but false knowledge that a new happiness has been reached.

It is still day 1 of his death. It is a day that I cannot accept and find it difficult to accept. Like I said before, it was a false front that I put up at the workplace. It continues to be a false front that I am unable to get over and am finding incredibly difficult to maintain.

I am thus sitting here, in front of a computer at 2130hrs, writing a letter that will never by understood by my cat, who died today, and will never get to read. I will write it because I have to get it out of me. I have to say it, before age and loss of mind cloud my memory of the day I lost a friend.

So hear goes:

Dear P,

You left us today, after six short years in our care. I will probably never know what led to you leaving - Was it that your body finally gave up the fight and you had endured enough? Was it that you lacked love?

I love you.

I loved you the first day you stepped into my life, a precocious kitten, curiously batting about the air and chasing imaginary friends. I knew I loved you the day you coughed and fell into a fit, and we rushed to send you to the veterinarian. I believe that you're the only one that I have loved till the end.

I am sorry.

I am sorry for having taken you for granted. For not being there for you when no one was at home and you spent endless hours in the balcony - trapped. It kills me to know that your last hours were spent in the same, unbearable place.

I would not want to leave this world being alone. Ironically, you were with us but yet so away from us. Was it terrifying walking away, into a new place, unfamiliar territory?

I would be terrified. And knowing that I would be terrified makes me hate myself for allowing you to have walked away like that.

I will miss you - I miss you already and I hate the feeling. It is difficult to get along in this world. It felt better with you around - Because you were innocent. You bore no grudge, no intent against me. You looked to me for sustenance and me to you for companionship. You are viewed with such insignficance by all, even by me. And I regret having done so.

I wish I could have been better to you.

I wish I had bought you fresh fish every day - made it a daily and weekly routine to see that you ate a different meal every day, had a fresh coat of fur from a warm bath. I wonder if that would have made a difference.

I love you, and I will miss you.

Debunking ZeitGeist

A good friend of mine introduced me to a movie recently that was slated to be quite the 'eye-opener'. Claiming that it awoke him to many things in the world that had been going on, he quickly shifted from a state of 'you should watch it' to 'you must watch it'. Eventually, his excitement broiled over and soon I received the specific website details on my handphone.

Since puberty, I'd always been a tad wary of half-fuck animations and videos claiming to offer salvation to the weak-minded and spinning off conspiracy theories. More so those that claim to reveal a particular truth.

ZeitGeist however, offered a fresh perspective. I had to admit that this wasn't your usual doomsday cult offering you salvation in the form of life with the stars or meeting willy wonka in his choco butthole factory. This was pretty good shit.

Good shit - Still shit.

While normally I'd embed videos within my blogs, I figured that it would be best that you understand my experience, as well as hundreds of thousands of others' experiences by heading for the actual website featuring the video. (http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com)

OK, if you aren't comfortable with watching 2 hours odd of 7 inch size video, I'll run you through what happened.

The movie Zeitgeist

199 Days Left

Batman - The Dark Knight

I know this comes a little late (to be exact, 4 months late), but this has got to be the best scene ever:



Ok, you've watched the show, you know that this isn't your usual blockbuster action movie. Having opened a little after Iron Man, it not only beat Iron Man pants down at the box office, but it also set a new standard for the action hero industry. Ten stars minimum for the Dark Knight for me mates.

I said that then, and I will continue saying that for a long long time. But realising now that it's been almost four months past it, I am beginning to rethink exactly why the movie to me was such a great show. I know I sound crazy, perhaps a little too crazy, but really - this scene and the rest of the movie, it just spoke to me.

I like the deviation from the suual juxtaposition of good versus evil, light versus dark etc etc... But really I don't think anything has quite achieved this comparison of one extreme of insanity vs another... You can't disagree with the joker - that maniacal, anarchist mode of thinking that civilised man is just a farce. You can't quite agree with him either - But let's assume that he's right. Indeed, what on earth makes the Batman any better than him? Both possess hideous means of violence at getting what they want - just that the meat of their prey have a different taste in the mouth.

Let's present the moral argument for the Batman's existence - I think thus far it is quite certain that he believes he has this obligation to remove the criminals of Gotham by force because no one else can achieve it - He does so because of a traumatic childhood experience, watching his parents mugged and shot at a corner in Gotham after the theatre.

So because his parents were killed by people who never knew them, were probably hungry and desperate, turning to violence as a means of last resort, he takes it upon himself to go through years of absolutely mental training, spending millions through Wayne enterprises to create weapons and vehicles that inflict a speedy and terribly traumatic end to those he perceives as evil.

