Guess it's been that kind of a week, with me feeling all self-indulgent and not making much more than brief comments about the stuff I've been ingesting. But that in itself is significant in that throughout the week some of us did manage to find time to socialize and unwind, for which I am truly grateful. It took some co-ordination, and there were a few last-minute decisions made, but I'd say the effort was worth it. Yes, this week was special. Thanks, everyone :)

So much protein in my diet. The past few days it's been a carnivore's paradise. Last night we were at Sunset with me pigging out on a fabulously thick, juicy hamburger with cheese, bacon and 'shrooms. Table for 10: Amy, CQ, Dee, Gary, HP, Jo, me, Q-tip and Vince; Anthony and Wendy joining us later.

Not often so many of us can buang our responsibilities and enjoy an evening out, but we pulled it off anyway -- without guilt too, I daresay.

Dropped in on the parental residence last night. My bro had brought back an Austrian salami as a souvenir for me from his sojourn in Germany, and it needed collecting.

Makes a nice change hanging out with the parents. It's so relaxing being with people who have all the time in the world on their hands. No rush, no schedule, just doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, no earlier.

I walked with them to dinner, and for the first time in a long, long while, I walked through the old route along the storm drain that cuts a narrow path between our neighbours' backyards to the coffee shop that was once my dining room. It bears a new name now, Seletar Corner, and the most popular stall there is the Western food one. The steaks are functional at best, but cheap and tasty nonetheless.

Al fresco dining on a breezy cool sidewalk with the folks. Wonder why we don't do it more often?

Busy days, nights of good eats. Sunday's dinner was at Tonkichi, Suntec City. There's a 20% discount off the menu on Sunday evenings until late September. Pretty generous! Food's substantial -- a thick tonkatsu pork chop on rice for me 'cos I wasn't feeling particularly imaginative, and June settled for her usual prawn tempura, pork fillet combo. We walked around the mall to digest dinner, then went for a goldmine and a lemon shiver (what a concept: a scoop of lemon sorbet floating in freshly squeezed lemonade) at NYDC.

Last night Vince and NBS kept me company -- June's flown off to Manila -- at Secret Recipe, J8. Vince just had to try the Irish lamb stew. Having to carve meat off a large bone brings out the utter carnivore in me. Fortunately, the meat was tender enough to grant the illusion of being a primitive savage ripping flesh from a fresh kill without having the proper canine development to do it for real. With Og Mammoth Hunter's face smeared with gravy, we ended the evening with a civilized slice of yogurt cheesecake. Thanks for picking up the tab, NBS!

Mary invited us over for dinner. We had a steam boat, which is how she usually entertains her house guests. The difference was, this time she added a few bottles of Brand's Essence of Chicken into the stock, and perked up the soup like nothing else would. She assured us that the bottles were close to expiry and that it wasn't an unnecessary extravagance on her part.

Looks like everyone's making some kind of career change too. Adrian's making a lateral shift in his company, and both Jen and Mary have gone back to education (though not as Ministry minions but rather as independent consultants) after several years of self-exile from the Ivory Towers.

Jen brought over a set of Star Wars themed Monopoly for after-dinner entertainment. Adrian appeared a bit upset at the trade alliances that were forming around him, so June gave up her 'Park Lane' equivalent so that he could develop the prime property in that corner of the board in exchange for rent-free status should she ever land on that property. The game went on till past midnight.

When we finally decided to call it quits, we took the opportunity to go look at Adrian's new Civic in the parking lot. Mary got a new car too, a Mazda 2 SP! Yay! Another M2 owner. June pointed out that if we drove all our cars together in a convoy, we'd look like the Mafia.

I topped up my fuel tank before the weekend last week. Today, at the top of the weekend, my fuel gauge is still reading above the half mark. Either I'm getting a lot more economical with my driving style or, well, the alternative is too sad to even consider.

Edit 01:
Being fuel economical means that I have time to churn out yet another "model essay." This one's based on a Paper 1 question from the Cambridge 2004 GP exam: 'Far too much attention is given to beauty products and treatments.' Do you agree?

Do I?

It may have taken a couple of days longer than expected, but my work debt from over the weekend is finally clear! I can breathe again for the next couple of days. Yes.

The printer delivered our latest NY conneXions late this afternoon, on time to meet tomorrow's distribution schedule. Despite -- and possibly a little because of -- some earlier confusion, we got our centrefold printed in colour, FOC! Great job, dude!

If you can get your hands on an actual limited run copy, please do so -- it'll be distributed on campus tomorrow during common lunch break. But if you can't, you can download it in .pdf format here (600 kb).

