The Curse of Kayaking

I'd like to write about this one time I went for a kayaking course. In fact, it was the only time, so that narrows it down quite a bit.

Kayaking, for a tall person, is an exhilirating ordeal. On one hand, you're bobbing up and down on the waves, feeling the wind on your sunburnt face, with the closest sign of civilization being the barge that's coming awfully close to you- OH SHIT, while on the other hand, what you wouldn't give if you could just STAND UP for a second and stretch those cramped legs.

Your legs, you see, have to be bent outward so they look form a erogenous diamond in between them. Bracing your knees against the side of your kayak helps you make sure that you're absolutely balanced. Trying the alternative to this, if it can be called that, usually results in some impressive kayak drifting, which would be a lot more satisfying if any of it were intentional.

So you're condemned to having your feet stuck in the same position for hours on end, and if you're sasquatch-like from the ankles down like me, then you'll have no choice but to uncomfortably squirm to change your foot positioning in the claustrophobic space available. It comes as a particularly painful blow when you raft up with the rest of the trainees, which involves paddling next to each other and grabbing the sides of each others' boats to form a giant floating waffle so your instructors can tell you precisely what you were doing wrong earlier, and the short guy next to you just crossed his legs in his kayak. At that point I couldn't help but notice that he didn't have his paddle properly secured, and the instructor wasn't looking.

Well, no. I never did grab and toss that guy's paddle (wiggles eyebrows), but since then I've never taken standing up for granted, or forgotten my horror upon learning that the kayaks we used in the course were the SECOND-smallest variety.

Assigned Acts

I'm part of a Drama Club in school, and we do plays, in between our administration-assigned... assignments that we get every national occasion. These usually involve coming up with plays that reveal the wondrous origins and nature of celebrations whose wondrous origins and nature have been revealed to us since we were six years old and were yet to discover the wonders of nature that we would at the age of 12 or so.

We're not generally worried about whether or not these plays will be received well, since everything's dead set on going a specific route since the points of time at which they're assigned to us. The contents, and very often the plot, are pretty much expected to be of a certain kind, and the reaction of the audience, if you really want to call it one at all, is generally the same as last year's: Excitement nearly rivaling that of the performers', unless someone's humiliated onstage, in which case it suddenly becomes the best damn play since the other one where Sam got called a girl, or something along those lines.

To sum it all up, the audience's boredom, or at least, their disinterest in what's supposed to be the subject matter of these plays, is always anticipated and quite distressingly, usually ignored. This is where things get ridiculous. The same plays are churned out year after year in schools everywhere, or at least everywhere in this country, and the whole thing ends up looking like tossing stale doggy biscuits at a puppy that always smack it in the head because it's busy ravenously devouring your sofa instead.

So what is it with assigned, occasion-based school plays that make them as appealing as soggy crackers?

Well, to start with, as mentioned before, it's the repetition. The same objectives, the same delivery, the same morals for each play for a a particular occasion. The audience can't ever feel suspense or curiosity when they're already smelling their palms and shaking their heads, muttering "Here we go. Educational play again..." They already know what the play's about and they already hate it before you begin.

Then there's the revolting cheese that accompanies every one of these plays, that sickening skin-invading chill that's bundled with them. The culprit's really the objectives and morals of these plays, which are politically correct and so government sponsored to the point where, whether rationally or not, people can't help but dismiss it. I don't know why opinions promoted by authority are always so unappetizing, but they just are, so performers always end up as "the admin's bitch". Sad and depressingly true.

So how do we save plays for national events, and do we want to? Well, we should. The occasions themselves haven't gotten stale, it's just that the same discussions about them are held every time. So if anything's going to save these skits besides Saxton Hale, it's variety in the way the subject matter is presented and discussed. Which means that we’ve got to move away from reading facts off checklists and going through all the “good” and “bad” perspectives and start presenting some of our own opinions: offbeat, tangent ideas that can be subjected to the ridicule of hundreds.
Why not? They’re better than reciting the same maxims over and over, and they make it clear to the audience that for once, perspectives are no longer restrained to the recommended few. This opens up the possibility of audience involvement, since once audience members realize that opinions just as “improper” as theirs are legitimate, there’s little besides the chronic fear of public speaking and prospect of humiliation that might hold them back, but that’s not really the point. The point is that breaking conventional play objectives will make these plays more intelligent, if not at least more entertaining to the audience.

But there’s an atrocious obstacle in the way. There’s always the possibility that someone in a group of over a thousand, or thousands in other schools (because let’s not forget that we’re a high school/junior college/anonymous schizophrenic group the size of a playgroup), is going to say something that pisses someone off, whether such responses may be rational or not.

