Last few days have been a positive deluge of work. Not even the fascinating, interesting, "ooh-this-tickles-me-elmo-on-pot" kind of work, but more like "dry-cleaning-the-big-bird-costume-by-hand" kind of drudgery. Still, once again the forces of Sloth have performed a Cannae-like maneuver - today I sluiced off some of my more menial tasks to the New Guy in my office (ah, seniority has its perks). And thusly, dear reader, I am free to entertain/bore you with another collegial rant.

"Just as the collected letters of Proust fill dozens of volumes, Dressler has stuffed Honig's Outlook Express in-box with e-mails totaling thousands of pages and spanning years. The writings of each man are a winding psychological journey, weaving experiences from his everyday life with memories from the distant past...."Clearly there is a higher purpose to these discursive ruminations," Honig said. "In describing in great detail the new dog his next-door neighbor just got or by writing about how he was tired and just drank three cups of coffee from the vending machine down the hall, Eric is seeking to rescue these moments from the clutches of the past. Proust had the same obsession with the inexorable passage of time.""

Last weekend was yet another quick, manic flitter-by down south for an interview. In the absence of any inspiration to structure this entry more imaginatively, will fall-back on tried and tested chronological order.

Thursday

As usual, departed from work straight to the bus terminal at approx. 7:30pm, only this time was toting a sling bag instead of my usual utilitarian backpack. The sling bag was a result of my mother's excessively repeated exhortations to avoid rumpling the shirt and pants I had packed for my interview on Friday.

I've been taking the bus up and down the highway for years now, and I can never get over just how pilgrim-like it feels, at each terminal end. On the Malaysian side, in the Pudu Interchange, there is this constant flow of human fodder - circulating up and down the arteries of our nation's highways and by-ways. The interchange is old, grimy, and constantly punctuated by this odd, flinty smell of fuel oil, human waste, sweat and junk food. The semi-lit departure berths are filled with all kinds of people squatting restlessly, waiting for old, creaky buses to take them to places distant. There are merchants and stalls in almost every corner, peddling dried snacks, soft drinks, newspapers, and other assorted mamak wares. All of this always makes me feel like I'm in some kind of modern-day Samarkand; amidst caravanserai preparing for a distant sojourn. Too bad we're missing out on the camels, mercenary bodyguards, and bales of silk, but it's still the same, in many ways - people travelling up and down for trade, to visit families, to seek work, all the old, human reasons. And certainly the highways have their share of bandits (the local police, although, generally, buses don't get cozened for a bribe).

I suppose I'm lucky that I can find some touristy wonder in something that should be as prosaically familiar as a bus interchange.

There are pros and cons to taking an evening bus like this one. The obvious pro is that you can save an extra day by leaving right after work (as I did), it's generally easier to sleep in the night, and the highways are slightly less crowded. On the neg side, however, I can't read to kill time, and for some weird reason, they *never* show VCDs or other movies on evening/red-eye bus trips. (The express coaches usually have a TV embedded somewhere in the front to play pirated VCDs, for those unfamiliar with budget transport).

As usual, I spent about half my trip glued to the mobile phone, chatting. The other half was spent trying to sleep; difficult, given that I had taken a slightly crappier bus line this time round, one that I am normally leery of patronising given that their buses have terrible suspension. Unfortunately it was the only 7:30pm bus available at that time.

Being a veteran of the highway route, I am intimately familiar with the two rest-stops the buses pull in at along the way for toilet and meal breaks. The one I prefer is the brightly-lit monstrosity off the highway at Ayer Hitam. At least they serve something other than mixed rice; like hay mee or porridge. Mixed rice is a *trap* at these price-gouging hellholes - adding just one or two lumps of meat can effectively raise the cost of your meal by 50% (painful experience). The valuation of your conglomerate meal picked from various trays and dishes is performed by some professional aunty assayer who eyeballs your plate of rice, luncheon meat, assorted veg, and baked beans, and derives the final price from some exponentially weighted algorithm designed to rip you off. But after about 3 hours in a bus, one is in no position to complain about a little sustenance, however expensive.

And there's always this feeling of desolation, sitting in a rest stop, idly smoking over the remains of a meal, watching bus after bus disgorge their human cargo ad infinitum. People taking a few days off from their salaried serfdom in the city to visit their relations back in the villages and kampungs they left for a "better life". Students going back to their families for a few days. Supervisors travelling up to out-of-state factories. Auditors going to distant, out-station business sites. Hitchhikers on shoestring budgets. Salespeople, foremen, factory workers, students, housewives, travelers, all passing transitory. Sic transit gloria humanitas... What was that line from Miller? "Funny, y'know? After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive."

"He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong."

Anyway, they always sell steamed peanuts and corn at these places; a necessary snack for the rest of the journey. While watching the parking lot crammed with tour buses, I have this vague impression that I'm in a scene, an episode on a television screen filmed in washed-out palettes, perhaps the X-Files, with its familiar, opening onscreen note at the bottom left corner in Courier font text going:


9:37 PM
AYER HITAM, STATE OF JOHOR
94 KM NORTH OF SINGAPORE

Anyway, the rest of the trip was just languish, watch trucks roll by, note disappointingly the absence of any chio hitchhikers on the bus this trip round, and finally arrive at the JB Causeway at approx. midnight (FYI, the buses down from KL almost always go through the first causeway, because about half the passengers on any trip disembark at JB. The few lines that go straight to Singapore via the Senai-Tuas 2nd Link cost far more, and pick up from weirdly located hotels.). As usual, there was a thrill of fear at Singaporean-side customs due to the six or seven pirated CDs stuffed down the side pockets of my cargo pants. And as usual, I was waved past with nary a glance; just another weary traveller; part of the steaming biomass being pumped back and forth to be processed by two different national economies; simultaneously a cog in a machine(as part of the financial economy), a victim to be exploited (as a consumer), and a resource to be squeezed (as a worker enriching an employer).