Survived Monday, just barely. Reduced the long line of people waiting to kill me for missing their deadlines to just one. Sorry, NBS! Considering the hours I put into my entire weekend, with Amy providing assistance and advice in laying out the latest NY conneX print edition, I think I got quite a lot accomplished. All GP marking completed, Baggy's assignment completed, ish #3 printer's deadline met, lecture prepared and delivered (I felt like I knew what I was talking about in Monday's lecture, anyway)... I may have burned my weekend, but at least it was productive. Phew!

Even managed to find time for a late lunch at Friends with Vince and ZC (is that how you spell his name?). Friends has a set tea menu for us who arrive too late for lunch. A chicken or salmon sandwich with choice of hot beverage. On the menu the set reads quite prosaically, but when it actually arrived it was a jaw-dropper. Much bigger than expected: chunks of chicken inside a thick, folded-over flapjack-style pancake. And crispy fries. And lots of salad in balsamic vinaigrette dressing. Dunno why but I get a good impression when restaurants are generous with their salad servings.

Ever had one of those days when you realize that everything you've been procrastinating; been putting off till another day; been saying, "tomorrow never comes," about; suddenly have all got the exact same "tomorrow" deadline?

Tomorrow is going to be exciting. Let's see how I survive it. OMG.

I've got work piled up to my head
All I want to do is jump into bed

- Corrine May

I have no weekend. Sigh.

Drove out to find a suitable, conducive venue for marking my latest set of test papers, but today being a public holiday, everywhere was full of noisy holiday-makers and overcrowded car parks. So mission failure, drove back home and caught the Parade on TV. Usually June and I would be on-site, but this year we didn't score tix. Oh well, at least Q-tip got to go out on a long drive, so she's happy.

On the eve of National Day, it feels good to be well-fed and happy. I must give thanks for the 3 solid meals I got today: brekkie at Ya Kun, lunch at the Colbar and dinner at the Delhi Restaurant. Good food with various combinations of the EL Dept people for company.

Not too many people in too many parts of the world can say something similar of their day today. How's that for perspective?

Rediscovered that walking to the old coffee shop at Ave 2 isn't such a bad thing. For a quick off-campus lunch it'll do. No need to burn fossil fuel unnecessarily when you can just amble over there, eat and return all within an hour.

Like every other establishment around here, it's undergone some kind of facelift, giving it a rather sterile kind of appearance, compared with the grungy look that I remember. Thankfully, the food's still pretty ok.

I enjoyed my chicken rice with liver, my first in many weeks. Can't find a decent one near my place, that's why. It came in nice, big portions too, though there was a bit more heart (literally) than I'm used to.

The other stalls there look worth trying out, too. Nice to have options.

Spent the day feeling dizzy and sick. Not in a delibitating way, but also nothing I can describe to a doctor for an MC... or medication. Maybe it's more emotional than physical. Hope I'm not coming down with something. This is a bad week to get sick on.

Edit 01:
Attended our first ever film festival this evening: a triple-bill of short films shot by the kids themselves, apparently without help or advice from anyone who might have known anything about filmmaking. That, I believe. The experience was painful. I usually try to be more tolerant of kids' work, but they went and made this event public, so to me it's a free-for-all.

"Sisters":
How many cuts does it take to get a girl to walk from the end of her driveway and into her front door? The continuity is no doubt smooth, flawless even; but as the opening sequence, it sets the tone for a tedious succession of slide-show images that the film does indeed comprise. There's so little movement it's a waste to capture it on video.

"Waiting":
12 minutes of someone waiting for someone else to show up but doesn't. It's ok to make the protagonist wait, but it's unforgivable to make the audience wait with him. Even a tiny payoff, like say a glimpse of the cute Japanese-speaking girl who leaves "don't wait for me" messages on the protagonist's answering machine would be something, but no such luck. Instead, the audience is treated to a final shot of a pedestrian-crossing's countdown timer counting to zero. It's like we're just waiting for the movie to come to an end, and so relieved are we when it eventually does. A tip: have lots of things happen to the protagonist while he's waiting, so the audience is entertained, though none of these things is what he's waiting for. Ultimately, he can be disappointed, but your audience should never be.

In-house band performance:
Please, less idle chit-chat with the audience, and more music. Die-die also must get a monitor so the guy on vocals can hear himself sing. Learn to attack the music, especially since you're playing Green Day and Bon Jovi stuff, otherwise it's all just falls flat quickly.

"Angel":
Highlight of the evening. I never imagined the malaise of the long blackout would ever infect the genre of film, but it happened. Several narrative bits over a completely black screen drove me nuts in my seat.

