shitting and coming humblest apologies for the lack of posts for nearly a month. and believe you me, i've been trying. there are a lot of drafts drafting about in the deserted realms of my blog at the moment. and all of them have a body, it's just that the opening for each blog post is missing. it's practically like a headless zombie fest in my blog at the moment.you see, the problem is that i'm going through a bout of constipation at the moment. and it's not the type of constipation that comes about when you've had one too many times of anal sex thus resulting in compacted stools at some unreachable end of your bowels. no. it's the type of constipation that afflicts the average writer at the most inconvenient of times. of course, any time for the writer is an inconvenient time. because the writer is constantly able to churn out what his senses tell him into pieces of flowery speech. it's a bit like a pastry chef taking the most mundane of household ingredients and baking them into connoisseur-worthy pieces of food.apparently, the need to shit or the want to bake pastries (whichever metaphor is more suitable for your palate) is just not that. being bogged down with work and a major hospital audit is not really helping things. even worse is the threat of four nursing essays looming in the background. these assignments have their heads on, but are 'bodyless' so to say. which is way worse than the state of my headless zombie blog posts. but then again, that's no proper excuse for not blogging just as there is no proper excuse for not shitting.like i always tell my patients who are on a regular dose of morphine or have just been through a minor operation, shitting is one of those things in life (just like coffee and sex), that simply can't, or at least shouldn't be rushed. when it comes, it simply comes. of course, if it's not coming for a month, then one should start seeking medical attention or buying better coffee or changing a sex partner. rushing would just result in something sub-standard and who likes a sub-standard shit? so i'm just waiting to come (i've always wanted to say that on this blog).and right now, i think i'm coming (there i've said it). how croutons turned into fish food while my grandmother used her secret means of comunication on me i seriously think that the paternal family seem to be running out of ideas when it comes to the sunday gatherings that i mentioned in two blog posts ago. remember those picnic outings with them in the random parks of Singapore? the humongous portable picnic tables and gaudy Spiderman 3 mats from KFC? the ones that were filled with a weird assortment of foods and tetrapack drinks? the ones where everyone would be talking about their families while my father would be doing his Martin Luther thing while my Robert Kiyosaki of an uncle would be reading his books on politics and anything else that would most likely have a '$$$$' sign on its cover? yeap, those sunday gatherings in the park.these gatherings, much as i find them morbidly embarrassing, are actually quite enjoyable. given the hustle and bustle of the modern day life, one would actually be quite hard-pressed to find a decent and quiet spot to have a picnic. everyone in Singapore it seems, wants a piece of the green on the weekends. and that includes us. but when we do find some nice spot that is actually quiet for once, it's when i start to appreciate these outings the most. and by 'nice spot that is actually quiet', i mean that everyone else in the park is quiet except for my family who makes as much noise as a political rally. other enjoyable things in the park of course include (but are not limited to) - curiously gay rollerbladers, over-dressed joggers, eccentric old people who exercise in the park with their chinky chunky peripherals, et cetera.so it was with the saturday that had just passed that i found out that my parents were taking out the disposable plastic cups from one kitchen cabinet. now, when the parents start brandishing the disposable plastic cups around the house, it can only mean two things. one, that we're having the relatives over at our place this coming sunday. two, that we're having the picnic gatherings. i decided to go with the former as i remembered the picnic gathering that we had had just about three sundays ago. it was at a relatively desolate spot of green named, 'Chinese Garden'. there were lots of trees, presumably Chinese-looking rocks, Chinese fishes in a broad lake that doubled up as a reservoir and a pagoda at the end of the garden that over-looked the whole estate. it was a place that was really perfect for an evening's jog or a walk in the park. or as one other gay friend so aptly put it, 'a nocturnal rendezvous for them horny homosexuals'.cruising aside, it was with the assumption that the paternal family were headed for my place the coming sunday that i started the usual routine of hiding all the carnal stuff in my room. and i know i sound like Mary Alice (of Desperate Housewives fame) when i say this, but indeed, every family has their secrets. my dad would start keeping all my Xbox360 games that has 'unchristian'-like covers inside a discreet-looking cabinet beside the television set. i do my part by hiding that bottle of Baileys and the 42 below from sight. my secret stash of gay porn which i usually keep on a shelf just above my bed would have to vanish as well (Cousin: 'Hmmm.... i wonder what CDs you keep in that CD pouch of yours!' *unzips*).it was on Sunday morning that i discovered the blatant exposure of the Xbox360 games just beside the gaming console itself. on the top most of the stack was Dead Rising which had a cover of the main character in the game bashing a television set into the face of a zombie. to avoid having to show a demonstration of the various other bric-a-brac that the main character can also bash/slice/dice/impale/dismember into/from/on the many many zombies in the game, i decided to start keeping the entire stack of games into that nondescript cupboard as aforementioned. my very observant father of course noticed this and casually mentioned, 'We're not having nai nai (our affectionate term for the grandmother - literally means paternal granny) and all over today, we're going to Chinese Garden instead.'i started the not-so-tedious process of replacing the empty voids in my room with all my carnal indulgences again.--the picnic gatherings are always a potluck event. every family unit in the paternal side is deputized to bring a consumable of sorts to the gathering by a quick family discussion. the lucky family of the particular outing would have the wild card of 'drinks'. all they had to do was provide a beverage of some sort rather than cook or buy something that would satisfy the palates of everyone. if it's not a fruit punch or rose syrup, it would be the infamous Yeo's tetrapack drinks or Pokka green tea bottles that are a dime a dozen in the homes of Singaporeans across the island. i have always enjoyed it when one particular family gets the 'drinks' designation. they always provide a bottle of wine or at least some sort of sparkling juice. as the cousin from that particular family once told me, 'Wine is acceptable in the bible context okay!'unfortunately, my family had had the 'drinks' wild card on the previous outing. so this time, we were designated with a food item instead. my mother, being the other of two members of the paternal family who pushes the boundaries of everyone's palates in the paternal family (the other's the family who brings the wine), decided to try a quick and new mushroom soup with croutons. she normally does baked goods like cinnamon rolls and raisin bread and what-danish-nots, but i guess she's a very exploratory person by nature. none the less, don't be fooled by the simplicity of the name of the dish. because, it may sound really, like the crass stuff you find at western dining restaurants, but the end result is somewhat a work of art. of course, she's my mother and this is quite possibly a biased statement.it all begins with four can of Campbell's mushroom soup, pour in a fair amount of water and put them all to boil in a pot under a medium flame. it's actually quite entertaining to watch while my mother cooks because she will start singing her church choir songs while she's chopping up unidentified bits of 'things' (which i presume are herbs and mushrooms) that will end up in the pot of mushroom soup. it's as if she's singing the mushroom soup to perfection.the tedious part however, starts from the croutons. my mother would start by butter a million slice of bread, dice them up into a billion cubes, and bake them into that all-too-familiar crispy, salty excellence that i'm so fond of. of course, along the way, the crispy pieces would start flaking into a zillion bits and specks, which would basically result in a real mess on the kitchen floor. which is why it's so tedious. i'm always the one who vacuums the floor after the baking of the croutons.and with that, the end results is a steaming pot of creamy mushroom soup with floating bits and pieces of unidentified chunks and croutons. to put it simply, both are just a match made in heaven. admittedly, i have never bothered to ask what else my mother puts in the soup other than the occasional mushrooms. but you know what they say in the culinary world, 'if it looks simple yet tastes curiously good, don't ask what went into the damn thing.' and thus, looking like we're headed to those infamous heartlands Tupperware party traps that sell 'as-seen-on-TV!' infommercial products, my mother packed and sealed the entire mushroom soup and croutons into them air-tight containers. yes indeed, we were ready for another outing at the Chinese Gardens. not forgetting the disposable plastic cups of course.since the only thing i did contribute to the mushroom soup with croutons was the occasional tasting, some saliva (i can't help but be conditioned to salivate when my mom cooks the soup, blame Pavlov!), and the post-cooking vacuum-ing, i have always tasked myself to help promote my mother's goods. when my mother presented her cinnamon rolls the first time at one paternal gathering, the oriental taste buds of theirs were not that receptive to the whole idea of western baked goods. i facilitated by rummaging through their fridge for a bottle of coconut jam. apparently, they liked it.based on this success, i have always been the kinda sad guy you see at fun fairs and carnivals trying their utmost to hawk the wares of others. in marketing terms, it's the wrong target group we're looking at. in my mind, it's always like trying to sell platinum bling blings to a group of Chinese aunties. and the only way to make them buy it is if you put in huge chunks of jade into the plat blings.at this particular gathering, everyone loved the mushroom soup. given that Campbell's chicken soup is pretty much a staple food/soup in my paternal family, their palates were well-versed to their creamy taste of the mushroom soup. my mother's baked croutons however, were left as untouched as a virgin. in fact, the only people who helped themselves to the croutons were the wife of the Robert Kiyosaki uncle, the cousin who believe that wine is acceptable in biblical context, my father, my brother, my mother and me. and believe me, my mother baked A LOT of croutons. it's as if Jesus took the famous five loaves of bread and broke it into a million pieces and one basket of the famous twelve that he broke, was sitting right there in the middle of the Chinese Gardens right beside me.i tried really hard. believe me. but that wasn't a fridge to rummage into for sauces or coconut jams and thus, it was a hard battle lost when it came to the croutons. unexpectedly, it was at that moment that my grandmother hobbled over to where i was sitting beside the 'basket' of croutons (you do realize that it's not really a basket but merely, a Tupperware right?). my paternal grandmother has been through many orthopaedic surgeries that involve inserting in metal screws and plates to keep her spine upright. i've already lost count of the number of surgeries she has been for apparently. but what i can confirm though, is that she has enough metal in her to build one of those tacky, touristy replicas of the Eiffel Tower. alas, the pain that she constantly experiences upon physical movement is pretty much comparative when i take one of those Eiffel Tower replicas and stab it into your spine and joints. not fun i can assure you, especially when you're already in your late 60s.which is why she hobbles. and when she's really tired, she needs a hand to hobble up the stairs. which is what she asked me to help her do when we wanted to take a walk around the park to see some of those Chinese fishes as i mentioned at the beginning of this post. it was during this assistance of her hobbling that she always takes the chance to talk to me. she would often ask about my general well-being, my health, whether my father was ill-treating me and stuff of the like. she always knew how violent my dad used to get so she really cared a lot about my parents and me. plus, my father's the only son in a family of daughters, so being the eldest grandson and the only grandson of the only paternal son, i am (IMHO) quite highly-priced in the grand children's market (i must've lost you somewhere in those family connections, haven't i?) opf the paternal family.so i expected that my paternal grandmother or nai nai as i so fondly call her, would ask how life was in general. instead, she bent low and gripped my hand tight. and she said to me in a sort of forced and hushed whisper yet with a smile in mandarin, 'Ah Than!!' she always calls me by that since i was young. the chinese language apparently, doesn't have a rough approximate pronunciation for the Jona- part of my name. 'Ah Than!!! Don't smoke already lah!!' which came about as shocking as an Eiffel Tower pain in my mind. 