selamat hari raya aidilfitri

i feel so inclusive. yay.

what a way to end such a slack week. bowling on monday, physio on wednesday and pool on tuesday and thursday. i hope only that my life continues to be so slack.

sunday got ahm :S

going back to the ministry on monday for filming. hope it would be great fun!

what nostalgia

i feel of my 11 week break, as i sit here in front of the computer on a weekday. it feels great, that i am on morning off today because there isnt much to do in camp and i have physio at noon so my nice boss decided to let me not go back this morning. but of course if he wanted me to clear an off its fine by me also, i am in my last stretch already and i cant really be bothered much about camp and about accumulating a huge lump of offs. i just wont touch my leave just yet, so i can unleash them 14 days in november when it is time for me to mug hard for my french exam.

since returning to camp i havent been doing much commander-level work, to use a lame term i first heard spoken by my counterpart, an overenthusiastic, over responsible and underchilled ex regular who is biding his time to his november ord. i have been more or less not taking any initiative, have been doing only whats been required when required. have been too preoccupied with sending friends off, meeting up with people, and of late to some extent, my french. but i cant help it. i also cant help my resolve to not go outfield, to not book in early et cetera. i think i fit somewhere between mr negative and mr suckthumb, in that i try not to suck thumb when i dont have to, but i suckthumb so that i dont get into trouble, which for the past few weeks have been muchly possible, save one or two retarded occasions, like saturday when the boss decided to have a pow wow and wasted my precious weekend afternoon discussing irrelevant nonsense. deo volente, this lucky streak will continue for the next 3 months. yes, it is to be 3 months to my ord, exactly, in 2 days time. i feel my ord coming already.

i still think of the days leading up to my enlistment, the anguish i had felt, knowing that my life was going to be changed forever. on the outside i was stoic, and a part of me tried to be positive that the 2 years of my prime aint going to be completely squandered away. of course whatever positive feelings i had got quickly eroded away by the great torrents of stupidity that got rained on me from tekong to plc to nee soon to jurong to sembawang and then jurong again. i lost faith in the system, it being run with a cadre of disagreeable characters in a disagreeable way. i hate it.

i remember those happier times before enlistment. they werent perfect and there were time i worried and i was sad and i was foaming hard at the mouth. but those were, in general, as a whole, better times, that i have come to miss, that i have come to treasure. really, i have to agree with the lyrics of jankis favorite song, big yellow taxi, that 'dont it always seem to go, that you dont know what youve got till its gone'.

physio.

homework

i've fallen in love with french homework

i find it hard to believe, but it is true.

it is a true escape from work,

and it feels like im enriching myself.

true there are moments when i feel like an idiot

because i dont understand anything

but when that happens, in camp i look left and look right

outside i just look at the receipts of spent tax monies

and i again feel strength to continue.

if only i had felt this good,

this satisfied,

with homework in jc.

or secondary school.

eitherways,

maybe i wont be in this rut now.

thank god for mess activities like bowling

to relieve my angst and boredom that have been building up very quickly since i returned from my mc.

another ict tomorrow. tough life.

orh orh

i just took a 2 h nap at the expense of my french homework.

how typically me.

napping is an indulgence i have rarely indulged in since NS started, because excess sleep is a waste of time that was super precious when i used to stay in and i only had like 48h per week out of the shitty camps. not forgetting that napping on sunday is going to be real disastrous cos getting to sleep in camp on the first night back is usually quite tough for me.

now i enjoy napping because it doesnt matter to me that i sleep late and be tired, i really dont care about camp work anymore. the bosses generally are unappreciative and they dont even bother to mask it.

and so i wont mask my complete disdain.

pencils sharpened on both ends

yesterday i was typically bored and i wondered about the world around me. not the world at large, but my immediate, physical surroundings. which happens to be the office now, since i am with ops int and i am excused outfield so i try to spend time seasoning the plush office chairs instead of their counterparts in the mess. so in the office there is a whole row of metal cupboards, a third of which belonging to ops int, so i had to find out what was inside some of them.