No need for a fair trial, no need for the public to have a say in what's wrong or what's right - Or even determine what's a fair retributive sentence to be passed down. Swoop in, in the middle of the night, viciously punch out the living daylights from the drug dealers, robbers, muggers, money launderers, and then ignore whether they live to be able to talk - Just get them. Inflict enough pain to scare them from even venturing out of their homes at night.

Let's turn the argument now to the Joker - We don't know what kind of trauma he went through. He's insane, clearly, by our standards, but he chooses to believe and manipulate, unfortunately, people's perceptions to see that it is state control that causes evil - He is merely liberating the modern human mind to accept anarchy.

Which is why - "Why, so serious?"

Man is a laughable species, one moment propounding his opinion of what is fair and just, and the next moment shredding the one next to him. Don't bring justice to the people - Because you can't. Bring their minds towards you, shape their minds, change the way they think , and before you know it, you're in control - Aha, until the Joker comes into the scene to liberate and free people from their illusory safety zones in society.

Who's the nutcase now? Or can't you tell?



Notice how the Joker keeps trying to bring man (both Batman and eventually sizeable chunks of Gotham city residents) into the classic human dilemma of choice - Choosing who decides to live - Laughing at how the insane decision of who deserves more to live is made. His argument is sound. You can't choose- You aren't qualified to choose. You live by self imagined morals and various arguments...that are agreed upon by a majority and hence make up what is legitimate for society at the point in time.

That leaves us with the biggest victim of the entire argument - The only human being who lives within his abilities and doesn't try to exceed what society demands of him.

Harvey Dent.

I love the name. I've loved the character of Two Face since young, I don't know why, or rather I didn't know why. I loved pitying him - The one who has this angry streak inside who doesn't know how to control it, and has no choice but to leave it to simmer and grow because for all of society's devices, there is just nothing to satisfy the thirst of the human spirit in Harvey. It is growing, it is expanding and it is waiting to blow. It blew eventually - I think Harvey Dent broke when he threatened the manipulated guard-of-honour who shot Commissioner Gordon (or we thought he did) with his life.

We are all like Harvey Dent. We're ticking time bombs, waiting for that vicious darkness to blow up and consume us until we can't tell what we look like. Unless and until we all come to a consensus, reach within us and admit that we would rather accept the lot of our own life and avoid trying to MAKE lots for others' lives... We will become Two Face eventually.

And then really, Why So Serious?

You can't control it anyway.

Just live life your own way.

The Foreign Issue (240 days left)

Singaporeans are a funny bunch.



Scouted the following from Wikipedia:

The Foreign Sports Talent Scheme is a scheme used by sports officials and organisations in Singapore to scout, identity and facilitate the migration of non-Singaporeans deemed to possess sports talent to play in Singapore colours in sporting events. Introduced in 1993[1] by the Singapore Table Tennis Association,[2] it also aimed to boost local sporting standards by importing sporting expertise. A similar scheme, the Singapore Foreign Talent Scheme, was introduced in 2000 but was limited to scouting talent for the Singapore national football team.[3]


In March 2008, it was announced in the Parliament of Singapore that 54 athletes had benefited from the programme and received Singapore citizenship, of which 37 were still in active training.



This incident has sparked the following debate, very tightly summed up in the following:


The achievement of Singapore's women's table tennis team in winning a silver medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the country's first Olympic medal since 1960, reignited debate over the Foreign Sports Talent Scheme. Some critics said that the Singapore Table Tennis Association (STTA) has relied too much on it, as the team comprised three China-born players, Feng Tianwei, Li Jiawei and Wang Yuegu. On 19 August 2008, a correspondent to The Straits Times wrote that he was not proud of the way Singapore had won its medal through a team of imported foreign-born players, one of whom was granted Singapore citizenship at the beginning of 2008. He continued:


When I think of Wang Yuegu, Li Jiawei and Feng Tianwei, I can think of only foreigners brought in by Singapore to win medals and are paid handsomely for it – Singapore's pragmatic way of problem solving. My challenge to the Singapore Table Tennis Association and other national sports associations: Do you have the plan and – more importantly, courage – to send an all-native Singaporean team, for the London Olympics in 2012?[4]


A day earlier, STTA president Lee Bee Wah had said: "It doesn't mean that we should look at them [foreign-born table tennis players] differently because they're not born and brought up in Singapore. The important thing is that they have embraced Singapore and want to be a part of it. And they wanted so badly to win a medal for our country. We should not be harping on where they are born. I hope mindsets change."[5]