'Smoking is bad for health!''How did you know ah?' i asked my grandmother in that equally juxtaposed mix of a harsh and forced whisper yet enveloped by a smile.'How i know doesn't matter! What's really important is that you don't smoke already! Or at least cut down! Bad for health!' that's what i like about the grandmother. she's as Christian as Jesus himself. but she always gives practical, sound and really quite reasonable advice.alas, the only response my mind managed to conjure up was a flimsy, 'Okay.' there was a quiet, pensive air between nai nai and me after that. as we hobbled back to the table, i couldn't help but wonder who was the missing link in between that led to my grandmother knowing about one of my many carnal vices. was it the cousin who took up the same nursing degree as me? was it one of the relatives who drove past while i was puffing away on a cigarette? after some elimination and mental images of literally eliminating the suspects, i quickly decided that it had to be the cousin. who else really, had the most contact with me outside of the sunday gatherings.as we hobbled back together to the picnic table, i discovered the 'basket' of croutons missing. i didn't think that the relatives would self-initiate themselves to gobble the whole basket up. it wasn't until i heard the happy screaming and shouting of my youngest cousins, John Chua (the one that was named after me and has curiously effeminate ways) and Grace Chua feeding the fishes in the pond with my mother's croutons. apparently, my cousins saw the other park visitors feeding the fishes the lake with torn pieces of bread from a giant jumbo loaf. so wanting to join in the fun, they searched for the nearest source of baked goods. and being the clever kids that they are, they saw opportunity in my mother's basket of croutons.and thus, half-gone were my mother's croutons by the time i confronted John and Grace Chua. i decided to let them have the rest of the croutons as my mother didn't really seem to care about her food as well. in fact, she was down on her knees beside the lake with a wooden stick, trying to indulge in a childhood activity of picking water snails from the lake. the icing on the cake was when there were no more croutons left, John and Grace forced me to eat the toppings off a pizza that one of the family members had baked so that they could have the baked pizza itself. pizza = bread in their minds.clever kids, i say. why i never endorse the use of restraints on patients i vividly remember my posting at the Institute of Mental Health during my nursing student days. it was an old building located at one of the most inaccessible parts of Singapore. true, there were buses and taxi and people living in the area, but the nearest train station was about a half-hour's bus ride away. in Singapore where our train stations are constantly expanding their branches and networks, a populated area like this being isolated from a train station is something out of the ordinary.i recall the whole place giving me the impression of an English countryside. the complex stood proudly on a hill of green, like a grand old dame standing erect and stoically, watching the rest of the world with the eyes of weariness. maybe she's really tired, maybe she's on meds. who knows? what i did know and notice though is that a long winding road led to the main entrance. architecturally and scenery-wise, it looked like the place for a mental patient for a retreat. from a nursing and security perspective, well.... it's a long run down the hill if you're trying to escape. not forgetting the fencing and the security guards armed with tranquillizers. of course, you do realize i'm joking right?on arrival, the lobby greets you with a very warm and relaxed atmosphere. genially friendly staff are there to guide you to the place you need to go. given that the complex is actually quite big, i daresay that it's a godsend. the aroma of fried noodles from the cafeteria and the scent of antiseptic wafts through the eerily quiet place, giving you the impression of hygiene and good food (which is the only way you want your food to be, no?). i allowed myself a wry smile as i thought to myself, 'i wonder if they serve noodles fried under aseptic technique'.none the less, i was posted at a general ward which housed a grand total of about thirty male patients. some were truly insane. some were mildly off. some were questionably crazy. it's easy to tell the extremes apart. the really crazy ones and violent ones wore orange t-shirts. the questionably crazy ones wore the blue. but sometimes when i talked to those patients, i found myself wondering if they really deserved an orange after all. not because it's more suitable for their skin tone or it looks better on them, but rather the content in their conversation seems rather.... off+++. for all it's worth, several plastic shields and batons were hung in the nursing offices for emergency uses. and i'm sure those equipment are no respector of t-shirt colour.one of the patients i talked to was a jovial old man who seemed like a mentally-healthy person. he talked about coffee and he talked about politics. and when he talked about politics, his face had this glowy 'in the zone' kind of look to it. it was obvious that he really enjoyed talking about politics. i wasn't that familiar with the local political scene during those days and i took everything he said at glowy 'in the zone' face-value. i mean, it really made sense and it didn't hurt to actually believe in the governmental conspiracy theory that he was relating about. unfortunately i decided to discard what he said on the second day when i started getting chummy with him. he pulled me to one corner of the psychiatric ward, and he whispered to me in hushed tones.'Eh boy! since you're so nice to me, i'm going to give you something!''And what are you going to give me, uncle?' i replied with a cynical tone.i was half-expecting some junk or some sweets or something silly. after all, these patients had very few physical possessions to begin with. this was for fear of them injuring others or hurting themselves. it was almost like Prison Break, except that you've got an all-star Asian cast. and the orange and blue t-shirts of course.'I will give you....' he held his breath as he fumbled in his pockets for the mysterious gift, 'the personal phone number of the president!'from his pant pocket, he took out a note book. it was the old and ratty type that punters and gamblers used to take down sweepstake numbers, copy down names of winning horses and quite possibly the mobile number of 'Krystal' who offers lapdances at bargain prices. he asked for my pen and proceeded to write down the number on a piece of paper. intermittently, he would look around to see if there were any Internal Security Act Agents standing around to arrest him. he tore the jotted-down number from the punter's notebook and handed it over to me.'Don't look at it until i've gone away!' he said again in a harsh whisper that was in close proximity to my right ear. unfortunately, my Jackie Chan nose was also in close proximity. i could smell the fetid breath of halitosis as he quickly attempted to mingle with the rest of the patients again.when i opened the folded piece of paper from the punter's notebook, the following numbers to the president's personal telephone were written down in a somewhat childish and untidy scrawl:1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9indeed, government conspiracies. he was really funny though and i enjoyed his company thoroughly.another highlight of that particular posting in the institute involved a fellow nursing student. this fellow nursing student was the ardent Christian type. the type that says grace before food, the type that drops the name of God intermittently in every two or three sentences. the type that says 'Thank God!' and really means it as 'Thank you God my precious saviour and all that thou hath done for me!' aside from the zelous nature of hers, she's pretty and she has a mole on one cheek that really befitted her. i called her 'The Christian Beauty Spot'. i found her enjoyable to talk to and we shared a lot on how our churches are like and alike.none the less, Christian Beauty Spot and i were on duty that particular day. she mentioned in the morning that she felt tired and weak. i shrugged it off as a lack of breakfast. and as if to chastise that nonchalance to her general body condition, she fainted right there and then on the spot. i manage to catch her in time just as a few other patients were trying to make a grab for her. according to other nursing students, they had a lecherous look on their face. i can't really tell if that was true though i seriously think they were trying to catch her too.but that's the problem with mental health: how mad is mad? is eccentric really mad? and can mad be sometimes simply shrugged off as eccentric? the homeless chap whom you pass by everyday - everyone so readily labels the poor chap as insane and mad. but the professor of science and the arts and all his weird little idiosyncrasies is no more than eccentric. there seems to be a bias in place when it comes to the definition of madness.none the less, over a cup of milo in the tea room, she thanked me. there was a look of adoration in her eyes that i felt really embarrassed about. not helping was that her beauty spot of a mole turned into a dimple when she smiled. charming. over the next few days, she kept would bring up the event and reinforce to me that she had had breakfast in the morning. to which we would have a good laugh over and reenact the moments and snippets when she fainted. at the end of the posting, she gave me a CD of a sermon by a famous preacher in her church. the title was something along the lines of wealth and health.these days when i see her in the hospital, she still looks pretty. my father inherited the CD which she gave to me and occasionally listens to it with plenty of scorn and cynicism.--the concept of restraining patients in the hospital setting has always been one of questionable ethics. when do you need to restrain a sick person? why do you need to do it? is there no other alternative? what about sedatives? how do you go about doing it then? do you know how to tie a knot? why do they call it 'tying the knot' when the only firm sort of knot that you know of when 'tying the knot' is most likely a 'dead' knot?rubbishy questions aside, the ongoing understanding from having worked in the hospital for several years coming seems to be that only restrain when the patients is doing something harmful to themselves. then again, how do you define harm? a person slashing their own wrists and doing bodily injuries to themselves or others is definitely within the boundaries of harm. but a 'naughty' patient who tries to remove his blood transfusion cannula and refuses treatment when he's already of a questionably unsound mind and low haemoglobin level seems to fall under that category as well. there's loads of factors to consider when the decision to apply restraints on someone is considered.even so, application of restraints comes with the proper technique. cotton pads are applied to the wrists when hand restraints are used. charts have to be set up to ensure that the nurses check on the restraints regularly to see if they are too tight. the doctor has to be informed. the relatives have to be informed as well. and there's the fact that most relatives, just like parents who receive news that their child has done something wrong in school, almost always refuse to believe that their loved ones are unmanageable to the point of restraints. i knew of one patient whom a colleague had restrained in the afternoon. throughout the night shift, that particular patient's relative constantly called every hour or two to check on the condition of the patients. she apparently slept peacefully throughout the night.in my humble opinion and principles (hey, i actually do have some of those okay!), i don't really believe in restraints. it's demeaning and besides, most patients on restraints tend to struggle even more than they previously did when they were unrestrained. this basically ends in really knotty situations whereby you spend even more time undoing the restraints that were enforced on the patient. actually, come to think of it, i'm about as capable with tying restraints as a junior boy scout member. i mean, i can do enough knots to get through a couple of shoes, a neck tie, a wedding gift, a plastic bag of general waste and perhaps a session of light bondage that is not even convincingly tight. but since when was a Windsor applicable to a pair of hands? which is why every knot i tie ends up as easily removable as a shoelace or as permanent as a dead knot. most of the time, i cut the damn thing off with a pair of nursing scissors.my other colleague whom i work with on the permanent night shifts is a strong advocate of restraints however. she's been in this permanent night business for about three years coming. and believe you me, three years of irregular sleeping hours and horrid colleagues handing over terrible work for you to follow-up during your shifts can really make one bogged down and burned out. she has the dark eye bags and permanently tired look on the face to prove it. six months into this gig and i have already sallow skin and a permanent frown on my face as battle scars.my colleague usually considers restraints after three warnings to patients against whatever silly things they are doing. some are plainly confused. some are irrational. other are just bordering on pure disobedience and bastardry. why come to the hospital when you're going to refuse treatment and cause so much trouble? either way, i think that the 'three warnings' system is quite possibly the best method to go about hinting at restraints. but then again, i'm stubborn and stick to my principles sometimes like a frozen tongue on an alpine ski lift.i steadfastly refuse to restrain my patients. so much so that if they are restrained at night, i would secretly untie them in the dark of the night. Pangkeng (whom i have taken to calling 'Xena, Warrior Princess these days due to his overall lack of gentleness) gets extremely pissed when i do that. most of the time, the patients don't really do much damage themselves. they pull out their cannulas, they attempt to climb out of bed (but rarely ever manage to do so). nothing that can't be resolved. in fact, most of them actually sleep better at night when they are unrestrained. but then again, the only patients i usually nurse are men.now, the reason why i brought this story up was simply because of a lapse in my principles several weeks ago when a patient under the charge of my colleague was admitted for a suspected bleed in the gastro-intestinal tract. her blood count results showed a low of about 7.0mmol/L. couple that with a previous history of a duodenal ulcer and she was thus scheduled for a scope the following day. during the course of the night, she was transfused two bags of bloods to 'top up' her blood supply. according to my colleague, she was really nice and all during the day when the bloods were still transfusing. post-transfusion however, she was caught attempting to leave the bed.there was nothing wrong with actually leaving the bed, but the fact that she actually leaving and walking all the way down to the other end of the ward corridor - now, that's a worrisome fact. we asked her of course, what she was trying to do by walking down from one end of the corridor to the other. she just said she was looking for her relatives. it was about 3.20am at that point of time. when i thought about it, it was pretty obvious that she was trying to look for an escape route from the ward. she was constantly opening doors and on the lookout for an exit. not helping was that she did the above-mentioned with all the subtlety of a brass band's percussion section.as nurses, we always attempt to try the nice method first. the more forceful alternative would always remain as a secondary plan. of course, the forceful words always come after we settle whatever issue a patient has at the pantry ('What is wrong with this old man? he wants me to hold his penis so that he can pee properly???' - this is true, i heard it at the tea room before). we attempted to convince the old lady to go back to the bed and take a rest as her blood levels were low and she was at risk of fainting at any moment. we tried helping her by guiding her at the arms. she slapped my hands off and ended up slapping me in the nose. which basically gave my Jackie Chan nose a reason to start up a sinus party. i couldn't stop sniffling after that.after parking her in her bed, she attempted three more 'escapes'. 