But what’s important to note is that such problems are caused by individual ignorance and aren’t the fault of the performers or the administration. For some reason, however, schools administrations are still willing to take measures to prevent this by cutting out content that might incite such problems. That may appear to solve the problem but what it really is is paranoia, sacrificing what might be interesting and engaging content for the sake of eliminating the possibility of any situations later on that could be easily clarified. The option of distancing the views of the institution with those of an individual’s has always been there and it ought to be used.

In addition to the random heckler though, there’s also the risk of the play’s actual content being considered “objectionable” by certain members of the audience, or better yet, by the parents of certain members of the audience. So quite understandably, the administrations of many schools take the safe route, slicing out content that may be “potentially offensive”, or just taking the much shorter route and put bullets through the heads of any plays with such content. But while that’s an understandable reaction meant to conserve institutional image, the problem is that a clear line separating the “potentially offensive” from the acceptable doesn’t exist. No firm boundaries are drawn in the censorship process, and what might be removed from a play may be dependant on the personal opinions and unease of those responsible. This means that script writers are subject to inconsistent, and very often rather paranoid, scrutiny and restrictions.

We’ve just been assigned an orientation play that’s to be held in… well, January next year, and I don’t want to see another play that makes me chomp on my arm again. The title we’ve been given is “Life in NUS High”, and it’s evident that they want this to be a positive, cheery portrayal of a fun and educational lifestyle. Well, bugger that. Any quirks, problems or even redeeming qualities that you find in your current life in NUSHs, go ahead and slap them on the tagboard, because seeing that discussed in a play would be cool.

A bunch of friends I know (As opposed to…? Never mind that.) apparently had the recent misfortune of watching numerically appealing movie 2012. According to them, it’s every disaster movie rolled into one wholesome Katamari, which is then repeatedly rolled into your face until you get a strong sense of rather accurate déjà vu.

Whilst they didn’t actually mention Katamari, they did give it a generally negative review, but I’ve no way of telling whether they’re right or were simply on helium at the time of watching and found counting their fingers more entertaining. Helium aside, there’s always the factor of personal preference. What my bunch of gas-loving mates found to be a long environmentalist boogeyman may be a thought provoking an- Alright, just for the sake of the argument, let’s assume we’re not talking about 2012. But the point is, I may very well worship what they consider an undesirable influence on young adults.

Which makes movie reviews, which is based around the whole business of telling people what films to watch and why, all the more stranger. Spoiling what you’d consider a terrible movie isn’t frowned upon, and may in fact be considered a public service. But spoiling a good film is bound to get you stoned to death, unless it happens to be a classic, in which case you’ll probably just be hideously embarrassed. But it’s very uncomfortable making that judgment based on your subjective opinion only, which is all you have to go by, really. So movie critics, or critics of any sort of medium with a plot, have to describe bits of the stories they review to justify why they like it or think of it as oddly good fuel, all while being careful not to spoil too much of anything.

But ultimately, though a critic can fan flames whichever way he wants as much as he likes, it’s really still up to the reader (Or watcher. Reviews in multiple forms of media are making this confusing and very meta.) to decide whether he wants to watch, read or play whatever’s being reviewed. So what exactly should reviewers and critics do?

They need to supply enough information about the stories they review to let potential audiences decide whether the subject matter might appeal to them, talking about themes, atmosphere and acting while avoiding too much exposition, and that’s when criticism may very well border on being the subject of criticism itself.

The Aiiee of the Storm

People are a fussy lot. Give them glorious servings of almost commercially cheery sunshine and they call it sweltering. Respond by sprinkling a little bit of rejuvenating rainfall and they call it beastly, even going so far as to refer to that meteorological wreck of a place, London.

So it really shouldn't have been much of a surprise that after months of squeaking about how the rainfall quota was far from fulfilled, that they would just let rip with rain and cram a month's rainfall into a period of twenty four hours, like an inexplicably pseudo-American Australian Asian student cramming what should have been six years worth of studying into a weekend. And like any other attempt of the like, both ended up with uncontrollable bouts of sobbing, with the interesting point that both were occurring nation-wide.

In fact, both are uncomfortably relatable topics to me because I'm currently in the midst of both, standing in a bus stop whose architects never heard of combinations of rain and WIND, sobbing about my lack of Chinese vocabulary while wishing that the heavens weren't doing the same.

