Ian On The Red Dot

Put a bunch of unattached guys together and you’ll most likely hear the phrase “I’m chasing her” at some point.

Why do we use the verb “chase” to describe our courtship of a girl?  “Chase” conjures the image that the girl is running away from us and probably running scared.  It creates the mental image of a cowboy swinging a lasso above his head, trying to rope the girl and tie her up.  To use the word ‘chase’ seems to convery the impression that when we finally do ‘get’ the girl, it is because we have worn her out, exhausted her to the point that resistance is impossible.

Maybe, we should use a new verb – “attract”.  “I am trying to attract the girl.”

Is this even important?  Maybe.  Somehow, I feel that if we start using a different term, then mentally, a switch will be flipped.  Instead of focusing on actions that will win the girl’s heart such as sending flowers, constantly instant messaging her (and ending the monologue with ‘you busy is it..talk to u another time den..’ when we know she is actually
ignoring you and most definitely not busy), ‘stalking’ her and other ineffective gestures we would start working on the self, preparing the self for couplehood, improving our abilities, honing our gifts, making ourself worthy to be loved.

Ok, so you and the guys decide to go to Zouk on a Wednesday night for mambo. The plan is to go out for a good time, get seriously wasted with tons of alcohol and hopefully find a group of girls to hang with. The ultimate plan is to hook up with one of the gals and bring her to your home or some hotel and get laid or maybe just a bit of making out in the car.

At Zouk, things start out a bit slow. Everyone is going for the one-for-one deal and other promotions…the bar is packed, the waitresses ignore you and there doesn’t seem to be any hot girls on the dance floor or for that matter anywhere. Finally, you guys get your drinks and the fun kinda starts.

After an hour, you pass the ‘Am I drunk test?’. You know you have passed the test if everyone suddenly looks good.

Pumped up with dutch courage, you and your mates decide to hit the dance floor. Standing in a circle, you guys begin to ‘move’ to the music. With a little bit of strategic planning and manoeuvring, the group manages to position itself beside a bunch of girls dancing wildly. Now the trick is, how can the group manoeuvre into a position where they can dance with the girls or at least stand around or near them to get some cheap action.

So the night wears on, and no luck yet. You notice one of your friends (Jim) having broken off from the pack with a girl dancing wildly with him. She is gyrating her ass against his crotch and you can see his ‘little brother’ is kinda enjoying it, but his face betrays a certain disinterest. You see him slowly disengage himself from the girl and rejoins the group. The girl is now left dancing alone. You whip out your phone and text a message to him. His reply, “Cannot make it lah that girl!”.

You think your friend is crazy for rejecting a girl with a hot body in a sexy outfit willing to rub her ass against him. You decide to move in. His loss your gain. So you try to as casually as possible position yourself in her dancing space, hoping that she bestows the same kind of attention on you as she had done to your friend. And she does. Woot! Woot! Woot!

After a few minutes of raba-raba on the dance floor, she leans over and introduces herself. Woot! Woot! Woot!

The raba-raba continues and then she leans over and says, “I need a drink”. Before you can reply, she grabs your hand and starts pushing her way through the crowd. At the bar counter, she orders two jugs of vodka-ribena and you go, “Shit..two jugs damn ex..die lah..got to pay..shit man… should have known not to follow her!!!”.

But before you can grudgingly take out you wallet to pay for the drinks, she whips our her credit card for the waiter. Woot! Woot! Woot! Dumb Jim really let go off a good thing. And so the drinks keep on flowing all thanks to this hot rich chiobu.

After a couple of jugs, the two of you return to the dance floor and before you know it, there is some serious tongue action. Both your hands are all over each other and you tell yourself, “Woot! Woot! Woot!”.

She leans over and asks, “Do you want to come to my place?”. “Duh.. ,” you say to yourself, but to her, “Ok…”. So she grabs your hand and leads you out of Zouk.

Under the brighter light, you get a better look at her face, and you go,”Oh shit. This girl is FUgly…Why didn’t I notice it earlier?”. You break hand contact and take your phone out, pretending to talk to one of your buddies. You tell her that your friends are still in Zouk waiting for you and before she can reply, you turn around and make your escape.

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So you finally rejoin the group and you guys head off for supper at some famous Bak Ku Teh store. And they start making fun of you.

“Wah lau…that girl so fugly you also want, ” says Random Friend A.
“I thought I told you cannot make it leh, ” says Jim.

“Yeah man.. Jack..you horny also cannot so despo leh,” says Johnny.

“Not cool man..not cool…some more saw you kiss her until like that,” said Random Friend B.

And deep down inside, you know you will never hear the end of this topic. The night that Jack shoved his tongue down a fugly chick’s mouth.

And that is the thing about guys. They already know the girl is f*cking ugly so to joke about her is pretty pointless and not funny at all. However, when a friend is either drunk, dumb, horny, despo enough to hook up with one…now that is fodder for endless tekan sessions. The guys always know who actually f*cked up in a story like this.
And in this story…it was you! Horny and desperate to get laid plus overwhelmed by the money the girl threw at you when buying alcohol for you.

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And that is what I think of UNSW pulling out of Singapore.

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And sometimes, when the guy has to pull out, because he didn’t have the ability to go all the way, maybe, just maybe it isn’t cos the girl is fugly. The girl could be as hot as Jessica Alba but the guy still needs the pills so he can stand up and be counted.

This last few days have been crazy. A major system is going live and as usual, lots of things which didn’t go wrong in testing are suddenly causing problems. Sigh.