'escape' is in inverted commas as there was absolutely no stealth in her attempts. you could hear the loud click as she undid her bed rails. the flip-flops she was wearing truly lived up to their noisy names. one bizarre thing though that made us question whether she was of sound mind or not was that she didn't even try to run or walk briskly. she was actually must sauntering about and looking about for that elusive escape route of hers.and thus a final warning laced with a hint of restraints was issued to the lady before we enforced on her the inevitable. i couldn't bring myself to do it as i was just being a real prick with me and my principles. but one could really hear it was a tough job despite the fact that Pangkeng was there to help. bloodcurling screams and shouts pierced through the quiet night air. and Pangkeng was occasionally spewing vulgarities. he only uses vulgarities when he's with me or when violence ensues. so he was obviously getting physically abused. it was either my friend getting kicked or my principles. i decided to screw them for once and help Pangkeng.at the bedside, it was truly an ugly scene. gauze wrappers were strewn all over the floor. blood could be seen trickling out from an ex-cannula site that the lady had forcefully ripped out from a vein. the lady was screaming, shouting and kicking everything and everyone in sight. the rest of the patients in the same room as her had woken up and wondering what the commotion was all about. she had even managed to pull her pyjama top open. a button lay at the side of the bed and she had one breast exposed. she looked savage and she looked vicious. in my mind, i made the mental connection between the lady and the harpies in Van Helsing. my colleagues got bitten and pinched. i got kicked twice in the chin. Pangkeng, the warrior princess got slap on the face and his balls kicked. but he's resilient.it was with all that violence that we decided to reinforce the entire set of restraints - a body vest, a pair of hand restraints and a pair of leg ones. Pangkeng did the ultimate of plonking his entire hulking 98kg frame on her legs to stop the kicking. and it's really ugly to see a woman scream and shout when you usually see them very well in control of their emotions. i felt bad as throughout the whole ordeal, she was screaming and appealing to us not to tie her. she mentioned that we were bullying her as there were four nurses tying her up. she stated that she was old and that tying her up was a sign of disrespect. being Chinese and having a father who imbued me with respect for the elderly, i really felt that the whole thing was... demeaning or disrespectful or well, i can't pinpoint an exact word. but i hoped that i was doing the wrong thing for at least the right reasons.and restrain the lady we finally did. exhausted, Pangkeng and i decided to head to our secret spot in the hospital for a quick smoke. when we came back an estimated fifteen minutes later, we found that the entire bed had been shifted out to the ward corridor in front of the nurses' counter.'She actually managed to undo her restraints!' my colleague exclaimed in exasperation.upon closer inspection, 'undo' was not really the correct word. she actually ripped out her restraints. and those weren't soft, cottony gauze restraints. we used linen restraints that were double sewn at the seams and connecting points for extra strength. as we did her restraints again, she got even more violent and abusive this time. somehow or other, she managed to get hold of a bottle of Chinese medicated oil that she stashed underneath her pillow. she start sprinkling the entire vial of mentholated fluid at us. it was burning. it was hot. and resolved all of us nurses to quickly get the job done.when we managed to restrain her the second time she suddenly started singing a bizarre song in Hokkien. there were some old Hokkien words in there that i couldn't understand and my Hokkien is l33t. but what i did grasp was that she was trying to call upon the spirit of her in-laws to destroy us. and being Chinese, calling your in-laws for help is sorta like the last resort, given that most Chinese in-laws are quite the horrible bunch. we were kinda freaked out as her unnatural strength, her loud screams and shouts, her Hokkien in-law song... we were thinking along the lines of demonic possession actually.suffice to say, when she was more settled down and asleep from all the physical exertion (or maybe the demon left her, who knows?), i managed to catch a breather with my colleague.i asked her, 'you think it's worth it to tie her up after all that kicking and scratching?'she was scratching at the already inflammed area on her arm where the medicated oil had landed. on her other arm was a slight hint of a bruise. the other arm was a redness that came about from a pinch from the patient.'maybe,' she said, 'i mean, it was either her or us.'was the lady with the low Hb condition mad to begin with? or was she just plain 'naughty'? those thoughts made me pensive for the rest of the evening.but i'm thinking it's mainly due to me being really anal about my principles. how i got my Platinum card and still couldn't make the father proud (apologies for having not blogged for so long, plenty of activities and educational pursuits and work matters, apologies for another post on family issues as well. you must be bored to death hearing about my father and his constant suppresion of myself. i'll blog about something as next week. otherwise, i'll.... ehrm... post naked pictures of myself!)my paternal family has the sort of 'fun-filled family activities' enthusiasm going on that can really sometimes irk you to death. you see, it all started with one fine Christmas gathering when the entire family committed to spending more time together. this particular Christmas gathering was the one that had just passed apparently. the one whereby my father tried to convince the entire family that the world was ending and that we were to tighten our chastity belts and keep a good check on our faiths to see if we were still in tune with the Lord. the one when everyone simply just laughed at my father's all too zealous belief that the world was ending. the one whereby my father still has a sore spot over the fact that the paternal family laughed at his claims.in all honesty, it wasn't that my family didn't believe in his theories of apocalypse. everyone in my paternal family (well, practically everyone - i'm not that there yet in terms of faith) is a strong Christian that truly deserves a one-way ticket to heaven. but it was more of the way he did the whole spiel that made everyone think that he was verging on a crusade or matyrdom. it's all cool to believe in an 'end-days' theory, but to be a doomsday preacher is way not cool. which my father apparently needs someone to drill it into him. but how many people actually approach their local doomsday prophet and actually correct them or tell them 'it's not cool'?the more i think about it, when i actually dress my father in the scholarly robes of yore, hand him 95 pieces of theses and place him in front of the Wittenburg church door, i begin to realize that i have actually been living with a Martin Luther in the house. not exactly in a 'it's wrong for the Catholic church to withhold the bible in a foreign language from the public' kinda way, but more of 'i challenge the authority' manner. it's quite apparent that the doomsday belief of this Martin Luther father of mine (and i say this with all the love in the world for the man who raised me up) has apparently tainted and coloured his social life. my father has only friends from church. my father only conducts business dealings (eg. insurance agents) with like-minded brethren. he even managed to convert his best friend from Catholicism to Christianity. last heard, i think he was a Deacon in one of the sister churches of my dad's in Canada.so you see, given that we're not getting much of a social life in terms of a family unit, i think it's a prudent investment of time to go on various outings with the paternal family over the weekends. what sort of outings you say? thus far, when we don't head out into the public, we rotate potluck parties at each others house on a weekly basis. we would try to have themes and prepare dishes in accordance to the themes. so far, we have only been successful at Western, Japanese, Korean and of course, Chinese cuisine. actually the Korean was falling apart with the appearance of Chinese ngoh hiong rolls (translated to mean '5 spices' - it's my grandmother's speciality).when we do go out however, it's much more interesting. we do morbidly embarrassing things like go out to the park with picnic tables in tow. we literally find a grassy spot under the shade and open up this grassy-green coloured portable picnic table that's the size of a hedge. in fact, it blends in very well with a hedge (thank goodness!). since we have only two tables that can sit a family of four, the others would make do with the trusty ol' picnic mats. and not just any ordinary picnic mats, but tacky Spiderman 2 mats courtesy of Colonel Sander (it came free with a family feast from KFC). and sometimes i question their cleanliness because we don't often do picnic moments together. so the picnic mats tend to be in great need of dusting. i can't really tell whether it's just Spiderman's webs or really cobwebs.during these picnic outings however, there's always a bizarre mix of foods. everyone brings whatever they can lay their hands on. packets of chips that nobody eats at home, a big metal pot of Shark's fin soup (can you actually say that you actually have eaten Shark's fin soup in a park in shorts and singlet), bottles of green tea, a box of 16 doughnuts, roasted duck, a chunk of agar-agar that looks like a fish (??). of course, there's the standard fare of fried vermicelli and finger foods like sausages and nuggets.it's all these outings that i come truly prepared. i bring along a good novel and my ipod and indulge in a good half-hour's worth of reading. another person who does the same, albeit without the music, is my uncle-in-law who opened the nursing degree programme that i'm currently being educated at. my selection of reads are mainly limited to fiction and the occasional popular non-fiction literature. whereas my uncle-in-law is the direct opposite. he reads books on financial management and success. he would always be armed with a copy of the Business Times and financial magazines. titles like 'You Can be Financially Prudent Too!' and 'Money Matters' flash across my mind when you ask me about the books that he reads. i just met him again last week and i saw him reading 'Master Plan of Evangelism'. eclectic mix of books, that's all that i can say.i've come to realize that the both of us are the only one who don't really talk much to the paternal family. my reason mainly being that i'm in the presence of my parents and don't find much comfort in expressing myself. my uncle-in-law however, it's a different matter. the only moments he chips in are when it involves politics and financial matters. and he's quite well-versed in these things. listening to him talk is like watching a political commentary. which admittedly, thrills me to no boundaries. i'm sure he quotes most of the stuff from the books that he reads. but it's almost like watching Robert Kiyosaki at work. which is quite possibly the next best thing to sex (for me, at least).Robert Kiyosaki and Martin Luther... isn't my paternal family quite the fun bunch?--they say that good financial habits comes from good parenting. however, when it comes to all things financial, i'm about as wise as a piece of banana money. my parent's idea of financial prudence is a matter of saving for the rainy days. as the free thinker of the family, i feel a presing need to go against the grain. every day seems to be a rainy day for me. after all, what's money if you don't spend it? of course, i'm not that callous with money. just a tad more generous when it comes to friends and colleagues.still, i've come to realize that i've made many financial errors in my life. one of the top ones begin that i took up a financial advisor that was introduced to me by my mother. she joins the church choir (she's a soprano) and knows a lot of people in there. one of these people that she's connected with, is an insurance agent or more aptly put these days, a financial advisor. he's a Christian guy whom i suspect is a closet case or at least someone who's trying to suppress those man-loving tendencies. he owns EVERY season of Friends on DVD (not exactly crminally gay) that he keeps in an OCD-resemblant disc folder, he speaks in a light tenor voice, and well... the ground that he treads on basically sprouts pink daisies. but he's a good Christian aman and i can without a doubt attest to that. problem is, i don't feel comfortable sharing my financial situation with brethren that are as like-minded as my father. and my financial advisor is one of them. it was with him that i signed up two insurance policies that amount to a monthly premium of $354.67.my parents expect a monthly contribution from my salary to the household expenses. which i'm actually fine with. the initial amount was a whopping $500, which in reality i can figure out lots of foolish ways to dwindle it down. i can buy all the lap dances i want for an entire night and still have enough to spare for a a supper for two, a cab ride to the nearest love hotel and the transit rate there. i bargained it down to $300 stating that i was just starting out work, which the father expressed unhappiness and compared me to the cousins who literally contributed $500 a month. if there's one thing parents should never do is to compare their children to that of relatives. it's demeaning. and anyways, the brother's the one who wastes electricity by leaving all the switches on on the 'vampire' electronic devices.then there's the issue of my school fees that sets me back by about $250 every month. my phone bill as well which never exceeds its stipulated minutes every month since i don't really like to talk on the phone. this basically results in me having roll-over minutes EVERY month. i do subscribe to a wireless broadband service though. total - $67.50. a World of Warcraft account costs me $25.14 per month. adding the odds and edds and i fork out a total of $997.31. i bring home about $1.8 - $2k every month from working the permanent night shifts. which leaves me about $1K every month. and apparently, it's bordering on being insufficient. i find myself lacking about $50 every month. i think it's the smoking.you see, i smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. and i can't do the low-end brands because they make my throat phlegmy and leave a terrible after-taste. not that i'm trying to be prissy or classy or anything like that. but the only cigarettes that i can enjoy and i find a good investment in are Dunhill Kings, Consulates, Camels and Marlboro Ice Mints. so it's practically $11-12 a pack. not helping is that i need to be at Starbucks every weekend to help generate these blog posts. so if you add up here and there, i'm actually surviving on an amount that's just sufficient, short of $50. i throw $50-100 into savings every month which i end up having to tap back into.i'm not thinking of quitting smoking or even cutting down any time soon. the last time i bought new clothes was when i was in Thailand. before that, it was during the Chinese New Year, before that it was Christmas and before that? my birthday in October. so i'm not exactly splurging on materialistic goods.so when i think about my finances, it basically all boils down to matter of unwise financial decisions that i'm bogged down with. the insurance especially. but i understand that in the long run (pending the doomsday prophecy), it really helps. the bigger problem though is that every month i'm constantly having to head back to the parents for money. and i'm not asking money from THEM, but rather, trying to tap on my savings which i decided to let my father safeguard. alas, my father being the prophet of the end times would never release my savings to me without 'the talk'. now, 'the talk' would usually last about a half hour or more. it would usually start from my smoking habits, and develop and evolve till it reaches his favourite doomsday prophecy. the first few times when he did it, it did have some form of impact on me. subsequent times however, it was much less impressionable. mainly because it was the same old recycled material that he would always use. keywords that would often pop up during 'the talk' would be things like 'gnashing of teeth' (to describe what hell was like), 'seven years of trials and tribulations' and 'rivers turning to blood'. and all i wanted was the take some money from my savings...and to crown it off, he would never ever release my savings to me based on a previous experience of me splurging when i had a lot of money in my bank account. of course, i was young and i was new to the whole concept of holding a singular fifty dollar note in my hand. and splurge i did. what my father would normally do would be to take him like a credit card and roll over the money. so every month, i tap on my father's credited money and roll the money to the next month to pay him back. in all reality, i might as well get a credit card with all the legal and financial implications behind it and be spared the hellfire and brimstone prophecy.so i did the administrative procedures for a Citibank savings account and credit card application over the weekend. it was smooth-going and my application was approved within two hours. it was after that unfortunately that i had to consider whether to come clean with the father regarding my credit card application. because, living with them is like living with the Secret Police. they used to go through all my mail until one fine day when i raised my voice and locked my bedroom door. they were so freaked out that they never dared to go through any of my mail again. i decided to save the voice-raising and door-locking for emergencies in the future.out of love and honesty and a responsibility to my parents, i decided to talk to my father about the application and its approval. i tried a 'i want to take responsibility of financial matters now that i can manage better' tactic with my father. suffice to say, my father on top of being the Martin Luther of the family is now quite the wet blanket. 