In addition, during his Mandarin National Day Rally speech on 17 August, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said:


In the Olympics contingent, there are 25 members, half of whom are new Singaporeans. Why do we need them? Make a single calculation. The Chinese have 1.3 billion people. Singapore has a population of four million ... If we want to win glory for Singapore and do well not only in sports but in many other areas, we cannot merely depend on the local-born. We need to attract talent from all over ... Look at the Beijing Olympics. Tao Li, the swimmer, she's done very well. The women's table-tennis team ... they have won an Olympic medal. We welcome foreigners so they can strengthen our team, and we can reduce our constraints. So let us welcome and let us encourage them.[6]


There's something scary in the way that line reads - That 'if we want to win glory' we 'cannot rely on the local born'.

I was brought up to believe that there is something about my blood that transcends all sense of ethnicity and race - That as a Singaporean, my grandparents paid the price for their citizenship through their nation founding efforts to build Singapore into the modern city-state it is today. I honestly regard highly the fact that we have an all-conscript military capable of launching integrated air-land strike operations, a finance sector that is strong enough and RICH enough to constantly dirty-float the currency market to maintain the strength of the Singapore dollar.

China believes in our model of governance and economic management - India has occasionally glanced at us and winced. The United States sees us as a firm foundation for conducting its SEA foreign policy, I think...

So what's this talk about us not being good enough... if we are local born?

My PSLE/O Levels/A Levels aren't good enough? I didn't make it into some new talent scheme that checks the genes for suitability for high and mighty civil positions? Probably. Oh yeah, maybe I'm Catholic too - and that's why there's this slight government aversion towards me... ISD got their hands messy in the heyday of '89... wouldn't want to mess up that bit again.

Wait a second, no one's listening.

Hey that's odd - You know, after this entire debate on foreign talent beating us at ping pong and thus bringing glory to our WIN-obssessed city-state, there's this whole new debate on making sure the classy Serangoon Gardens district doesn't get infected with foreign workers descending in a swarm next to the elite.

A Timely Update

One Messed Up Evening Before the Storm

Man, I am right now awake on a Saturday afternoon typing at the computer... feeling like there's sandpaper in the throat and a chunk of cast iron in my head. That's right, I've been drinkin... all night long and sloshed all day. See this guy on the left - Yeah that's about how I feel right now. We had drinks to celebrate the end of the week... OK, pardon the melodrama. It was a BAD week. It's been a week of working on slides, rehashing slides, and on one terribly bad day... Sitting at a computer, with five heads and coming up with only one slide.

FUCK yeah, ONE slide.

Look - I'm not trying to be mean, or trying to be sarcastic. I'm just going to be brutally honest. If we are trying to come up with a plan to do something, shouldn't we base our ideas on something more than just intuition!? For five blooming days - FIVE DAYS man, it's been - Are you sure the public would think this way on this? I FEEL maybe not. You might want to explore FEELING something else on this issue. WHy don't you have the message of this cos it FEELs like it's better that way. So from crap ideas, we came up with compost and sold more crap. The almight and all knowing COLONEL K of course saw through the whole plan. saw through what we were doing and failed us. Imagine - When you've had 72 hours of crap, trying to salvage a situation and churning out more stuff that you hope and pray will help the situation... and it all fails, how man, how?!?!?

A man can do 2 things:

1. Head for Drink

(Note: This by the way is fantastic whiskey - The Glenmorangie, Nectar D'Or. It's absolutely serendipitious how The Boys and I could be in 2 separate countries at the same time (They Malaysia, me Vietnam). And without communicating, we looked across the whiskey shelves, saw the Nectar and decided that that would be the drink for the night. And I would like to imagine that at the same time, while they were there and I was here, we had put the glass to our lips and unanimously realised the beauty of this whiskey... Imagine a sweetness and strength to a warm shot of single-malt whiskey.)

2. Play the Blame Game

Let me tell you a story of a boss that is so evil his subordinates die from stab wounds caused by the evil boss's enemies, who have been tricked into thinking that his subordinate is the actual doer of his crap work.

I know the above sentence sounds convoluted, but read it, think about it, and it will all make sense.

It was a Wednesday, I recall. The team of us were running on andrenaline after having spent Tuesday morning, afternoon, night, late night, uber late morning of wednesday night, doing up THE SLIDES. We worked at a feverish pace with the slides because there was absolutely that need to ensure that the plan was seen through.