i proceeded to open the keypress to draw out the keys. well, this is iti, so only 2 or 3 of the 50 keyhooks in the keypress are in use, because the cupboard keys, abloy keys and internal doorkeys were mostly collected on a single keyring. we call it the master bunch (0f) key(s), because with this bunch half the doors in 2 different blocks in and 20% of all camp cupboards can be opened. bearing in mind that this is iti, the keys are all not labled.

so i spend almost 1 hour trying out keys and opening cupboards. there were many cupboards and many keys. it was annoying, but i had to kill time. the spirit of adventure and discovery was strong in me, and i staunchly believed that i was going to find something good among the stacks of papers bearing testament of lousy english lessons, random stationery, parts of cannibalized field chairs and sbo parts.

i did. i found a mechanical pencil sharpener. that was made in japan. how cool is that. i was quite amused by it, by how it was so damned heavy, by how it contained 4 batteries to power 2 tamiya-like engines. i postulate, hopefully quite accurately, that one engine allows the screwblade to rotate around it own axis while the other engine drives a chain that allows the screwblade to rotate around the pencil shaft which itself also rotates. and it comes with a safety mechanism that kills the power when the shaving collection bin is removed. and a manual that was completely in japanese with no illustration.

the sharpener automatically sharpened anything pushed through its vulva, for the lack of a better name. and it did so with a satisfyingly loud whirr that attracted the attention of mes chers collegues pretending to do work in the labyrinth of cubicles. it didnt sharpen very well, but within seconds every other bored guy seemed to have with him a pencil, or two or three of them, that needed sharpening. so i let them all sharpen their pencils. and i realized that the resultant shavings are quite pretty.

the sharpener, for want of a better expression, became 'my precious' and i decided that i had shared my precious enough, so i retired with it someplace else to sharpen a pencil. the sharpener made a lot of noise but didnt sharpen very well, so i had to think of what i can do to achieve the best result.

i tried to engage it at different angles, but with varying success. in the process i made an important discovery that sharpening pencils at both ends was the domain of the demented bored dude or dudette, not the nerd with a transformer pencil case with purpose built eraser compartment that springs out, or humji-kia whose pencil lead will definitely break during model-drawing. do not spit on this discovery. it seems blatantly obvious but only because it has been discovered. its just like gravity. it took more than 100 000 years post-monkeydays before a specimen of humankind discovered it. it is good to be bored sometimes, so that one can try out new things and make great discoveries that might one day make the world a better place for the entire human race.

anyway i discovered that the best result was achieved by providing a good strong downward force that continuously fed the pencil to the depths of the hole. to prevent the graphite shavings from sticking on the wood, the sharpener should be shaked before the pencil is gently removed. the lack of force will result in a blunt pencil head. excess force on the other hand creates the made-in-china toy helicopter problem. helicopters often have a little propeller on its rear tip to keep the copter in the right direction, but the chinese helicopter would have a hind propeller tht is stronger than needed so the helicopter spins round and round. similarly the sharpener spins around itself and soon enough half the pencil has been shaved away.

which isnt a bad thing, really. because the pencil shavings look quite cool. it is quite amusing to look at the shavings getting spewed out. as the bin gets congested some of it feeds back into the screwblade and gets spewed out in a really funny way. i know its not just funny to me because some people who gathered around to watch the sharpener were mesmerized by the rhythmic spewing of the shavings. at some point i had taken out a box of fresh pencils and when i took a toilet break necessary to prevent stones from forming, the other dudes managed to lay their hands on my precious and created, within about half an hour, pencilettes from the pencils. and of course, lots and lots of shavings which got dumped down the shirt of some poor guy who was not involved in the original fun.

everything stopped when it was time to bookout. i locked the sharpener away for the day.

there is a fine line between curiousity and lunacy and between fun and idiocy. over here where i am squatting to my ord, this line is really, really fine.

ioies 1000

there is rarely a day that can be perfect. thats why i do not often seek perfection.

i keep worrying that my life will fall apart.

i'm disappointed.