'Are you sure you can manage a credit card because from previous records, i don't think so,' he started. and thus he launched into his barrage about bankruptcy and the seriousness of it and how the banks will come after me if i can't pay up and et cetera. i was hoping for something more along the lines of 'oh congrats on getting your first ever credit card' or maybe even a smile or some sense of pride. and he once again had to make a comparison between my all-too-perfect cousin who saves money every month and contributes a lot of money to the household and can rent a car every month to take the family out. i hate being compared.i'm thinking that i will never ever be able to make the father proud unless i become a Martin Luther myself. alas, monastery robes and all that are just not my thing. i wish the Robert Kiyosaki of an uncle-in-law was my father. but i try to refrain from doing that because that's already a comparison, no? adulthood is no more than childhood betrayed i've never liked racket sports (not that i like sports to begin with). events such as tennis, badminton, hockey, floorball and whatnot, they seem to project this image of... blame. each time the player misses a ball, whacks the puck out of court or bashes someone's ankle accidentally, he instinctively starts looking at his racket. it's as if to say, 'it's not my fault that the racket's possessed.' which is perhaps why i prefer watching rugby and most contact sports that involve the physical body and the body itself. of course, it certainly helps that the men playing such sports have bodies that appeal to the general public. especially rugby.but sports aside, it seems that people these days seem to fault everything that goes wrong to everything and everyone else other than themselves. in the context of law, serial killers can get away with a plea on insanity by stating childhood stress and trauma related to a parental divorce. employers who abused their maids relate it to work stress. serial molesters claim that they are the way the are because they were molested by others when they were young. so everyone gets away scot-free just because of their traumatic childhoods and seemingly traumatising stressors, so it seems.as for me, i'm morally grey with three shades down the darker side. i'm no criminal unless you consider buying the occasional contraband cigarettes to turn me into one. and of course, not forgetting the consensual anal sex with other men. but this got me thinking that in one way or another, we're all quite possibly damaged or at least influenced by events that happened to us during our childhood. after all, the minds of children are considered to be at their most malleable. childhood is like taking a plunge into the great big fondue of life. you may be a bright red strawberry or a colourful fruit by any other name. but once you take a dip into life, you definitely will emerge as a change person. mostly darker, no thanks to the sinfulness of chocolate.most events that children go through will almost always leave lasting impressions on them. and believe you me, children have really good memories. they remember the good stuff well, and remember the bad stuff even better. which is perhaps why i coined the phrase that 'Adulthood is no more than childhood betrayed'.admittedly, i can't say that my childhood wasn't enjoyable. there were good moments like Happy Meals, 10/10 spelling tests (i was really good at spelling), Sonic the Hedgehog, Rockman comics and things that endear a lot to kids of my time. however, it wasn't all that a bed of roses as well. i never played with the neighbourhood kids (mother was afraid that i would get kidnapped or molested). i had only one official birthday party with my classmates in my entire life, and that was in kindergarten. i spent a lot of time doing homework, studying and reading. these may have coloured my life today in some way. at the root of myself, i guess i'm still the fat geeky kid from the primary schools. unfortunately, the ultimatum of my childhood that really defined me was my father and his violent tendencies back then.father was a very violent man. of course, he's not that violent these days, Thank God (literally, because he somehow saw 'The Light' along the way and gave up his violence). he got pissed and irritated very easily, which made him very unapproachable. we used to live with my paternal grandmother in this jumbo apartment. if it wasn't for her, i would have perhaps been caned to oblivion and psychologically scarred beyond repair. it was the screaming, the canings and the shouting that made me hate my childhood so much. i remember praying a lot to God that somehow or other, my parents would throw away the cane. i prayed that they would never use the cane on me again. in fact, i remember one time i prayed so hard that i spent practically fifteen minutes just squatting by the bedside, hands clasped together with eyes shut tightly. though i really think that the reason why i spent fifteen minutes squatting there was due to the fact that my father had just given me a can of whoop ass.for the record, God never answered my prayer about the cane. when the cane finally started to splinter, they simply threw the old one away and bought a new one from the local provisional shop downstairs. the auntie at the shop would always give me that demeaning stare whenever my parents bought a new cane, as if to say, 'isn't this like the fifth cane they bought this year? i bet this spawn of Satan really deserves it! hmph!' these days however, what with the law and protection against the ol' skool method of chastising children, you don't really find provision shops that sell canes any more.so for the record once again, maybe God does answer prayers, just that it's a few years too late.--i decided to skip church today again. in fact, i have been skipping church for two months on alternative weeks. there were certainly what i considered to be 'white lies' involved. i mean, i couldn't jolly well tell the parents that i hated church and wanted out. that would be like grabbing the cane from them and using it against them. and i hate having to hurt people, whether physically or emotionally. therefore, i used to rather solid excuse of work commitments and group projects.truth be told however, i simply can't help but hate church, possibly because it makes me hate myself. the idea of church that has been branded on my mind since young is the warm and stuff place where everyone has black hair, long skirts and hairy armpits accompanied with fat arms. there's an organ at one end of the sanctuary and a piano at the other. people live their lives according to the word of God, as if the other practicalities of life never mattered. if their lives were an Electrocardiogram reading, it would be a pure flatline. a flawless, straight and narrow little flatline. boring, true. but flawless and leading to heaven, none the less.it's because of this hate that i've turned out to be what i call a 'church bastard'. i don't single the hymns. i don't contribute to the offering bags. i don't partake of the Lord's Supper because i haven't been baptised. i haven't been baptised because i don't want a part in the Lord's Army. i keep my eyes open during the corporate prayer to update myself of the family mechanics of the various church people ('Oooh... new girlfriend!' or 'The three teenage children are sitting between mommy and daddy... spousal dispute'). i end up noticing the hairy armpits and fat flagging arms at this junction actually. i do my best to fall asleep during the sermons. and if i can, i escape from the service for a quick cigarette and come back smelling like smoke.a lot of this church-hating sentiment i guess, is derived from events that happened during my childhood. nothing major i guess, but there are plenty of scenes that i remember vividly. scenes that are apparently more negative than positive in context. and i don't remember a lot of my childhood to begin with for some reason. it's these events therefore, that contribute to the building blocks of my relationships with my parents and how i've come to hate Sundays and church-going so much.why i find that i can't express myself in front of my parentsthis happened when i was about eight years of age. it was a sunday evening with the paternal family and the cousins. i've always enjoyed hanging out with them because it was the only time that i got to roam around in public by myself. my protective mother would never let me out of her sight and it was quite irritating that i had to follow her everywhere. okay okay, to be fair, the only point of time she did so was at the lingerie section where she would officially hand me over to my father for safekeeping.we were out at this ancient and run-down shopping centre called 'Beauty World Complex'. it was one of those old buildings that served its sole purpose of housing a few random stalls. these stalls usually sold really outlandish clothes and skin-toned bras. even at eight, i was surprised that i could tell that those clothes were really horrid. stuff that i would never have worn (and no, i'm not referring to the skin-toned bras). i vividly remembered the multi-storey car park to be this dark and creepy place. the type of setting that's perfect for young nubile things to get flashed at by perverts in the middle of the night.well, the only point of interest for us kids back then was the video game arcade. it didn't stock any of the latest games in the market. but it did have games and kids are quite possibly the most easily-satisfied people in the world. it was these small little joys that help endure the whole outing to Beauty World Complex. why they would have a video game arcade in this run-down shopping mall is really beyond me. truly, the beauty of this place is indeed, complexed.lame jokes aside, we kids anticipated that one or two of our parents would be bringing us to the arcade after dinner for some fun. the whole lot of my paternal family members were milling and ambling about in a women's departmental store. the kids were just randomly touching and rustling through the women's clothes in the most obscene of places. i was as usual, following my mother. when one of my uncles did finally make the announcement that we would be going to the arcade, i jumped for joy. you know that kind of 'yay! we're going to the arcade after a boring family dinner' kind of jump. all of us screamed and shouted and whoops and pumped fists into the air. just the way happy kids do.it was also at that same point of time that my father delivered a big slap to my right cheek. i remembered that it was at the intersection in the women's departmental store that separated the lingerie section from the pants. my mind processed what just happened and decided that the best course of action back then was to shut up. somehow or other, i also got the understanding that when your parent slaps you in the middle of public for no apparent reason other than being extremely happy... well... as a kid, you just know that there's nothing wrong that you've done. it's your parents.i instinctively put my hand to my left cheek. i remember my vision blurring from the tears that started accumulating in my eyes. all i could see was the blurry colours of beige (presumably the bras) and a few familiar faded faces. i hated my father so much at that point of time that i didn't want to see his face.the rest of the kids went on with their arcade session while i was forced to stay with the parents and endure the public shame. it was also with that day that i think that i must have decided to not ever be happy when i'm in the presence of the parents. i actually think that it was a three day tantrum sort of thing, to refuse to smile or even talk when with my parents. three days turned into three months and then developed into three years. and since then, i can never bring myself to smile, frown or show some signs of feelings when i'm alone in the presence of the parents. i'm just a passive flat line in the eyes of the parents. of course, it's easy to smile when in front of the relatives and family friends. after all, we all have appearances of happiness to keep up with in public. but then again, i don't really express what i feel or think when the parents are around. the thought of a quick slap to the face somehow just lingers in the air.but this is quite possibly the reason why i never say anything when i am forced to go to church every sunday.why i hate teachers and can never get close to themyou know sometimes when you think back about the things you did as a kid, you really can't figure out for the life of yourself as to why you did it. it's as if someone or something influenced you to do this unusual course of action. i remember one time during a primary school music class, we were all marching and dancing to a particularly enjoyable piece of music. for some reason, i just flipped up the skirt of a female classmate that was jumping in front of me. i seriously have no idea why i did that. and i was only seven years old then. the music teacher only warned me that that was a very wrong thing to do. children, as you might have realized, can get away with most things.the event in question happened in primary school during year one. i was seven and bored to death and irritable. i'm thinking it was the afternoon heat actually. it was hot and humid and in the middle of a boring reading session. i decided to up and leave the class and take a walk around the school. i ended up staring at the flag poles that stood proudly at the front of the courtyard. there were two apparently, one with the school flag on it and the other with the Singapore flag with its red, white and five stars & crescent. now from the first day i stepped into school, i have always harboured a secret fantasy of lowering the flag that only the prefect did. they normally did this during the singing of the national anthem. i mean, as a kid the pulley system of a flag pole is like the coolest thing that man had ever invented (aside from video gaming consoles and the computer).and so i succumbed to temptation and decided to try out the Singapore flag pole. of course, we learnt about living things and non-living things during science class. but the topic of pulleys and forces had not been taught to us yet. so with the simple undoing of the knot on the flag ropes, i basically undid the flag. there was this loud zzzzzzzipp that seemed to reverberate around the whole school as the flag sild down the pole. that loud zip certainly did attract the attention of one teacher that i will remember for the rest of my life. she saw me as i tried to return the flag back to its original position. and like every other good citizen would do when they some something wrong being done, they would shout out the obvious and start giving chase.'OI! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!'i was only seven and could run like the wind. she was over-weight, in her 50s and wearing sandals. unfortunately, she had the advantage over me simply because she taught me for Health Education classes and knew who i was.it wasn't till later that evening when i was about to return home that all hell broke loose. my father was in his smart-looking army uniform (he was with the military back then) when he came to bring me home. it was white and gleaming with respect. and with all the luck in the world, the Health Education teacher was there when i met the father. when i think back, either she just really happened to be there or she was actually nesting there, awaiting the arrival of my father. none the less, she went ahead and told my father about what had transpired during the afternoon. i'm thinking that it must have been a very shameful thing for him back then given the context that he was in the smart air force garb. my father apologized profusely and walked away without even a second glance at me. i stared at the Health Education teacher with all the hatred, ninja knives and nuclear bombs in the world before making my departure.i tried to keep up with him as i lugged my heavy school bag to the car. i remember that i said nothing at all during the entire drive back home. he was constantly berating me in the car. and you know what quarrels in the car are like. quiet. imaginatively echoey. and quite awkward. i've come to hate that silence when my father shouts in the car. i do recollect that the first thing that happened when we got home that evening was that he went straight to the store room and grabbed the cane. it was a thin bamboo rod with a pink handle.that was the night whereby i was caned the worst in my entire childhood. my father locked me in the dark store room for what seemed like a long time. i even remember the scratching sound of scotch tape that pierced the air as he tried to seal the entrance from outside. my grandmother and mother were pleading that he let me out. of course, an angry man is almost always a man you can't convince. it was that long period of time in the darkness of that store room that i hardened my heart against teachers and figure of authority. i hated people who did the right thing without considering the implications of their actions. the right thing, may sometimes not be so right after all. especially if it involved the drastic physical punishment of a child.the Health Education teacher has since then passed away from cancer from what i last heard. she was remembered as a loving teacher who was a firm Christian and strong morals.i remember her to be the catalyst for my punishment.why i hate good people (and Chinese language teachers)i used to be a class monitor when i was in primary three. i was nine years old then. i was really proud of it because the responsibilities were minimal and you got to wear an uber-shiny badge that stated the words 'MONITOR' and a lot of other unwritten pride on it. all the monitor had to do back then was to count heads, announce the arrival of the teacher of the next class and look really important. in today's modern day context of office rats, it sounds almost like the CEO's lackeys.i was a good monitor with a penchant for the occasional impish naughtiness. being in a Christian-mission school, that was highly unacceptable. but then i think i got to keep my position as class monitor because i did my job well. it wasn't till one fine day that i blurted out the word 'SHIT' during class when i forgot to bring my Chinese textbook. one classmate of mine took the bloody initiative to report me to the strict Chinese language teacher. as with most Chinese language teachers, for some reason or other, there tend to like wearing sleeveless blouses and stockings. not helping is the fact that they have armpit hair and unshaven legs. i'm not sure about you, but ALL my Chinese language teachers are like that. tradition or trend? you decide.maybe she was pissed with me, maybe she hated my occasional misbehaviour, but i was stripped of my monitor status there and then. and this is why i hate goody-do-gooders and Chinese language teachers. i know, it's a petty thing. but i valued my class monitor status a lot back then and it was a kick to the gonads to me. my church has a lot of these goody-do-gooders apparently, who simply don't consider the implications of their morally-upright actions. sometimes, it's good to remember that you maybe a Christian, but above all, you're still a human. and humanity prevails.why i hate youth groupsa friend and i agreed yesterday that Christian youths are quite possibly one of the most sheltered people in the entire world. statistically speaking, the average Christian is middle class, has a stable career and a quite a fair amount of luxuries. looking at my church car park, one will see Beemers, Mercedes, and an entire barrage of space wagons and family sedans. so the average Christian youth has hardly tasted hardship. 'trial by fire' to a majority of these people seem to mean examination and minor classroom disputes. when you compare these problems to that of the poor, the abused and the destitute, it hardly makes you bat an eyelid.the youth group that i grew up in were children that accompanied me for many years. from kindergarten to secondary school, we have seen each other grow and mature. most of them are now in some foreign country studying something worthy of today's working world. arts, economics, financing, banking, zoology, et cetera. in my batch of youth group members, there were only two of us from schools for the lesser mortals, some other guy whom i don't see in church anymore and me. my youth group leader was this family man who was raised in an elite school and was working in a managerial position of sorts. he had a nice car, nice family and a pretty nice home in somewhat prime estate.unfortunately, he was the type that favoured intellectuals. i couldn't hold a conversation well back then. i didn't know what to say when they brought up topics. and so i was more often than not neglected during those youth group classes. i was pretty sure that the other guy whom i don't see in church anymore was really left out. he was raised in a traditional Chinese family where they spoke mandarin. my youth group leader over the years, seemed to focus all his attention on the intellectually-endowed crowd. prolly all the mental-sparring shit that they loved to indulge in so much.but what really made me hate my youth leader so much was one church camp. this happened when we were all in secondary school, teenagers to be precise. teenagers as you might have grown up realizing, are one of the most easily-influenced crowds around in town. you could prolly blame it on peer pressure. and it's most likely true. they seem to value the opinions of their friends more than their family members. indeed, it's one of the complexities of the youth.peer pressure was what this youth group leader employed after a night sermon. the task was simple: there was an imaginary divide on the center of the floor. if you're on the Lord's side, please stand with me. if you're want to be with the world, you can scoot to the other. all of us were already on the Lord's side as the sermon was preached on that side of the floor. so perhaps we were all too lazy to move (it was a NIGHT sermon after all). as for those who were on the edge of the imaginary line, you could see them hurridly shifting over to the Lord's side, as though as the darkness will claim them if they don't.in this context, peer pressure would never allow the teenage youth to go over to the carnal side. to do so, would be to allowing yourself to be officially recognized as 'one of the others' in the youth group. it's what a youth fears the most, not being accepted by his peers. of course, this would entail of whole barrage of follow-ups like one-to-one heart talks about your spiritual growth and a tedious exercise of checking up on you constantly.it seems like an insignificant use of peer pressure upon impressionable youths, but i felt betrayed that night.and so, these are the events of my youth and childhood that might perhaps have damaged me in some way. but upon recollection, i think that they might have strengthened my resolve to not easily be influenced, to not give in to physical punishment, to grow stronger. some people lead great childhoods with fond recollections of their parents and the good times together. some have really bad childhoods. for me i think, if it needed a lot of caning to change my father into a better person, then i say it's simply no more than a matter of trial by fire.like they say, 'what doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger'. how i ended up kissing Pangkeng i love to socialize with people in general. i really do. the rewards that come from it are endless. to begin with. it broadens horizons, introduces new perspectives, and if it's a guy, gives one a potshot of a chance at sex ('Speaking of bed linen, why don't we test out the 'bed linen' at MY place?'). the only problem i have with socializing is that i hate it when it all goes wrong. i have an avid fear of conversations becoming boring. this is especially so with old friends whom i know them inside out. i fear the boring. so much so that i will never ever been seen doing anything uninteresting. whenever i'm out, i'm always armed with my cigarettes, a paperback, my laptop and if i'm utterly bored, i'll even bring along a vibrating dildo.point is, i realize that i can't spend too much time with people in general because i'm afraid of becoming stale material. i'm scared of having nothing interesting to say. in my books, either i have something witty, punny or interesting to say, or i don't say it at all. this is regardless of whether they are close friends or simply just acquaintances. which perhaps might explain why i eagerly celebrate the concept of the One Night Stand so much. there's a purpose in meeting for the two people who agree on the One Night Stand, it's mostly fuss-free and most importantly, with no strings attached (it's not called a Two Night Stand for a reason, no?). the person you're meeting prolly knows as much about you as you are familiar with your healthy gallbladder.obviously, this fear of becoming a boring person has sorta tainted the way i handle things in life. i abstain from outings that have a chance of painting the town a monotone shade of grey. every single detail about me has something interesting about it. you can ask me about anything i'm wearing at a single point of time and i can tell you a long story about it. most importantly though and the most relevant point i want to make with regards to this blog post, is that i seldom am keen to go for long overseas trips with small groups of friends. mostly i dread the moments when all of us are spent and exhausted with nothing interesting to say other than mentioning random non sequitur in the middle of conversations. like i said, when i have nothing interesting to say, i just don't say it at all.when i have nothing to say at all, i'm about as exciting as a library reading of the vibrating dildo that i carry in my bag all the time. of course, you do know that i'm joking about the dildo in my bag right? why put a dildo in your bag when you can put it up your.... well you get the point.--'Let's go to KL!' Kegal Laughs suggested one evening when we were transitioning from the afternoon shift to the night.'Let's go have sex!' i replied sarcastically, half-immersed in cleaning up the mess that the afternoon staff have left around while pondering whether she was serious about Kuala Lumpur.the idea of Kuala Lumpur had been thrown around amongst my colleagues for quite an extensive period of time. in fact, several months ago, Kegal Laughs had brought up the idea of a weekend clubbing holiday in KL, Malaysia. we swore to get wasted and hopefully, laid. of course, as with most random outings that you bring up at work, they get swept away faster than you can say 'housekeeping'. and thus, the nonchalant and equally sarcastic reply to Kegal Laugh's weekend getaway.'*kegal laugh* No! I'm serious about it this time!' she tried again to arouse my interest. if i were a heterosexual male, then arouse my interest it did.'Okay then, you give me the name of a hotel that you would like to stay, how long and when!'true to her word, she got back to me with an answer within ten minutes. and thus, like the moment spermatozoa comes into contact with the egg, a foetus of a plan was conceived and put into action. and grow into a baby of a holiday it did. we found people who were willing to come along for this trip. Pangkeng, whom you guys have already been so fondly introduced to, you already know. he's coarse, he's vulgar, he's perverse and he's a real brute. but beneath that ugly exterior of his, he has a heart of gold. he's the only guy whom i know that would bring my patients to bathe in the assisted showers at 3am in the middle of the night.Kegal Laughs, our resident nymphomaniac was of course also headed for this trip. she practices what she preaches whenever she giggles or chortles. we tried an exercise once to see whose mouth was bigger by stacked fingers (our own) into our mouths (our own). she managed four before gagging on saliva.'And *kegal cough* kegal cough* that's what i like latinos! *kegal cough*' she exclaimed unabashedly.the last person who agreed to go on this trip is someone that i have yet to officially introduce. she works with me on the permanent night shifts and is quite the object of Pangkeng's perverse affections. let's call her The Fiddy Cent Model. if you have watched 50 Cent MTVs such as 'Just a Li'll Bit' or 'Candy Shop', you'll realize that most of his MTV model are scantily clad in g-strings that provide as much coverage as a newspaper in a thunderstorm. the reason why i label her as that is solely because she has a posterior the size of.... ehrm... let's just say that you could write your thesis on it and still have enough space for referencing and appendix A & B. she's a meena with a pretty face and an even prettier *points finger*.the common points amongst the four of us were that we drank, we smoked and we had the combined morals of a fake Coach bag. it was with this motley crew of people that i took the brave step into the social unknown by making this holiday trip with them. i sorta guessed that i would start keeping silent by the second day of the trip when i had nothing witty to say to them. i mena, i work with Pangkeng and the Fiddy Cent model on my permanent night shifts. so i've talked a lot with them during our smoke breaks and over supper in the ward. none the less, we made plans. actually, it's more like a singular plan.the only thing we managed to agree on was that we wanted this trip to be cheap. and Kegal Laugh suggested the most convenient and affordable accommodation in the form of one Puduraya Hotel. situated directly above the Pudu Coach Station, it was the exact place where we would arrive and depart in KL. 