We had ideas, we also had justifiable points and fresh research to aid us in fkeshing out our work. With one main meeting to clear the slides at, this was the be-all and the end-all. Every man on the team threw in his weight and more into the work. Everyone except... the Evil Boss...

(Oh yeah, you would need a picture)

Haha, yeah he looks like that. With or without the hat. So I'll leave it up to your imagine. After you have the mustache frame in your mind, add beady eyes and fucking flappy ears. Add some sperm looking hair on top and you're pretty clear about his looks.

He was told about the presentation. Told about what needs to be done. Told and told again that the presentation involved X factors, Y details, needed to cover so much in detail.

Bastard child. That bastard child. Wednesday morning, in our absolutely tired out state, we went to his cubicle, with the print-outs, and told him,"Look, you have to carry this now, we worked all night and we produced this plan. It's in line with what Boss was looking for in the last meeting..."

He blinked his beady fucking eyes and said ok. Fine, you the man.

Then we stepped in for the meeting - And mind you, this meeting wasn't a typical meeting with missing members and that sort of thing. Somehow the brilliance of COLONEL K had impressed the surrounding stakeholders to pull together and work on this project. We stepped into a full house meeting, a group of twenty, eagerly waiting to hear the synchronised plan that we had drafted. While he had rallied the stakeholders to be present, to us, we were facing the fucking Gestapo.

I'll stop lying to you now. There wasn't really a 'we'. There was a me. There was also an occasional lieutenant Colonel too caught up in a bit of baggage from the past. He wasn't in a right or fit state to carry the presentation, and I didn't expect him to.

The Evil Boss, blinked. his beady stupid eyes.

he was shown the first slide - and he looked at my boss, and just stared. He just stared. Not because the slides were bad, but because the Evil Boss had NO IDEA what he was about to present about. He hadn't read the slides, hadn't been part of the planning, had no idea what the situation was about that required planning... WHAT THE HECK WAS HE DOING!?

A stakeholder drummed his fingers on the table in apparent impatience.

Another tweedled the straw of his drink, drawing circles in the air.

The BOSS looked at him, and said

"Sometimes alot of work is put in, and really, it is about the presentation. OK, we'll move on to the next item. For this, we'll take it offline."

WHAT THE FUCK!!??!??

WHAT THE BLAZING FUCK HAPPENED!?

What I felt there and then was the Moby Dick Syndrome , White Whale, Holy Grail, dig it out and murder him... etc etc. But after going through the Penal Code, I kindof figured that it would probably be best to avoid touching Section 300 on murder, since that entails the death penalty.

And it is best summed up when i say, "I am beyond this".

Japanese Lessons (287 Days)

She suggested taking them up in the most random of ways - Over an anime movie. We were watching "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" at her place on a lazy Sunday afternoon - Which wasn't a bad thing to be doing, considering our weekends were precious and even more so when work constantly ate into them. I was never a ... what do you call it? A 'Japophile'.

Solid Anime ... No, there's none of the Hentai stuff within...

Well sure, the occasional porn video featuring hot nubile young things dressed in plaid school outfits. And some really good anime like Samurai Champloo now and then.

But learning Japanese? No. That wasn't the way to go. Instinctively, because guys by nature act according to instinct, and for me instinct meant looking at the plausible benefits one could get from picking up a foreign language like Jap. And the answer was clearly zero. So No - It wasn't going to work out very much.

But today is the 287th day from the Breakaway, and I have had SIX Japanese lessons at an excellent Bunka language school located in the well-known Orchard Towers and Orchard Hotel area... US Sailor paradise and transvesites galore.

Patented System Textbooks!(I still don't understand half of the stuff within...)

How did I get to this? How did I, a solid wall of a man, bearing twenty seven solid years of life, succumb to a decision that was so clearly against my interests?

Her argument while lazing languidly on her bed stretching her legs that looked ever so beautifully sculpted ,"Well your brain's pretty rusty from all that work - You might as well get the clogs working again. Nothing beats learning a foreign language to unlock those chasms in the brain..."

That was the catalytic statement getting the flames of war a-going...

It saddened me to realise that like every slice of the general populace, She was no different from them all... She thinks of us as Grunts, obsessed with landing on shores and charging up hills with rifles blazing and mortars blowing up in the background. She doesn't realise the sort of thought that is put into... how was it described by a senior once? Ah yes, the intimate art of killing... plus the fact that I'm heavily into understanding the literature on capability development, force transformation, etc etc, so life across the green zone isn't as simple as she thinks it is. So I'm the rusty brained one eh... My work is nothing compared to yours eh?

