isaiah's
overly romanticised version of life

images by onionhead, RebzxJonasxMoseley

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Grey Grey Sky

Today at office, I had this feeling that time was going so slowly...

Or maybe it's just the dark skies which give me a feeling of lateness plus my watch which insisted on showing me a time that's earlier than 1730.

Hmm anyway...

Supposed to go gym with some colleagues today, but due to unforseen circumstances (read: WORK) I couldn't leave office with them. Thought I could join them later (when they're, like, at their last 15 minutes there), but in my haste I left my PT shoes in the office.

Imagine a bloke in vest, hotpants (Hoo~!) AND leather shoes.

Wow.

Of course, in the end I decided that going home straight away would be a much better choice. They said they're going to go gym every week anyway.

Air Force open house preview this Friday...

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Happy Birthday Bernard

Yesterday, after making that long post about CDs, I went for a quick swim and then for cell group with Jiansheng.

Hmm it's time I take a step of faith instead of just stop going for church and cell group. And Jiansheng's cell... well I have a feeling I can settle down there once and for all. Hopefully.

After that I went for Bernard's birthday dinner at Fish & Co, Dhoby Ghaut!

It's a standalone building with glass walls and roofs... some more with sports channel inside. AND there was a match between Liverpool and West Ham yesterday.

More about that later.

It was my first time (OK that's so very typical of me) in Fish & Co... so I didn't really know what to choose. YY was telling me about this "Seafood Platter For 2" which will easily leave 2 persons very full.

Now that really made me excited. Chor Bin and I decided to share this meal then, and we're even talking about the prospect of challenging Peng (famous for being a big eater) to finish this platter alone.

Soon the platter arrived and I, erm, deflated.

Not that the serving is small; I actually didn't feel hungry anymore after finishing the meal (though I really have to apologize to CB for taking most of the squid), but on the other hand, I could easily have finished the whole thing alone.

Then came the match.

We stayed during the first half (they were trying to explain to me the meaning of "Offside", to no avail...), at the end of which LFC's Crouch scored a sudden goal which broke the tie. So sudden that we didn't even have the time to shout "Goal!".

We left afterward for City Hall to play LAN. It's been a long time since I played Counterstrike, but I'm glad to say that I haven't quite lost my touch.

On the not-so-bright side, I didn't have so much "touch" to lose in the first place haha.

I surprised myself in the first map which was AWP (the sniper map), and in another map where we all pick up weapons instead of buying them, it was only halfway through that I remembered to choose the shotgun. Easy to makan people using that.

During the match I changed my nickname to "CPL_Wang" (yeah yeah dream on, Private!), and after that those guys started changing their nicks too, to various ranks ranging from REC (Recruit) to LG (Lieutenant General). I even became a RAdm once.

At about 2300 hrs CB and I went off, and the others stayed there to play, since they're supposed to go for duty at the Army Half Marathon at about 4 a.m. anyway.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

MORE music

Much more, in fact.

Recently I've been to Cash Converters to look for old Japanese song CDs to, well, learn Jap as I listen to those songs. Haha.

I actually got quite a few good ones there, like a compilation album of hit songs, and also an album by Speed.

This week I went on a hunt with Bernard again... 2 brains and 2 pairs of hands really upped the returns big time, man! This time, between us, we got Chage & Aska (and yes, "Say Yes" is inside), another Speed album, V6, Eriko Imai, Ami Suzuki and some other compilation album of dorama theme songs (with the song I was looking for all the time: "Believe" from "Overtime"). And others too. In other words, overhaul!

Now for some 1st handed CDs... I got a copy of Ken Hirai's 10th anniversary compilation entitled "Utabaka". Haha.

Baka. Baka baka baka.

And also, a few albums by Olivia Ong, this Singaporean girl singer whose songs are mainly marketed in Japan.

Japan?

Well this makes sense if you know that she was once from "Mirai", the Singaporean girl group from n years back which sang mainly Jap songs, and then got disbanded, according to OliviaOng.com, due to "some circumstances". She later worked as a model before returning to a singing career.

The first of her albums that I bought was "A Girl Meets Bossanova". Bossa Nova is a type of Brazillian jazz and the words mean "New Wave" in... Portugese? Actually, one of the reasons I bought this CD was because there are 2 songs inside which I know about.

First was "Fly me to the Moon", a song which people who watch Neo Genesis Evangelion might know about (it's in the soundtrack, sung by a diffrernt person of course). I first heard the Evangelion version during some Farewell event in my JC days and I liked the song immediately after hearing it.

Another song was "The Girl from Ipanema". Ipanema is some place in Brazil. Well I happen to be playing this song on my electone and I find it nice.

So I decided to see what her rendition of these songs will be like.

Well her rendition of "Fly me to the Moon", sort of, erm, flew me to the Moon. And not the teeny weeny, "pruney" (if there's such a word) white coloured moon you see everyday from your HDB block, but that big yellow moon lighting up the starry (to the power of 10) sky of Pulau Tekong Firing Range (minus the noise of the gunshots).

In case you still don't know what I'm trying to say, I was mesmerized. By both the accompaniment and her voice. Yeah.