'It's a three star hotel!' Kegal Laughs stated with much pride and gusto. this basically sent shudders down my spine and visuals of people waking up in a bathtub filled with ice. a note beside them would state 'Seek medical treatment immediately, we have just removed your kidneys! :)'and thus we met at the train station leading to the buses that would take us straight into the heart of Malaysia itself. this was right after a night shift and all of us were looking forward to the five hour coach ride to KL. to avoid boring you with the details and summarize the travelling bits to KL, this is a picture of Kegal Laughs without the make-up and me who have just woken up when the coach stopped at one of the rest stations along the Malaysia highway. this marked the beginning of us smoking two pack of cigarettes within a day while in Malaysia.but like i said, avoid the boring bits. we reached KL with all our limbs and luggages intact. the coach dropped us off at the road that led to the Pudu coach station. the afternoon sun beat down on us like bright Christmas lights and the traffic drifted past us at the speed the same Christmas lights would change their flashing patterns. we were constantly touted by men offering cab rides and coaches to various parts of KL and Malaysia. i was half expecting someone to sell me tupperware or sex. it wasn't when we reached the hotel that i should have known not to be surprised if someone did offer me a social escort for the evening.opening the hotel room door, we found what resembled our local chain of love hotels named 'Hotel 81'. we had adjoining rooms that were connected by a short hallway that last no more than two foot steps. the beds looked decent but felt really scratchy when you laid on them. the bath tub where i might have my kidneys removed had yellowed stains in them. there was water dripping from the faucets. and the toilet had a lighting that was reminiscent of a B-grade horror movie.yep, we ended up staying in a love hotel it seems. what confirmed my suspicions of the Puduraya hotel being a love hotel was a lift trip down the lobby after we had settled down. we entered the creaky life accompanied by one man and a woman. the man looking like your average Chinese Malaysian guy. plain and non-descriptive. the woman however, was dressed to the nines. she had bouncy shampoo commercial hair, thick make-up. her boobs were that type that said 'Helloooo! I'm Helga the milkmaid!' she carried an LV clutch in one hand and balanced a pair of Gucci sunglasses on that bouncy coif of hers. the give away that a 'business transaction' of sorts was done between the both of them was that they never said a single word while in the elevator. there was this awkward sexual silence in the lift as we contemplated about the man who paid for sexual services.part of the itinerary of our trip was actually to get as smashed and as wasted as it was financially possible. need i remind you that we were on a shoestring budget. from talking to the cab drivers that we hired during the day, we discovered that the taxi fares at night can cost quite the nuclear bomb. so we decided to make do with drinks in the love hotel. in preparation for this, we bought ourselves hard liquor. a bottle of Absolut, a Bacardi and a Johnnie Walker Black Label. the girls bought mixers to accompany the drinks. Pangkeng who's a beer kinda guy, partook of the mixers as well. i like my drinks and things neat and untainted.of course, alcohol does really bizarre things to people. for one, they lose their inhibitions and starting acting out. some get really horny (Pangkeng). some get crazy (The Fiddy Cent Model). some just keep quiet and deliver witty quotes at the most appropriate moments like Kegal Laughs and me. for some reason though, drunk people like to play games during drinks. one fine example since we didn't have any playing cards would be the classic Truth or Dare. Kegal Laughs and i agreed that we would rather take the dare than the truth as we both had a lot to hide. i, for one, have my sexual orientation to consider. Kegal Laughs i presume, had her alternate lifestyle to consider.none the less, one of the dares that we attempted was the famous 'Kiss (insert person's name of the same gender) on the lips. the dare was that i had to kiss Pangkeng on the lips. if i did so, then Kegal Laughs and The Fiddy Cent Model would do the same as well. i mean, it was easy as lesbian porn for the two beautiful girls. Pangkeng who was ready for anything that was even remotely close to being sexual was all ready for it. gay little me still had my social inhibitions to consider. and to crown it off, i wasn't that drunk yet despite five glasses of Johnnie Walkers.it's one thing to kiss a random stranger or a gay guy. but to kiss a good friend and colleague of yours is a totally different ball game. it would have been more palatable if Pangkeng was more pleasing to the eye. bless his soul and all, but it was while looking at Pangkeng's acne that i hesitated a little. the bulbous little things seemed to talk on a life of his own. Pangkeng was a tad irritated with my hesitation and tried pulling me forward with his brute-like arms. but gym-trained arms almost always trump brute arms. i pushed him back.'If we're going to do this, we'll do it on my terms!' i warned him.at the background, the girls were poised with their cameras and chanting 'Dare! Dare! Dare! Dare! Dare! Dare!' like a gaggle of pom-pom girls.i swig one big gulp of Barcardi, took three puffs of a cigar that we had bought at one of the downtown stores and felt the immensive high that overcame me all of a sudden. of course, my alcholic-inspired mind interpreted it as a bunch of guts and courage. and thus i grabbed Pangkeng's shoulders, closed my eyes and took the plunge.it was warm. and i didn't really enjoy it. a bit like kissing microwaved fish without the butter, spices and other flavouring ingredients. 'five seconds! five seconds!' the girls dared. and so it's official that i kissed Pangkeng on the lips for five seconds in the middle of KL. of course, the girls did the kiss on the lips for a full five seconds that verged on being French.i fell asleep soon after. the good thing though is that we never mentioned the kiss again for the rest of the trip. and when we went back to work again, everything happened as if the kiss never happened.i'm thinking that that's straight men for you. nocturnal food Singapore is quite possibly the most boring place on Earth. it makes me wonder why tourists bother coming here in the first place. but hey, we're generating plenty of revenue and sex with foreign men, so i'll keep my mouth shut. or maybe open, in relation to the latter point. point is, our country has very little news that really makes or breaks the world. our geographical location makes us pretty well-protected against natural disasters of most sorts, so no New Orleans-like situations around here. our economy is pretty buoyant these days unlike the economic recession of 1997. our arts scene is possibly as controversial and inspirational as the 9 o'clock news. it's always the profitable and popular stuff like musicals, musicals and oh, did i mention musicals?our crime rates are quite meh and humorous actually, sometimes even bordering on pure bastardry. murders normally involve rudimentary weapons best described as 'i reached for the first weapon i saw, which was a spatula' rather than drive-by shootings. our local thugs rob old people (there's the bastardry bit). local fights are mostly bar room brawls and street gang clashes, a lot of it revolving around a night out to the club and opening ten bottles of Chivas Regals at one go. Chivas seems to be the #1 choice of the street gangs that get into a lot of fights. indeed, this is the Chivas Life.given the boring context here in Singapore, it's quite possible that our locals have therefore found an obsession to build up their lives with. food, to be precise. we have A LOT of food in Singapore. there are four primary races in Singapore to begin with (in no order of merit or preference for those racially-sensitive folks) - Malays, Indians, Chinese and the last very fondly labelled as 'Others'. given the Singaporean culture to profit on obsessions, there have been many methods that have helped build the culinary industry. we have reality programmes designed to spot the best of the best of specific foods. we have guidebooks collaborated that offer the top 10 of (insert random local cuisine). i even know of a specific couple in my church that keeps one of these guidebooks in their car (a Beemer). they make it a point to visit a food outlet mentioned in the guidebook and cross it out. when i last talked to them, they were already 75% through the very much dog-earred book that sat beside the equally dog-earred street directory.none the less, it's with much thanks to the buoyant economy in the recent years that we've been seeing a lot of foreign fine dining popping up all over the place. French, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, Korean, Japanese, etc. you name the country, it's with a quick google that you can find it on our sunny shores. it's also with thanks to our Singaporean obsession with food and our knack for business, consumer versions of these fine dining places have been popping up for those who can't afford it and those who are ignorant of the sequence of culinary utensils on the dining table. we even have niche restaurants like Curry Udon places and Tapas bars. and yet, people are still complaining about the lack of proper food in this good country. a comment moan i often here from friends and colleagues goes something like 'But there's nothing here to eat!!' behind them would be an entire row of food court outlets offering local delights and western meals.like i always tell people, 'Food is a blessing. Variety is therefore, Godsent and perhaps prudent Economics.' i know it doesn't make much sense. but then again, neither does the fact that we are whining about the lack of food in a country that has an abundance of it.--working in a Singaporean hospital, you'll begin to realize that this abundance of food is not an applied reality. my colleagues are constantly whining about this lack of food in the hospital during the night shifts. well, the only source that's open at night unfortunately is the convenience store. true, it's air-conditioned and it offered hot foods and drinks. but you know what convenient stores are like., always stocking what's mainly convenient for THEMSELVES. it's the usual spiel of chocolate bars, potato chips, fruit juices, biscuits, instant noodles and factory foods. cheap, empty calories. whenever i head down to the convenience store, i end up buying the Kellogg's funpaks and a tetrapacket of milk. simply because there's variety in them. it's this lack of variety that we're complaining about, not the quality of food actually.this is why we're supremely grateful for the fact that food delivery services are in existence in Singapore. and please don't mistake it for those that you see on American drama serials where the lead says 'What're we having for dinner tonight?' and the supporting character takes out a Chinese menu and replies 'Let's order Wong's! I'm craving for dumplings!' no, the reality is far from your average American drama series.our typical drama scenes during our night shifts go something like that:Me: What're we eating tonight eh?Pangkeng: Anything lorMe: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?Another colleague: Anything lorMe: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?Another colleague: Anything lorMe: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?Another colleague: Anything lorMe: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?Another colleague: Anything lorMe: (asks another colleague) What're we eating tonight eh?Another colleague: Anything lori could go on, but you get the drift. it's because of this indecisiveness within my bunch of colleagues, that the onus of deciding on what to eat at night boils down to me and my cravings. unfortunately, the food delivery variety in Singapore is rather limited. despite having worked for six months on permanent night shifts, i have only managed to discover three places that make deliveries - McDonald's, an Indian-Muslim restaurant named Spize (i have a lot of Muslim colleagues), and a ching-chong Chinese restaurant just across the road from the hospital. no pizza deliveries as our local pizza parlours only deliver till 11pm. by the time we settle down from passing the nursing reports and clearing up the mess that the previous shift has left behind, it's already 11.30pm. i could order earlier, but once again that indecisiveness simply just prolongs the whole process of ordering.not making things any easier is that my ward has this under-running policy that if you're ordering food for the night, it's courtesy that you have to ask the rest of your colleagues in the department. all would be fine if any of my other colleagues bothered to take up the initiative of ordering food. but initiative just like food delivery at night, is very much lacking in my ward. therefore, i have become the only unofficial person who orders at night. and believe you me, taking orders is not an easy process. it's an extremely time-consuming process that involves plenty of persuasion, money and walking around. in fact, i've managed to come up with a systematic approach to ordering food. it comes in five steps actually whereby i take on five different roles at each point in the various steps.Step 1: The Propagandistthis usually occurs at 10.30pm when everyone is busy but i'm hungry. i decide on what i want to eat and start calling up the various sections of the ward to inform them that i'm ordering. i could walk down the ward corridor, but walking two hundred metres is not fun. walking back two hundred metres from the end of the ward corridor back to my section is even more 'not fun'. what is the most 'not fun' bit is having to entertain certain colleagues who will break into their usual spiel about the lack of variety. 'What? Spize again! Very boring!' having to maintain apt PR with the other colleagues, i refrain from reaching for the nearest item that can cause bodily harm.Step 2: The Advisorthe ward routine is that we're usually busy between 10:30 to 11:00pm. therefore it's by 11:00pm that i start taking orders from people. this is the tedious bit where i have no choice but to do the two hundred metre routine of walking and socializing with the colleagues. it'd have been all fine and dandy if the colleagues could make up their minds on what they want to eat based on the delivery menus. but they can even decide when i pose them the question of 'What're we eating tonight eh?' so i don't expect much out of them really. thus to help make up their minds i probe them for their cravings. Chicken or beef? Rice or noodles? Cheap or expensive? Any drinks? Condiments? Upsize? Would you like to change your drink to something else? it's costs another fifty cents if you upsize! Why don't you order so that we can hit the quota for the delivery service's reduced delivery charge? i normally complete this part of the process at 11:30pm when everyone else has completed their work and i haven't even touched a single bit of it. and does anyone help me to complete mine? other than Pangkeng, NO. ungrateful wretches.Step 3: The Ordererthis is when i make the phone call to the restaurant in question. i read out my orders. they read back my orders. i can't really fathom why they would read back my orders other than to clarify that i've ordered one big mac meal upsized, one double cheeseburger a la carte, one McSpicy meal upsized, two Chicken foldovers, two happy meals both with fries and nuggets and the toys for girls, two McFlurrys, and the drinks will be three cokes, one sprite, two iced milos, one iced latte, one coffee and one more large coke a la carte, and chilli sauce and curry sauce and barbeque sauce and a lot of mayonnaise. do i sound like i can remember all my orders in some random sequence? 