I've just gotten on a number 198 bus, having made a heroic dash through the gauntlet of rainfall from the bus stop to the entrance of the bus. This bit of getting on and off buses in the rain is another sneaky bit of work by the architects who seem to be determined in getting you wet (Ho Yay). If you've somehow managed to evade the cleansing spray of pristine rain water and the waves of tried and tested road water that's filthy enough to negate any appeal the rain water might have offered, then congratulations, assassin from feudal Japan, but let's see you get through THIS.

But nitpicking aside, the storm that I'm seeing outside of the bus and inside of the world right now, yes, I think it's proven itself enough to be called a storm because really, wow, it's enough to be described as a doozy of a storm, has got to be one of the most intimidating ones I've been in. It's like an eccentric fireworks maker collaborating with a SWAT team. I actually got thrown off by a flash of lightning, actually had to shut my eyes because of the brightness. Also, adding to the storm's organization analogy there, both the fireworks maker and SWAT team have consulted a psychologist for knowing the best time to chuck in some thunder after the victim recovers from the lightning flash prior to that and thinks it's safe to start thinking again.

It's really an impressive, frightening maestro of a storm and the sort that makes you wonder if maybe, just maybe, those crazy anti-global warming environmentalists might be right after all, and if they're going to spit out the proverbial phrase that stings more than any hearty bout of heavenly hell-raising: WE TOLD YOU SO.

A Rich Atmosphere

The evening might have been described as clear, but "blank" was really a much better word. The sky wasn't really unobstructed. It was more as if the powers that be hadn't quite decided on the aerial agenda for the day. This, some realized, was the astronomical version of being put on hold, and the dreadful prospect of the astronomical version of holding music was briefly considered before being dropped like a fluorescent light that a kid who thought would be really fun to swing around in the dark had dropped, the only difference between the analogy and the analogy's non analogy being that the concept of celestial holding music does nothing for you in the dark but make you have the tendency to mumble.

The air, on the other hand, blurred the boundaries between breathing and suffocating; being so thick that looking up and performing the breaststroke would get you near anywhere, the exception, of course, being places with fresh air, since the lack of anything to push against once you got to pristine places generally meant that you really wouldn't have to DIG your own grave when you went. You just went without much hassle. As such, the inhabitants of areas with air that doesn't get in the way of reading generally use aircraft as a means of aerial transportation, but also as a means of achieving the secondary goal of eventually no longer having to use them.

Days where these conditions were evident were becoming so common that eventually, people might just assume it had always been this way and stop making a big fuss out of it. Which was why people were making as much of a fuss as they could now, while others wondered if they had really ever breathed what could be truly called “air”.

What we have here is...

The following is an entry written at seven in a morning that I would describe for authenticity's sake as being "bleeding". At the airport, where even a delicious Big Breakfast from Mac's did nothing to stem my grouchiness at the time.

I've just realized, and by just, I mean at around six thirty in the morning in Terminal 3 of the airport, that I get all these great writing ideas at ungodly hours of the night/morning, but at those times my body really isn't capable of understanding "these artistic types" and just can't be bothered putting them into tangible form. So really, my brain's like a writer with a terribly lazy publisher that only operates whenever the brain doesn't, and when it does finally ask my brain for its writing ideas they're already lost underneath stacks of formulas for standard distribution curves and Kotaku news feeds.

So there you go. The startling story of a ruined creative industry in my head.

But maybe sometime in the holidays, like everything else I've wanted to try, I'll get up at at 5 at the morning, abuse my authority as major bodily stockholder and throw my body into my brain's working room and, in a strange physiological inversion, not let it out of there until it comes out with something. Anyone in favor of doing this as a conglomerate, go ahead and poke me, and don't forget to mention why you're doing it.

A Tentatively Apocalyptic Morning

A wedge of sandy orange light pried my eyes open, not so much as apologizing for the unsavory experience before it pointed out that the celestial bodies were generally in an apocalyptic sort of mood at the moment. They'd apparently had enough of the little blue git, infested with all manner of parasites that they'd told him time and time again to get rid of. He'd apparently grown attached to the swarming abominations and disturbingly enough, didn't seem to mind it when they called him "Mother Earth". This had greatly upset Mars and Venus who were generally very adamant about the clear definition of genders, not that that had anything to do with them since they were planets, but minor details like those certainly weren't going to stop them being filled with righteous fury.

I had discovered this intragalatic dispute when I stepped out of my hostel room and took a quick glance at the sky. The sky was a bright orange, and in between the sun and us was a thick veil of dust that might have suggested that it was probably time for humanity to start going back to their nomadic roots and start living in giant sandcrawlers while scavenging off the ruins of prior civilization for a living. The sky was now an expansive desert of nothingness, the dust in the air passing off for sand and making the sun seem a lot more sweltering than it would have alone.