The arrangement of "The Girl from Ipanema" in the album was nice too, and the part when she was humming to the first verse.

Hmm, hmm hmm hmm hmm, hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm-

OK I shall stop trying to portray it textually.

Other songs in that album include "My Favourite Things" from "The Sound of Music".

I bought 2 other album of hers, namely "Precious Stones" (her first non-Bossanova album in which she wrote the lyrics of all the songs... in English of course.) and the recently released "A Girl Meets Bossanova 2".

Tokoro de...

I missed the broadcast for Jay Chou's new song entitled "Qian Li Zhi Wai" (Thousand Miles Apart) which, I heard, was a collaboration between Jay and veteran singer Fei Yu Qing.

"Shu shang xiao niao ti...."

And I also heard that the song turned out to be quite nice.

Now 8 Sep really seems like "a thousand miles" from here.

Monday, August 21, 2006

For example...

During some point in this year, I got a bit tired of swimming for no apparent reason.

Not so anymore.

Thus I've been swimming quite regularly these days... I'm going to go for a swim later again haha.

Can lah, I'm on leave today (heh heh...). My colleagues at Depot must still be having lunch right now. I've spent my morning watching my Ini D 4th stage DVD and taking naps...

OK back to topic. During one of my swimming trips I came across this sign in the changing room... well the picture will say it all.

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A good example of a negative example.

Well I don't know if someone coincidentally left the key there, or they really mean for it to be some demo of really careless behaviour, but don't you find my caption funny nonetheless?

*faint*

Sunday, August 13, 2006

This summer, an eventful week needs no translation

Haha I met Wenrong at Tampines Mall while I was on my way to catch Toyko Drift!

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NYJC Vs SAF

Looks like NYJC's really that cheena. It actually made Chinese Language Wenrong's best subject!

But I think his recent dose of Mandopop helped a little. He hardly listened to Mandopop in my AHS HO days.

Tokyo Dorihuto was quite action-packed, I think. One thing that made me uncomfortable was that they kept using the word "drifting" when they're actually just talking about car racing. Otherwise, hmm deep down I actually have no problem with the fact that the key Japanese roles are all played by non-Japs.

At least there's this cute Jap girl in the cast! Although she doesn't talk much (I've read that she's currently learning English, so OK...), well, I'm cool with it.

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Keiko Kitagawa, the Jap girl I was talking about. This picture is closest to my impression of her in the movie.

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Dorihuto Shite Iru Ehu Di San Esu!

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Check out the skid marks, man... but I'm not comfortable with their modifying the Evo (a world-famous 4-wheel drive) into a rear-wheel drive just to make it easier to drift. Thank goodness they didn't do it to my favourite WRX Impreza.

Besides the abovementioned stuff, this week was quite eventful. 10/04 guys outing... public holiday... learning day... you name it, we've got it.

Not that the class outing was that successful, though...

Haha no lah, it's just that most of us are now NSFs and not all our NSFs are hoh-miah clerks like me, Kido, JY and Joel (who's actually not so hoh-miah as he's a stay-in unit clerk), who turned up earliest for the outing. Duh.

Our garang commandos had trouble booking out early (welcome to SAF), so they managed to arrive about one hour later.

And as usual, typical of NSF guys meeting up, we talked about army life and hardly anything else. Commando training was really siong, but like what Jeremy (a signaller) said, they're the ones who command a lot more respect than other soldiers.

Yeah, just look at the red-beret 1st Commando Battalion marching at the National Day Parade. Seh!

Kido was damn funny... he left straight after meeting our commando friends.

I don't think I have to say more about National Day, when I was happilly ripping CDs at home while trying to catch Jiansheng among all the Camo-faced Load-Bearing-Vest boys in the NDP.

For our Branch Learning Day this month, we learnt wbout the basics of sushi making from our Branch head, who is actually an enthusiast for culinary stuff. She actually prepared the vinegared rice by herself.

Even though it looks easy, like just putting the rice on the seaweed thingy and wrapping it up, sushi-making actually requires very good estimation of the proportions of the rice and the stuff you put in. Some of us (like Jireh) managed to produce quite professional sushi in various shapes and sizes.

Well, my first few attempts were not really that worthy of mention, but in the end, I guess my fishu-saapuraizu (Fish Surprise!), which consisted of Unagi (eel) and fishcake (our kind of fishcake, not the Jap one with the pink coil on it), worked out in the end.

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Getting it all stacked up

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A closer view before I roll it up

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Fishu-Saapuraizu!

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But I had to admit, the filling is a bit off-centre...

We not only made Maki-zushi... some of us attempted Nigiri-zushi (the kind where you put a slice of something on a rice ball). Although most of the rice balls they made are a tad too big, people like Max actually came up with quite interesting ideas like...

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Ubi-zushi. Too bad you can't eat this.

My attempt at the Gunkan-maki-zushi (Gunkan is the Jap word for "battleship") which consists of the same rice ball + the same topping + seaweed wrapped around the whole thing could only be summarized as: Too much rice, too little space for the topping. And there's the same old fishcake!