'It's easy what!' the guy who takes my orders over the phone would be thinking while staring at his computer screen with the orders in possibly Arial font.Step 4: The Debt Collectorthis is the part that i hate the most. because most people are simply not initiated to pay up. it's a bit like being a politician, having to tease and prod the most out of the colleagues for the delivery charge. on good days, people actually pass me the money automatically. on even better days, they tell me to keep the change. on really screwed up days, nobody pays up and i am forty-dollars poorer. not that i'm a stingy sort of fellow, but this has happened at least six or seven times out of the thirty times i've ordered takeaways. i truly deserve a tip. falling short of hanging a severed horse head at each of the ward's section, i can only ask nicely for payment. oh my god, it's already 11:30pm. and i haven't started on a single bit of work yet!Step 5: The Distributorsometimes when i can't be bothered with collecting money yet, i'll just wait for the delivery guy to arrive with the food before i start collecting back cash. i'll have to separate the various orders into bags for the various sections of my department. if the delivery guy had quite the bumpy ride, i would have to wipe up the sauce. i have to ensure that they have straws. they have condiments and et cetera. and thus begins the two hundred metre walk down the corridor with food once again and back. i would have been ravenous by then and possibly poorer by a few dollars due to those colleagues who conveniently forget to pay.it's usually by 1:00am that i'm able to settle down and have my food. by then, i would have been irritable and in dire need of nutrition. so the next time someone offers to take orders for food, do tip them. do something nice for them. give them a hug. give them a word of grateful thanks. because lurking beneath that cheerful exterior, there's someone waiting to reach out for the nearest object of bodily harm.and it might not be a spatula. straight dreams it's raining heavily. and not just any rain. it's the type that has monotone clouds, monotone lightning, monotone rain drops. if sound could be described as monotone as well, then it would be apt for the thunder. there's a faint smell of freshly-cut grass mixed in with the rain. and true enough, when the scene pans downwards, we see the horizon defining the sky and an endless field of green grass.in the distance, we see two people. presumably lovers, presumably star-crossed. like a hundred-metre dash, they run fast. like a war film trailer about lover separated by politics, they run with no regrets. like two magnets separated by a science teacher teaching a class about north and south poles, they dash to each other like it was a scientific law that designated they do so.the two lovers clash in a hug. they don't kiss. they don't make love on the field. they don't do anything else other than wrap each other in an embrace that possibly explains the context of the entire situation.two people. a man and a woman. he closes his eyes and cradles her. she is crying tears of reunion. the tears have a special glint though. possibly because they've been diluted with the monotone rain droplets, spelling out a short-lived reunion. she has the face of an angel no less, despite the fact that she's crying.the hug lasts for no more than a minute. two cars arrive.and that's when the dream ends.--for most gay people, i'm sure that there's some point in their lives that they've asked themselves THE question. it's a question that maybe spells out self-doubt. maybe guilt. or regret. or whatever negative connotations that come about when i reveal the question in the next few sentences. well i'm not sure whether it's most gay people or it's just me. but it's only recently that i've begun to question myself. 'Could i turn straight again and live with it?' can i revert back to the lifestyle that i left behind oh-so-many years ago? can i drop an ideal that i built my life from, right here, right now, and not look back? can i go back to sex with the supposedly designated gender that society says i ought to be having with? could i possibly get married with a woman and settle down? can i actually deal with having children? when i ponder over such thoughts, the only question that i can truly answer is the one about children. and you know how i feel about children, preferring most of them to be under the care of a Miss Havisham sort of character.it's definitely a daunting question, even for the most mature gay person. we've spent so many years working hard to get to the point where we are today. we built our lives around values that contravene most of the world's norms. and i can assure you that in the midst of meeting many gay people, most homosexuals have forgotten to add a few accommodating straight people in their list of friends. so you see, it's not like a change of underwear for a gay person to just turn the tables on the sexuality. or to put it in a crude metaphoric 'hur hur hur' sense, it's a bit like wearing a really kinky piece of women's undergarment. you have to take a while to figure out to put which limb into which hole of the undergarment in question.it is with recent concern though that i've been pondering this question of turning back to the path of the straight and narrow. of course, these thoughts don't just pop by one fine day and rear their ugly head. it's perhaps destiny and fate and the circumstances that they've thrown in that give situations their context. in my case, it's mainly feelings and dreams. well, not dreams of death and dying like i mentioned before in my previous posts. i used to dream a lot about dying, with my playing the role as the person who dies. not a very fun thing to do when you experience the various methods of death with the feelings of pain that my mind conjures up when i'm sleeping. the good thing is that these days, i'm don't dream so much about death anymore. it's as if my mind has decided to move on from horror movies and psycho thrillers and perhaps start watching something else more substantial.substantial in this case refers to the stuff that you often find in your local film festival. the type that has twenty second shots of water dripping, twenty seconds of silence and another twenty seconds of an upclose shot of a vagina. all for no apparent reason other than to dare the boundaries of film mores and perhaps artistic license. well okay, my dream are not that incomprehensible, but it does give me that feeling when i wake up after my post-night shift afternoon sleeps. the electric fan would be blowing in a corner of the room, the brother would be in another watching streaming movies and downloading porn at the same time, the window reveals grey clouds of impending rain, and i would be up in bed, hearing the sounds of the afternoon heartland soundtracki wake up from one indie film, only to be in an indie film of mine.--have i told you about my preceptee before? well, she has the face of an angel to begin with. she's as lanky as a supermodel. she wears braces. she has a great-fashion sense. she's porcelain white. her sinus gets aggravated when she's stressed. she's always giving gentle slap on the shoulders whenever i tell her something bad about a patient. and i like it when girls do that. she's the embodiment of innocence, so much so that you feel like you just want to protect her from the evils of this world. and believe me, i've protected her a lot. i've seen her cry before when an unreasonable renal patient went cranky and start blowing his top over small idiotic matters.admittedly, i couldn't help but have feelings of attachment for her the first time i saw her. and this is primarily quite weird given that i'm gay in the first place. but you've got to admit once again, that some girls just have the effect on men. i may be gay, but i'm still a guy and men know how to appreciate beauty when they see some. it was with this thought that i realized that in an alternative reality, she would be my kind of girl. of course, in that alternate reality, she wouldn't be married. yeah, she's 19 this year and married to a policeman. i'm attending her wedding dinner in the later half of this year.so it was with some fright that i woke up to that dream where i hugged her in the rain. she was crying. quite badly. and with that secret sense of longing. of course, this is just mainly what my mind conjures up. i'm sure she's deeply in love with her husband and not feeling this way. but i've always believed in the reality of an alternate universe and another time. somewhere else, we must be related in some sense. either as lovers or something along those lines. however, what matters most is that i'm in this reality and i know that i'm steadfastly gay.like true colleagues, i told Pangkeng about my dream over a cigarette break. he was smoking a Marlboro light while i on my Consulates.'i dream about the rest of our colleagues all the time what!' he replied after i told him about my dream. obviously, i omitted the fact that i was gay and that it was a very weird dream for me.'what do you dream about when you dream of colleagues?' i asked.he took a long drag of his lights before replying nonchalantly, 'mainly sex lor.'and to think i'm already making a big deal out of a dream of hugging a married colleague in the rain. how i ended up buying expensive underwear in Thailand money is indeed, a really sensitive topic within gay relationships. for the typical straight couple, tradition, norms and a superego have perhaps more or less defined that the guy should mostly pay for dinner, movie tickets, coffee and the hotel room. if the girl is prudent and really nice, she'll even bring along condoms, lube and her best friend (insert random heterosexual chortle here: hur hur hur!!). for the two men in a homosexual relationship though, financial matters are more of a grey and rainbow-coloured area. after all, tradition, culture and superegos are not exactly familiar with gay society and its social mechanics. should it be defined by age as in 'i'm older so i'll be picking up the tab'? should it take into consideration professions (doctors and janitors in a relationship)? or even better, sexual position preference (top picks up the tab because he's more manly)! which is why i believe that to avoid all the money-related conflicts ('i paid for all your stupid sparkling water during your fine dining meals, you bitch!'), it's perhaps better if gay people just go dutch on most things.in my short few years of being gay so far, i have seen my fair share of couples breaking up over money matters. a typical example would be a couple having joint accounts and one partner in the relationship being a spendthrift, fancying indulgence and constant extravagance. it's a problem that isn't prejudiced with age though. even young couples that earn barely enough to club on the weekends are plagued by it. you know how relationships are - expensive and as stable as a chemical reaction. and you thought that the young couldn't possibly break up over financial matters.of course, for all the breakfast-coloured sunshine and silver linings in this world, i have also known of really giving and generous couples who make sure that money doesn't become an issue in any conflicts that may arise in the course of love. i know i sound like a marriage counsellor here, but openness is one factor that really helps. other options involve going steady with a simple man or pre-nups. but speaking from a more practical perspective, avoiding extravagance and the impracticalities of life is seriously the most useful solution. for some reason or other, the average gay person simply loves extravagance and the empowerment of luxuries. is it a by-product of the Dorothy Dollar? or just simply the media and its constant barrage of the ideal gay man in a pair Gucci slippers and designer threads? and since we're on the topic of Gucci slippers, i'm actually dying to see the day when someone slips and fall while wearing a pair (this deserves another straight man chortle: hur hur hur!).i once saw a young gay chap of about twenty. to put it simply and without prejudice, he's the skinny and effeminate friend that you prolly know of or have one of. i like them because they are generally hilarious and vivacious people with plenty of attitude. this guy in question though, was decked from head to toe in black and brands. huge logo-ed ones, to be precise. he was what one could call as your definitive fashionista. from the top, there was a black Lacoste polo tee covering his skinny frame. a pair of black Abercrombie jeans hugged what was left of his anorexic butt. he carried a black Louis Vuitton carrier that prolly weighed more than him. what seemed like an original pair of Gucci slippers (i couldn't jolly well reach down and feel for the fabric can i?) announced his entrance with a really noisy 'piak-piak' sound. the crowning glory was a pair of Gucci sunglasses that screamed 'I am Nicole Richie, here me roar' (meow!). admittedly, i have nothing against style and luxury. in fact, i shouldn't have a say in style as i can't tell the difference between a birkin and a bag. the only issue that i have here is that i find it rather sad to see someone covering himself and what's left of his dignity in branded and logo-ed goods. everything on him has a logo the size of Zimbabwe. from the trade mark LV motif, to the gold-embossed Gucci frames.and oh, did i mention that i happened to see this guy in the blue-collared worker's main mode of public transportation - the train.yes, class meets crass.--i've never been one to spend tonnes of money on the various impracticalities of life. not that i'm a prudent person when it comes to all things financial. after all, i am the guy who signed up for insurance with a three hundred dollar per month premium. not forgetting another three hundred for the household expenses and another two-fifty for my education. none the less, i know i'm treading on really sensitive ground here given that 'impracticalities' is a rather loosely-defined term. i need my cigarettes just as the same way you might need to get your daily dose of a protein shake (which i used to, but now don't). point is, i know what i ought and ought not to be spending on. take for example, i would jolly well love to stride into the nearest Lacoste boutique and say something chi chi like 'Can i have ten of this in ten different colours?' but obviously i don't because not only do i have to put my ass on the street market for ten month after the whole Lacoste hoo-hah, but also it's just purely impractical. and silly. and foolish. and retarded. but 'nuff said.this trip to Thailand (yes, it's another Thailand post, sorry to bore you guys to death with my Sawadee stories) has really been one revolving a lot around money. to begin with, i have already burned a hole in my pockets just to get there and get bored to death with the family. i found the perfect solution for this though. whenever the parents went shopping, i quickly went my separate way and found myself a nice coffee join to start reading, smoking and people-watching. the brother of course, had no choice but to tag along with the parents because my mother believes that he will get kidnapped by tuk tuk drivers or Southern infidels. plus he didn't have a lot of money to begin with. i contributed a hundred bucks to the brother's expenditure in Thailand. and a few one cent coins just in case he needed the loo (you have to pay for entrance into the toilets in Mah Boon Krong).everyone of course bought plenty of things. everyone that is, except the father whom i can't recall bought much. prolly still saving for that HDTV that he so wants. i went on a book-spending spree, buying more than ten novels to keep me pre-occupied in Thailand and public transport in Singapore for at least two months. i bought cheap tees, pants, shorts and stocked up on a barrage of cheap beauty products. i even had money left to buy souvenirs for colleagues. i actually went there with a list of things i had in mind to buy. so i was pretty much left with an excessive amount of money which i spent on really impractical things like Wireless Fidelity in the hotel room. in case you didn't know, Wireless Fidelity is more commonly known as WIFI, not to be mistaken for something along the lines of fidelity and promiscuity which in this case might be a male masseur in my hotel room. but as i said, WIFI in the hotel room is silly. and foolish. and retarded. and impractical given that i'm in Thailand, the land of a thousand smiles and many more internet cafes. but i don't do silly things without a reason.the brother, being a young teenager and a real narcissist bought several cheap tees, a pair of sunglasses and one item of much decadence. the item in question here, being an Adidas sweater. it was white and had stitched-on red stripes at the side in the trademark triple stripes of Adidas. i would have been fine if it had been a simple Adidas jacket. but no, on the back of the jacket was the huge word 'JAPAN'. and thus, i spent a half of the trip in Bangkok watching the Chinese brother wandering around in Bangkok with the ching-chong face made up of won-tons and Chinese takeaways. i couldn't help but laugh internally when i see authentic Japanese tourists in their street-styled clothes walking past him. unsurprisingly, none of them wore apparel which stated their nationality. this also prolly explains why my mom