The desert was complete with bedrock, bedrock that tended to grumble a lot and spit lightning into its giant planet of a spitoon and wasn't quite content with being where it currently was. It spread, its blackness slowly contaminating the nearby orangeness and very soon, you had to look for the orange in the sky before you saw it, which meant that if you unaware of the orangeness to begin with then you would proably lost out on a lot of it.

But it had made a crucial publicity error. It spread so much, became so prevalent that it no longer drew any attention. It became the backdrop for a sky that was filled with nothing but itself, and everyone eventually ignored it. It didn't take this too well. It left, taking the furnace-like shades of orange and the fog of dust with it, leaving behind a vibrantly blue and slightly confused sky by three o'clock in the afternoon.

The weather, if anything, is erratically bipolar.

No U

It's one of those little things that's always bothered me that would have made for an excellent and intellectually stimulating conversation practically made for accompaniment by a glass of red wine if it weren't for the fact that nearly everyone I know is under the legal drinking age. So that's made me grab this topic, shove it in a bag and throw it in a trunk, lock that trunk then sit on it indirectly with fifteen art history manuscripts as the middlemen, but now, despite still being under the legal drinking age, I'd like to talk about the use of hypocrisy as a defence.

Suppose someone accused someone else of performing something absolutely dastardly, something shamelessly unethical or so far on the opposite end of the spectrum that it deserves a smack on the head, just as a good follow up of matyrdom, like every saint should. The accused then breaks into a smirk, grin, or befittingly of his saint status, an enlightened and gentle smile and says,

"Well, aren't you one to talk?"

His will is done, and the aspiring prosecutor joins Rowan Atkinson on the path from a life of wonder and splendor to that of a linguistically retarded man with an unsettling attraction to teddy bears. He now looks like a moron and the formerly accused is now free to continue his work, but now with double the satisfaction and a huge smirk on his face.

But even aside from the fact that his accuser may have been guilty of hypocrisy, it still doesn't change the fact that the accused hasn't in fact defended himself from anything. He hasn't in anyway refuted the incoming accusation in anyway and he might as well just have pointed how ugly his adversary's tie was, and how ties are a bad idea in general.

And this might all seem well enough and self-explanatory in an over-the- top, one dimensionally portrayed incident like this, but in real life, which tends to have a lot more dimensions and thus a lot more space for the important stuff to get lost in, pointing out that an adversary is guilty of hypocrisy and then shimmying away from the dispute without having to actually defend yourself, and you can do all of that under cheery applause.

I realize that all of this really has a place in Latin terminology so sophisticated it has to be italics: Ad hominem tu quoque. But what I'd like to call attention to is the mind-blowing ease in which it can be performed and the frequency with which it happens.

Then again, I've probably done that several times myself, but I'm not sure that's the point.

Edit: I realized that the fancy Latin phrase that I said had to be in italics was in fact NOT in italics. So yeah. I just went back and edited it in hopes that no one would notice. Then I explicitly wrote an update note at the end.

Write...

Just yesterday I started writing that dreaded extended essay and I did a little bit of a double take, followed by an intense five minute yawning session. The stuff I wrote was some of the most tasteless bran I'd ever written. If any piece of writing had to come with a glass of water, this would be it.

I can't remember the last time I wrote anything that was particularly insightful, but then again, maybe no one does either. (Well, that was depressing. Never doing that again.)

Should probably dust off the old notepad that doesn't actually physically exist but shh it's an expression. Start writing out whatever first comes to mind and see what dark crannies that leads to.

Tiiiiooooommmaaaannnn

Posts I wrote during the Tioman trip, in an air conditioned resort room next to the comfortable open air balcony that doesn't try to freeze the living shit out of anything in it, posts that are probably utterly irelevant by this point but that I'm still going to put up anyway.

Day 1

Today's the first day of the bet.

In the elevator, felt a little bit woozy. I'm sure that this is in no way indicative of my future status today.

I've noticed that while Cancy has coffee in her bag, she hasn't drunk it, whereas I've already begun not drinking coffee. Clearly this is why she thought she was going to win. I figure that if I can last till the hyperactivity kicks in for her, it'll be a home stretch all the way.

The sounds of garbled conversations and Bob imparting Malaysian wisdom to all around him and the humming of the bus are... Soothing.

Yellow Submarine is infinitely better as a song you're on a moving bus staring at the sea.

Apparently Cancy drank the cup of coffee and then fell alseep. But coffee takes a while to kick in. It also wasn't a cup of coffee by my prescription so I'm going to try and badger her into drinking another later on.