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Fish Cake Gunkan

By the way, I was the one who suggested using this kind of fishcake. Haha.

We had green tea to drink as well (to create that Jap atmosphere) and we're given our own foam cups with our names written on it (a good way to avoid mixing up).

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My Cup!

Friday, August 11, 2006

Music to my ears

Bought quite a lot of albums recently... SHE's "Forever", David Tao's "Too Beautiful" and Yu Heng's "Real".

In "Forever", the song that gets most attention should be the one composed by Jay Chou, called "Chu Dian" (Jolt). It tells of a girl expecting the beginning of a romantic relationship, and I think it brings out this emotion better than their classic, "Lian Ren Wei Man" (Not lovers yet), which tells a similar story.

"Goodbye My Love" is quite a sad song. Sadder than "Zi Teng Hua", another of their new song which uses the tune from Westlife's "Soledad". What I like most in "ZTH"'s lyrics is the part that says something like "The most torturing part is not the parting. It's the memories which renders you unable to move on, thinking that you can still go back to the past".

In "Too Beautiful", there's this song "Wang Bu Liao" (Can't get you out of my mind) which takes part of the lyrics from an oldie, "Bu Liao Qing" (Endless love). It's quite a cute adaptation, especially the rap near the end of the song which sort of chides the hero of the story for being unable to get over the girl who dumped him.

"Too Beautiful", the song for which the album was named, tells of a woman's enduring love for a guy who hurt her more than once.

Another song that I like is "Zhu Ni Xing Fu" (literally means "wish you happiness" the English title is put as "I don't wanna know"). If you're dumped by a girl who went after another guy, this is your song!

I got to hear most of the songs in "Real" in some segment on YES 933 Fm, and there're quite nice songs in it like "Nu Sheng Zhi Jue" (a girl's intuition) and "Yi Kou Qi Ai Ni" (Love at first breath).

Waiting for Jay Chou's next.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Happy birthday

One thing I'll call Singapore -- a miracle.

41 years of independence... not that "independence" was such a great thing on this day on 1965. It was said that Singapore was "Out!".

On its own. Abandoned. A "moment of anguish". Not really something worthy of a celebration. Most people were actually worried about the future of Singaporeans at that time.

It's the passion of our nation builders that changed things. It took passion to improve conditions like housing and health of the people. Many say that Singaporeans were too co-operative. But if not for co-operation of the people, our nation could not have made it this far.

Some say we're a red dot on the map, but then again, our small size means that it's not really difficult to centralise things and set standards. Which was a good thing, of course.

Freedom from natural disasters was a plus point, of course. But we're lacking of natural resources as well, which is sort of like a price we had to pay for safety.

It's really our people that made the difference.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Fried

Well... a few more days of work, work, work.

And the frustration that I can't get my things done quickly.

PLUS the frequency of new tasks coming up.

Guess this is like school life in some sense... where every of your subject teacher thinks that his subject is the only one you're taking.

But unlike studies, the feeling of being heavily loaded will be instantly gone come knock-off time. And to get my mind really off work, 1 day of leave is actually enough for me.

...

Had dinner with Keon again at KFC... something happened that he said he would blog about... but I guess he can't care less about blogging these days haha... not telling about it is only to my benefit.

...

OK lah... I got normal fries for him instead of cheese fries lah OK? But seriously, the fries at KFC really needed the cheese sauce. Otherwise it's tasteless.

Anyway, he just got some license for driving some armoured vehicle and I had the "honour" of being the first one to have a look at it since he booked out.

Bought S.H.E.'s latest Greatest Hits Compilation, "Forever". Hmm... to some it's not worth getting a CD with only a few new songs, but in this case I don't have most of their CDs since "Together" (their previous Greatest Hits album), so it's worth the money for me lah.

Just that it would be better if I can choose whether I want the DVD or not... I don't really mind not having the MVs if I can pay less for just buying the songs CD.

Recently Jianyuan went into cross-stitching, and for starters, his first attempt was actually quite a major task... a very detailed image of Sagitarius.

Hmm sounds quite fun... so I decided to give it a try too. some would say that designing my own design for a starter is really too much, but to me it's a way I start with any easy picture which I'm interested in. Besides, I'm already done with the design.

Will post the picture of my first cross-stitch piece here after it's done.

Saw an article on the New paper about single adoption (people who don't want to marry but want "children" choose to adpot them). This practice raised some issues.

Well, for me, I'm instantly turned off by people who say they don't believe in marriage.

Also, such practices can be described as "wanting the pleasures marriage can bring without wanting the commitment involved". In this sense, one might go so far as to say that single adoption is like cohabitation and premarital sex.

OK maybe not that serious lah, but why should one back away from marriage?

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Vindicated

Yesterday, something happened that made me realised how good it feels to be... vindicated.

Seriously... I can tell that most of my colleagues won't trust most of my claims... because even I can't be sure of things as well.

But seriously... I have this feeling that if a certain "someone" made the very same claims I would have made in my place, the claims would have been well recieved.

Forgive me for being unfair to you guys when I feel that this is unfair to me, but this is how I feel.