is paranoid about the tuk tuk drivers and Southern Infidels kidnapping the brother.my mother was more prudent with her purchases though. she bought accessories. she bought clothes. she even bought a Thai silk nightie that looks really nice. alas, she bought a fake Longchamp bag as well. being no style guru, i can't tell you the exact name of the bag in question. but it's the trademark one that comes in a variety of colours and the brown flap over the top. there's a logo emblazoned into the brown flap which my mind captures as 'the guy on th ehorse in mid-jump'. i was in the hotel room when my mother returned from shopping with the proud tote in hand. but the moment i got to touch the leather flap, i had problems convincing myself that it was a genuine item. plus, 'the guy on the horse in mid-jump' was slightly faded when i recalled seeing the original product. in fact, the guy looked better if he were on something more ancient like a tapestry or a brochure for medieval holidays in Europe.but enough with what my family are buying in Thailand. the norm of the our short holidays in Thailand would go something like that: the first half of the day would be spent out on the streets of Thailand's coffee joins and shopping centres. the other half though, would be mainly in the hotel rooms. you see, just when i thought i had the legendary 'iron stomach' that could ingest and digest any food from all over the world, i developed a bout of indigestion on the second day of the trip. i didn't seek any medical attention as there are three nurses in my family, me included. the culprit here i suspect, would be the Chang Mai rice that i consumed in the latter-mentioned country.now, Chang Mai rice is different from your typical Thai rice that we Singaporeans mainly consume. it actually comes in clumps (which sounds rather lewd - 'I come in clumps!'), it's sticky and it's hard (which sounds equally lewd). not to be mistaken for glutinous rice, Chang Mai rice is the type that suitable for extended storage due to its lack of moisture and 'clumpiness'. in fact, it's perfect for food fights over the dinner table. if you run out of Chang beer bottles to throw in Chang Mai, grab some local rice and hurl it over to the nearest drunken tourist for a grievous injury to the eye.out of the seven days on the trip, six of them were tainted with fevers and the constant purging of solely liquid. everything else was just clumping along in my stomach and intestines and remaining undigested. use your imagination when i say that 'whatever went in, came out looking like it never went in'. i permanently felt like puking half the time. all i could do when i watched my parents and the brother pigging out on steamboat and pizzas was exude a greenish tinge on my face. it was with this that i decided to spend the second half of most of the days in Thailand under the cosy comforters in my hotel room. i watched plenty of Nat Geo, Discovery Channel and MTV, suffice to say. i learned a lot about Global Warming. i was humoured by Mythbusters. and i saw how Janet Jackson danced with four (or was it five?) glowing balls in 'Feedback'. by the fifth day however, i was bored stiff. mainly because cable TV is all about reruns. plus i had already completed three of the books i purchased in Thailand.the cool part though was that i brought along my Fujitsu laptop with me to Thailand. the not-so-cool bit was that i had no internet connection. i had porn on my laptop though. and as many guys would attest too, porn is only fun till the point you come. you can have 9 hours worth of porn in your storage space, but if you come within 9 minutes, it's pretty much is useless, isn't it? not that i come in 9 minutes, mind you. or in clumps for that matter. it was with this ultimate boredom that i decided to purchase WIFI in my hotel room, a three day pass to the world wide web. i spent the last two days in my hotel room mainly playing World of Warcraft from the afternoon till the night. this is what i mean by 'impracticalities'.despite spending on exorbitant internet access, i still had quite a large amount of money to contend with. close to three thousand baht, if i recall. falling short of a massage, i couldn't really think of anything else i wanted to spend on. besides, if anyone were to massage me at that point of indigestion, i would most definitely have hurled. and vomit-stained towels are really not that widely accepted at most massage parlours in this world. even the shady ones that offer extra 'services'. so the idea of something that i could spend on came to me at what i defined as 'The Gayest Moment' of this family-oriented trip to Thailand. as i might have already declared proudly, i didn't have any sex in Thailand.what transpired was a random trip with the family to the huge shopping complex formerly known as the World Trade Centre in Bangkok. it was one of those places that were more attunede to the foreigners that go there for holidays. there were plenty of boutiques and various other chi chi places selling luxury goods. one of these upmarket places was of course, the Zen Department stall. 'The Gayest Moment' of course happened when i passed by the men's underwear section, no less. like your typical men's underwear section, there were really artistic mannequins of Herculean torsos clad in underwear. and you know what they say about art imitating/irritating life. as if one cue, there were several equally Herculean men wandering around the rows and rows of undergarments. some were obviously gay. some were obviously couples. for some curious reason, all of them were Asian. all of them were staring at the new-comer with that gay stare, as if daring me to purchase some expensive underwear.from a gay person's point of view, it was one of the most fascinating underwear departments i've actually seen in my entire life. not like the typical ones in Singapore that stock funny-looking under that require instruction sheets and some creative thinking in order to put it on. not like the average ones in Singapore that have plenty of grey, whites and blacks. not like the horrid ones in Singapore that have really gaudy designs of yachts and stars (i'm not joking about this). i dunno what made me decided to purchase expensive underwear in the end actually. maybe it was the fact that there was a sale going on. maybe it was the pressurizing atmosphere of Herculean testosterone and pheromones wafting about. or maybe it was that i had money to clear before my departure from Thailand.it was with some decision however, that i decided on two pairs of Aussiebums. i couldn't help but think about what the sales assistants were thinking when i made my purchase. prolly something along the lines of 'i could purchase more than fifty meals in Thailand with that amount he spends covering his manhood'. there was even a VAT refund for the underwear i bought. but that was too much hassle. i couldn't help but feel guilty over my purchase. a sort of guilty pleasure though. somehow or other, i always imagine most expensive items looking like money. like take for example, a birkin bag would prolly look like many stacks of hundred dollar notes shaped like a birkin bag. in the same line of thought, my Aussiebum covering my genitals would be nothing more than a few wads of cash sewn together to provide coverage.it's not a pleasant sight, i must say. well at least not something that anyone could come in clumps to. elephants, oxes, culture and all that shit i like to people-watch. this is of course, not to be confused with the primary gay past time of cruising for sex. to me, people-watching is one of those activities that you can learn a lot from. it also helps that i have this uncanny ability to notice bizarre little details about people. it could be one's manner of walking, one's manner of speech, the accents, a scar, line of vision, choice of apparel, et cetera. from these details, my mind processes it with cultural facts and information gleaned from life. it mixes it around and comes up with a conclusion as to why that particular detail exists of this person.i know this makes me sound really intellectual and all, but i assure you that i'm not that clever. and anways, most of the conclusions that i come up with are along the redundant lines of 'He's wearing a white shirt because he's a waiter' or 'Prolly because he likes to wear white'. poin tis, people watching accompanied with the ability to notice bizarre details on people is prolly the main reason why i love visiting foreign countries so much. plus the fact that you can seal real hot men in the flesh.beats having to download porn just to see a Caucasian.--if there's one thing i've noticed on this trip to Thailand, it's that people go to the Land of a Thousand Smiles for various different reasons. in fact, you could divide up those reasons into two simple ones. for the typical Asian tourist, it's the cheap bargains, cheap food, cheap produce. not forgetting the really (cheap) fact that you can be an average middle class worker in your home country, but thanks to the currency rate and way of living in Thailand, one can really live like a king of sorts. the inexpensive airline tickets are another big lure as well. i can't help but think that perhaps this is why every other gay person in Singapore thinks of Bangkok as the perfect weekend destination to buy cheap goods and hook up with other hot Caucasians or Negroids. pricing, simply put, dominates the mind of the typical Asian tourist.for the average Caucasian tourist though, it's a totally different matter. in the eyes of the Asian tourist, the average Caucasian is prolly insane. it could be an American tourist taking pictures of the Bangkok rush hour, in the middle of the road. or the purchase of a Jade Elephant statuette or an ornamental vase. i daresay it's that immaterial substance that permeates every corner of Thailand. the typical Caucasian tourist asks questions. why the curves on the roof of a Buddhist temple are done that way. why are the temple domes are covered in gold leaves. why there are over a thousand step on the only entrance to the Buddhist temple in question. it's this all-encompassing thing called Culture.it's perhaps this stark reason of a lack of culture in our family holidays, that my parents decided on Bangkok with a detour to Chang Mai for this trip. after all, we've done Bangkok so many times that we're prolly bored stiff. the normal routine whenever i go to Bangkok with the family would be to get what i want from the various department stores and then head to the nearest coffee joint for a cuppa, some reading and people-watching. my father will accompany mother on her shopping trips like the perfect husband. my brother will simply follow along because he doesn't have any money of his own to spend.Chang Mai is quite the desolate place. not as crowded as Bangkok and the traffic is actually way better. and there are 'American' pubs everywhere on the main tourist districts offering ribs and steaks and Chang beer. which explains why the night market rates are prolly jacked up way higher than the Bangkok prices. it's a great place to relax and chill none the less, which was what i did most of the time when the parents weren't in my hair to bug me.our time in Chang Mai was spent doing cultural things. things like visiting the various handicraft and produce factories with our tour guide, Noi. Noi was really informative and knowledgeable about Chang Mai itself. after all, you wouldn't expect any less from a person armed with a Masters in Political Science from the University of Siam. previously in the import/export trade, he became a tour guide after 9/11 when his businesses folded one after another. and thus, he told us the history of Chang Mai, the various kings, the princesses, the ones who brought back the silk trade, et cetera. i had a better understanding of why the Thais are the kind and hospitable people that they are after listening to his stories.the second day of Chang Mai was rather exciting to say the least. we went all wildlife and nature and took an elephant ride. Noi drove us all the way to an outpost in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. there was a big sign that announced something in Thai and broken English. you could basically understand two things from the sign:1) there were elephants in that outpost2) this was an outpost of some sortCaucasian tourists were everywhere. most were plus-sized, in their 50s and had really bad peeling tans. the screech of cicadas pierced what would otherwise have been a nice quiet forest of sorts. if you listened closely, you could pick up strains of French, Russian and German words occasionally punctuating the air. Noi who wasn't one to waste time due to our tight schedule of visiting many other cultural-inclined places quickly ushered us onto two elephants, the parents on one and my brother and me on another. i have to admit that the only elephants i've seen are on Discovery Channel, Nat Geo and the Singapore Zoological Gardens. and these are all encounters behind a television screen or at least some fencing. therefore, to see one upclose and feel the skin and all of an elephant is really quite an experience.riding an elephant is not like riding a horse or a 100% speed mount (to put it in World of Warcraft terms) where you hop on and get to the business district within five minutes. there's a big hand-made seat with leather cushions for two tied on top of the elephant. an elephant trainer sits in front of you armed with a stick and a mobile phone, presumably to send text messages when he's bored ('I'll c u @ outpost 4 lunch in 1 hr, am ridin now'). it's a slow process that only tourists with all the time in the world to spare can afford to do. for this elephant ride, our destination was to the village of what i think was the Lisu tribe in Chang Mai. i felt like a joystick, suffice to say. we constantly swung to the left, to the right and then one sweeping round. this constant pattern of swing left and right and one round was really making me feel queasy. what wasn't helping was that at that point of time, i was going through a bout of indigestion, having consumed a large amount of Chang Mai sticky rice the previous day. i thought of lighting up a cigarette. but i also thought of smoke-aggravated charging War Elephants in a computer-based strategy game (Age of Empires) i once played. i decided to live with the nausea and a handy stash of Maxalon pills that my mother brought along.we spent close to an hour on the elephants, riding from the outpost all the way to the Lisu village. it's really like National Geographic, crossing rivers, seeing kids play in them, forests and plenty of flies and mosquitoes. my father and i were pretty nonchalant about all things buzzing, having survived the army and all that survival training stuff. my brother and mother though, were constantly slapping them and losing their karma points. our missing luggage hadn't arrived at that point of time and therefore there wasn't any repellent to go around. there was plenty else to see otherwise. the villagers dotting the surroundings. i couldn't help noticing that anatomy of elephant as well.as you know elephants are BIG creatures. and BIG creatures translate into BIG anatomy. there was another elephant in front of ours. and it had an anus the size of well.... i can't find anything to describe it. but to put it metaphorically and humorously, if you wondered why the Vitruvian Man has his arms stretched out... well it has something to do with the length and width of the elephant's anus. amidst all that gray skin, there was a rude pinkish hole that constantly dripped some really viscous fluid of sorts. one would automatically assume that's the anus of course without expecting anything else other than faecal matter to pop out of it.but Mother Nature sent her act of confirmation with a really loud plop of sorts. it was that kind of plop that sounded like a human dropping from a building, thanks to CSI. lo and behold, the elephant started shitting mid-trip to the Lisu village. the rude, angry-looking anus in