Watching clouds moving past other clouds in the sunlight. I'm not sure anything beats that.

The ferry is tiny, and it tries to make the trip shorter by freezing its passengers till they get there. But then the boat starts rocking a bit, and that makes up for everything.

I'm writing this as I lie in a comfortable, uncomfortably enough, double bed, but essentially, I'm skeptical that this is in fact primarily an ecology field trip. The food's good, the room's are beyond anything we thought we'd get, and all our rooms are all on stilts and suspended above a scenic pond. I sat there and watched it for a good ten minutes and birds swept down and glanced the water just for dramatic effect before smugly flying away. So the accomodation's wonderful, if not touristy down to the last overpriced detail.

About the fairly minor ecology aspect of this trip, we constructed our Ber-something funnels, made to chase insects out of leaf litter we collected into bottles of soapy water that are to insects what vats of acid are to government agents, with the exception that they actually succeed in killing what they set out to kill.

A while after that we treked over to a forest and planted our eggs while we raked up wads of leaves to the melodious sounds of "O nom nom nom" and "Guns don't kill people".

During dinner, with a complete absence of any leaf litter whatsoever, the kind resort staff supplied customers with a pot of piping coffee at the buffet spread. I decided at the time, for some reason, to point this out to Cancy who very politely enquired if I wanted some. I declined even more politely and started thinking about nothing but the merits of tea for the next few minutes.

I actually intend to start drinking leaf water as a substitute for the bean solution that I love. At least I'll get some sort of hot stimulant in the morning.

Day 2


Can trees go above the canopy? We spent hours measuring trees and we still have no idea. More of a question for the philosophers.

We trekked back to the same spots in the same forest to measure the height and diameter of trees this time. Ants apparently found this objectionable and expressed this in the most dental way possible.

Snorkelling afterward was best described as a tune to the sound of salt water entering nasal cavities, people gawking at the fish circumventing them, and people emulating fishy schoal behaviour but with a camera.

Tragically, the forest night walk was replaced with what sounded like a fairly uninteresting return to the intertidal regions and mangrove. We later found out from those bored or interested enough to go that they ventured down to the mouth of the mangrove's river and saw igneous rock and sand.

Igneous sand is black in color. I don't think I need to explain how this variation in colour is the most awesome thing that could be done with sand.

Day 3


Today was really more of a wrap up than anything else. We went back to collect our quail eggs and got readings indicating that the spots we picked were essentially quail refugee zones. We walked down a bit to one of the other team's sites and found out that that was bollocks, of course. Where one of the teams once had two eggs in their petri dish, they now had three significantly smaller ones.

Leaf litter was also sorted through. At least, I assume it was, since I was busy trying to guess what Vera meant by "the opposite of Malay", which according to her is Indian. A few moments later she was equally confused as us as to why this was so, so it's all good in the end. Taboo is excellent for exposing politically incorrect beliefs.

A while later we were told to embark on a photographic treasure hunt for some organism or the other. My group knew the trauma associated with spending twenty minutes on the first clue and mopping up the remaining eight in fifteen minutes, which I’m sure we all still insist is the fault of the lycan growing on the tree right next to the bar in which we were given the clue which was way too discrete about its lycanthropy for its own damn good. In any case, after we ran to and from the bar where the teachers lazily supervised us in between sips of their martinis, we had the rest of the day to ourselves.

Ideally, the immediate to do would be to gather up a bunch of mates and proceed to scour every reachable inch of the island for amazing sights that we weren’t shown just to demonstrate the monotony of our education system. The problem then was that either a good majority of us had already thought of that an hour before the rest of us did and had already fallen down the crevices of some obscure rock formation elsewhere or had conspired to hide in their rooms and not answer the doors, because Cancy, Adhit and I couldn’t find Dom, Movin or Divya, and there was the general consensus amongst the people that could be found that the people they were looking for couldn’t be found either.

We couldn’t find anyone in the resort, so we figured that we’d try the beaches since we’d been talking about faffing about near the mouth of the nearby mangrove’s river.

All we found at the beaches and the mouth of the river were, respectively, the beaches and the mouth of the river.

So all in all, no people, but still a good find.

























Went back a while later to find out from Kylie, who we’d passed by earlier on, that Dom, Divya, Aaron and Movin had shimmied over to the mouth of the river AFTER we left. Movin’s inexplicable disappearance was explained by him creeping over to the nearby forest and swimming in a natural pool by the trail we took earlier on. Dom had declined time alone with Movin based on the prospect of parasites in the water. Movin, being naturally repugnant to all forms of parasites, swam about for a good hour before heading over to join the others in saltier water.