Need to stop leading the donkey's life eh???

THE CHALLENGE IS ON WOMAN.*

*- Challenge was laid down within own mind. Nothing conveyed to the woman, written or verbal.

The thing about trying to prove someone wrong without actually letting that person know that you're letting the gauntlet of competition land in their face is that ... you run the risk of coming across as the acquiescent one. Or worse yet, the challenger fails to meet the requirements of the challenge, resulting in the hard gauntlet of competition flapping back and slapping you squarely across the cheeks...

Let me give you an idea of how I'm suffering in Jap class now:

I AM MUTHAFUCKIN DYING IN THAT CLASS

I HAVE YET TO FEEL SO FREAKING RETARDED IN MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE

Every week, the routine is the same... I fight to finish the homework from the previous week, struggling ... and I mean STRUGGLING with a FUCKIN font size 8 Jap-English dictionary...

We went through participles and pronouns last week, MY GAWD I couldn't understand half the GIBBERISH coming from Mr Taka's mouth...

WHAT THE FUCK MAN... It's not that my brain is rusty, I mean, I think... But SHIT it's tough.

The entire plan has backfired. I am in contingency plan F now and I'm telling you... I'm telling you it is disgusting how badly I'm faring.

Mr Taka "OK D-san, please reply to the question... nichiyoobini doko e deska? Please explain why the participle use here is 'e' and not the 'wa' phrase."

Me," e."

Mr Taka, "Yes, why the 'e' participle and not 'wa'."

Me, "wa." Eyes blank out. Fuck-blur face emerges.

(Very very Carefully, Mr Taka casts the direction of his beady little eyes away from my silhouette on to Juna-San, with her eager I'll-suck-your-balls-dry-to-learn-more-jap eyes)

Mr Taka," OK, Juna-San, can you try to explain? How would you reply?"

The fan in my room is oscilliating at a constant 300 revolutions per minute, setting 3 out of 3. It is an old fan, with blades blackened slightly from neglect and age. It has served me well for over 3 years now, with a good 3 more years on it's faded SANYO logo to slog on I hope. All that defines its existence in this little universe of my room is the fact that it is there to cool me. And it does a damn good job of doing so.

Did I have a specialty like that in this universe?

SOmetime one needs to realise that like every animal in the forest bearing their little unique specialty - Ducks swim, bears hunt, chickens cluck... so on, learning a foreign language may not be the best idea on earth. I should have stuck to my guns, now that I think about it, saved myself S$220...

But then what's my specialty to develop on? If I leave my Woman to attend classes now without me, I would have failed to live up to not just HER expectations of me, but my own expectations too. A man doesn't walk out of his woman like that, hiding away when she really needed me there to be a pillar of support for her. She wouldn't have mustered up the courage to take up a language she's been really interested in until I said I'd join her in it (Yes, that's eventually how I put it to her.) Walking out is akin to breaking a promise. And I will not, cannot allow her to see me in any lesser light. (I know, it doesn't get much further from Retarded right now but well...)

If like how I'm discovering now, I have NONE of that specialty in my profession of arms, then i should leave. And that is without doubt - I have done my time, done my utmost to contribute to the organisation... And come up short and lacking. I have sought and at times found nuggets of joy in my work. But this is not MY work. This is not MY world. So I have to leave, and leave soon to find out what lies in the great beyond where I can specialise, try and perhaps discover something about myself that I will die many years down the road ... satisfied that yes. The contribution's pretty good. Left a legacy.

Thanks to the Woman, right now, I think it's pretty much settled that I have a solidly rusted and crusty brain... Used to standard operating procedures and the like, but little else beyond that.

All my life, I've been putting up a false front of bravado, acting 'as-if'. Haha, Since joining the profession of arms 4 years ago. What next now... Who's going to feed the geriatric folks while I continue trying to find my specialty to branch into? WHO?

Duty Honour Country :-)

If i'm willing to work with both my hands, I shall not starve. - Welcome to the new Baseline.

First Strike - You Got Me :-) (288 Days)

This is a communique between me and YOU. In our previous conversations which have taken place over the past 3 years and 2 months, my impression of you has been summarised as follows:

In my first year, when I returned to your side,

I came running as a son to a dearly-missed father.

In my second year, when I had worked at your side long enough,

I began to realise that the father wanted not a son, but a slave.

In my third year, I realised that I would die at your side,

If I continued working for you.

This is my final year. I leave it to you to write the final line.