The dialogue is minimal and inconsequential, many scenes cutting themselves short before any dramatic point can properly develop. In close-up shots the script drives the characters away from the camera too quickly, whereas what looks like promising lines of dialogue are taken in long-shot and either voiced over by yet another irrelevant narration or covered over by background music.

The film suffers from having too many locations, making the audience work overtime trying to figure out where the characters are. Lots of scenes were taken on campus so the backgrounds may be quite familiar to us, but an outsider would have given up a long time ago. The audience should at least be able to sense a rough map of the location, but with locations whimsically jumping all over the place we're just hopelessly lost.

Lights. Very poor lighting choices. Characters' faces are so often in shadow, it's hard to distinguish who's who. After a while, we don't care any more.

Conclusion:
These guys are very good with the camera equipment, and very good with the technical aspect of post-production. Drama Club has the talent and possibly the vision for shooting a good story. Dare I suggest, barring pride, prejudice and parochialism, a collaboration for next year?

Look what June left for me before taking off on her Aussie vacation.

I discovered this new stash, neatly arranged and concealed under the comforter. It took me a while to realize that the arrangement had a particular shape to it, but it wasn't long before I introduced myself to Mr Snackinbed.

Now I feel like a cannibal.

The college alumni arranged an informal chat session for our JC1 student leadership and the 2 newly elected MPs who are also college alumni. Coincidentally, the 2 were students in the same year, though they never met each other on campus before.

Arriving in non-standard t-shirt and jeans, they showed they intended to keep the session as comfortably informal as possible. It was nice that they chatted about their experiences as students in college and traced their separate paths towards local politics. They were emphatic about their preference for CCA activities rather than their academics, and in fact it was through working on their own projects that they developed the confidence to take on more and more responsible leadership roles.

They used their own personal anecdotes to explain how our grassroots democracy works, and that despite their own youthful dissenting voices, the political leadership was willing to listen to them and gave them a chance to put their proposals for improvements to the community into action. Today, because they were successful in their follow-through, they were invited to become part of the political leadership themselves.

So today, they have become The Man. But at least this incarnation seems more approachable, more consultative and less know-it-all dictatorial than before. They present a more "we are all in the same boat" leadership style as opposed to the "swab the decks, ye swabs, 'cos I'm the cap'n, an' what I says, goes" approach that we've come to expect from members of our dominant political party. They did, however, occasionally slip into repeating some tired old cliches, e.g., "Singapore is unique...," "we must be prepared to face the challenges ahead...," "Singapore is a small country..." But they did seem to genuinely want to engage rather than nag, which made today's dialogue more lively than we had anticipated.

Meantime, June left for Sydney, Australia today. She'll be there for a week on her company's annual incentive tour (i.e., corporate all-expenses-paid vacation). And my bed's full of consumables again. Heh.

What a smack in the face for our proud, grand institution of Education. Wake up and smell the coffee, 'cos apparently corporate society doesn't want people with academic smarts any longer. Nope. Higher education, in fact, is becoming increasingly a liability for those of us inclined towards, as students like to say in their essays on education, "getting a good job." Employers are now looking for people who have the skills to attract people, hold their attention, interact with them, and -- above all -- can have a great time with anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow. This cynically astute observation appeared in TIME Magazine, online version here.

In corporate America, the mugger-toad with his nose in a book, and speaks in proper grammar when he finds both the occasion and the courage to say something, will live and die under the rock he never crawled out from. Good riddance, too!

Fortunately (or unfortunately?), we live in the rest of the world alongside the "Chinese and Indian brainiacs." Waitaminnit, we ARE the "Chinese and Indian brainiacs!" So let's not give up on studying yet, ok? And in any case, whoever said that education is only meant to prepare students for employment?

Been re-reading Blackfoot Physics, and I found an anecdote describing a familiar classroom scenario. I could identify with both points-of-view: the teacher's and the students.

The story's a bit lengthy, and I don't have the author's permission, but I'll put the excerpt here for downloading anyway. Click.

Sometimes, I wonder if traditional ways were indeed the best?

Hung out for a couple of hours at Serene Centre yesterday. It's easy become quite enamored with the place. It's as comfortable as my living room, only mall sized.

For a small mall, it has everything I like: comics, toys and collectibles, books, PC and other platform games, ice-cream, and a McD's for a quick nosh. Even the supermarket stocks US brands imported from the US and not their Indonesian, Thai or Korean equivalents.

Wanna psychoanalyze me? See what's going in my mind? Just walk around Serene Centre. You get the idea pretty fast.

And in a couple of hours, June will be home! Better toddle off to warm up M2...