Anyway, everyone from the different teams are sending emails back and forth. A reports a problem to B. B forwards the mail to C asking for details to help. C forwards it to D saying ‘hey, didn’t you say this was ok’. D forwards it to A saying ‘I thought you told me to tell C it was ok.” and on and on it goes…. Every mail of course is CC to the bosses so that the record shows we are all doing our job. Grrr… damn stupid. Half the time people spend protecting their own backsides that no work is really done.

Anyway, it reminds me of this game we played in primary school. Actually two games. The first is poison ball where one team is surrounded by another team which tries to hit them with the ‘poison ball’. If you get hit, you die and you are out of the game. Corporate life seems to be like that. I see people avoiding phone calls, stay away from the desk and shunning the boss…the key is if the boss can’t see you, hopefully they will move on to another target.

The second game is pass the package. The game where you don’t want to be caught holding the package when the music stops. That is the email game we seem to be playing. Keep emailing and forwarding hopefully it isn’t your turn to answer when the boss starts taking notice of all the messages in the thread.

Oh well…. being the new guy here, I can just sit at my desk and do what I enjoy – trace the code and fix the bugs. But my seniors… they are in front of the firing squad but credit to them, it seems that my team is more interested in solving the issues than anything else

Yesterday, on the way home for a quick nap before going back to the office, I had to change trains at City Hall. And I was witness to the amazing physical prowess of Singaporeans. We may not be able to change our mass at will to squeeze more people into the MRT, but we most definitely can boost our speed with amazing acceleration in a manner that would make Jay Garrick, Barry Allen and Wally West proud. Yes, I’m talking about the dash across the platform to catch the train from the other line.

The only reason why I’m blogging about this today is because yesterday as I was walking across the platform, some girl banged into me and knocked what I was carrying to the floor. She didn’t stop to say ‘sorry’, didn’t turn around to say ‘sorry’ while continuing running. What she did was just shout ‘sorry’ with even looking back to see if I was ok. While I understand I’m not some fragile old lady, but when I heard the ‘sorry’, the thought that came into my mind was ‘Say Sorry for F*ck, you really sorry meh…’ but then I caught myself. Shouldn’t be so harsh on her. To her credit, she got attached to a guy who was nice enough to stop for half a second to see if I was ok and then continued on his mad dash.

In the end, I also managed to get into the train and I think that was the ultimate ‘punishment’ for her because I could tell she was really embarrassed. She was covering her face with her hands.

Anyway, when I said I should’nt be so harsh on her, I meant it. As I thought more about it, I knew who to blame.

I BLAME SOCIETY

But before I come to that, I blame SMRT. I mean… I don’t think it is that impossible to schedule trains such that the train from one line arrives one minute before that of the other. I can’t help but feel it is some twisted joke by the people up there, our mad dash across the platform an amusement to them. I can’t help but think the lyric playing in those executives’ heads is

“See how they run…see how they run!”

I might have bought the argument that the current way things work when changing trains might be so that people don’t have to wait but honestly would you buy that argument?

The thing is, people dash across the platform because in a way we hate the “Ahhh..SHIT!!!!! I just missed the train feeling!!!!!”

I started thinking about my own reactions when I take the train and I realised, if I missed a train at City Hall or Raffles Place (either because I was too slow and fat to get across the platform in time or my train pulled into the station just a little too late) and had to wait for 3 minutes, I would feel worse about it then if I had to wait for six minutes without seeing the train leave the platform.

The “Ahhh..SHIT!!!!!” feeling is a powerful feeling and I believe we do alot to avoid feeling it. That is why to me things are so insane in the property market. I know there is optimism in the air about the future of the Singapore economy, but I also believe a good part of it is because we don’t want to get the “Ahhh…SHIT!!!!!” feeling.

People who own valuable properties are doing en blocs because they feel the time is right but also because they are afraid if they don’t do it now, they will be leaving cash on the table if they do it later when the economy takes a dip.

“Ahhh…SHIT!!! Sell earlier can make more money!!!”

But frankly I don’t care about those people. They already have enough money to use 2 dollar bills to wipe their ass. It is the other group that concerns me.

“Ahhh…SHIT!!!! Should have bought that house last year..now price so high..F*ck it..I’m going to buy that condo now in case price goes up later!!!!”

Don’t get me wrong. If you have thought about it, studied where the economy is going, confident about your assessment and it is within your means to buy the place without over-leveraging yourself, go ahead and buy that property. But please, don’t buy it cause of fear and greed. Don’t buy just because you’re afraid of the super combo

“Ahhh…SHIT!!!! WHAT IF I HAD…….” feeling

And so like a good product of a generation that idolizes the self and yet loathes personal responsibility, I BLAME SOCIETY….

But if you really think about it, it is not about who to blame, but learning to accept the fact that we can live life one way or live life by the many other ways, one of them being not bowing down to the

“AHHHH…SHIT!!!!!”

feeling.

Ok…so I was watching tv the other night, and they were advertising some crime show on Channel 5 about underage sex. And i was thinking about how the guys in Singapore damn poor thing. I mean, if a 15 yr guy and a 15 yr old girl have sex, the guy kenna 10 times jialat jialat (pulling this number out of my …) compared to the girl.

Why ??????????

I mean, women always like to say they are more mature than guys.  If I had a dollar for everytime I heard a Singaporean girl say that Singaporean guys are damn immature compared to them and only after NS do we even begin to start getting near to their maturity levels, I would be a very very rich man.  Hell, the girls are so confident, they are even able to tell us specifically how much more mature they are – by three years.

So, if a 14 year old girl has sex with a 15 year old boy, i mean, technically in terms of maturity, it is a 17 year old girl taking advantage of a 15 year old boy.

Of course, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t protect our minors from predators.  We should.  But it would be nice to have some consistency.

Not only in Singapore do campaigns don’t go according to planned.

It Worked … Too Well..

What would it be like living in a world without oil?