Snuck off at Woodlands - I wonder just how long the bus (which terminates its route at Golden Mile Complex) waited for me. Some drivers take the precaution of counting first just how many people are getting off at Woodlands and how many at Golden Mile. This bus driver didn't; and given that I invariably shove off at Woodlands itself, I wonder just how far they go when they take a headcount after customs and find a passenger missing... Probably they just shrug their shoulders and drive off.

Took a cab down to my assigned quarters for the night. As some of you may know, my mendicant trips down to Singapore are usually carried out in a nomadic, "so who wants to put me up tonight?" fashion - you poor sods. It was a little tricky finding a place on Thursday night, given that my peer group no longer thinks of November / December as holiday or exam time but, rather, as just another working month. However, one of my kinder associates at Serangoon Gardens took me in at 1:30am in the morning - despite having to go back to Tengah Base at 7:30am.

First time at this guy's house, and it's *old*. The floor tiles were of this style I haven't seen in years - which some of you might be familiar with. It's this smooth, granite composite, usually pale cream in colour, but embedded with conglomerate stones - so the mix looks like a bunch of rocks swimming in a beige pool. No ceramic finishing or glaze; just bare, cold rock beneah your feet. It's the kind you still see in those old apartments around the Joo Chiat Rd / East Coast Rd block. Apparently it's due for renovation soon (more bomb shelter issues), but my friend's the Spartan kind; his room comprises little more than a mattress on the floor, a few bookshelves, a drum set in one corner, and a PC. Walls devoid of decoration. A study desk with nothing but CDs, scattered stationery and stacks of academic notes. Disturbingly, all of his books are old textbooks.

Hadn't caught up with him for a while, but I could see he was in no mood to talk for long. So we just exchanged the usual convival cigarette outside the gates, and headed off to sleep with little further preamble. I pride myself on travelling light, but it's always disorienting to have to set up all manner of paraphernalia upon travel - hunting for a power point to plug in phone charger, arranging toothbrush and razor (the only toiletries I require) in an accessible location, folding up clothes and piling them neatly in unfamiliar cupboards or on unfamiliar surfaces, possibly surfing the net on an unfamiliar PC where even the arrangement of shortcuts unsettles you. It's the little things like finding your way through an unfamiliar bedroom in the dark, or how the contours of the bed (or, in some cases for me, chair, sofa, carpet, gorilla nest, or horizontal surface) one sleeps on isn't quite the same. Clearly I lack adaptability skills.

Okay. Shall continue later. Am busy organizing the few trinkets I have recieved from colleagues who just went travelling; a pair of carved chopsticks in an embroidered holder from Thailand, a pack of mini-sized playing cards from Xi'an (each card decorated with a depiction of a terracotta warrior or sculpture), and an odd little Japanese beanbag ninja, cunningly weighted so that it always lands on its base. Ah, what master engineers the Japanese are.

Currently the chopsticks are positioned on top of my PC monitor, with the rear-ends protruding over the edge like a gangplank, while the ninja stands precariously at the end, performing the crane stance. (Or it would, if it had limbs - it's basically two beanbag-filled spheres on top of one another, swaddled in ninja clothes, with two painted dots as eyes.)

Usual commentary on tracker stats.

The most used keyword by unique visitors descrending on this blog via search engine is, unsurprisingly, "Singapore", occuring in 2.39% of searches. The second most common word is "nude" - 1.88%.

And today's usual weirdness includes "strange plastic drinkware" (A Tupperware fetishist?), "kansas city bbq connectin" (Yup, we're allll good ole farmboys), and "wilting sound wav" (???), amidst the usual assortment of sex and zaogeng.

Comments to the G-Man.

Firstly, the technical distinction between pornography is that it involves flagrant nudity meant to titillate for sexual purposes, whereas tasteful nudity, say, a Botticelli nude, is simply artistic depiction of the nude human form. However, in an era of scrotal infusion and Lego pornography, everything turns *someone* on in some way or another. And of course, the role of sex in what Irvine Welsh calls "the commodification of transgression" Check out that link - very good interview. After all, what is MTV, pro wrestling, and most modern reality TV other than a way of turning the perverse, outre, and bizarrely alternative cultures into simply another cash cow?

Secondly, as I told you, racial harmony only exists as long as one is in camp seeing the same guy day after day. One odd form of (benign?) racism I've noticed is how one can be pretty good friends with individuals "of differing ethnicity", while disliking or holding prejudices towards their race as a whole.

Thirdly, I'm not hated as a person; simply as a provider of irritating opinions and as rants on a screen. Most people operate on assumptions about my personality based on what I write and the manner in which I present my ideas (telling, but not the complete picture, methinks). You're hated as a real, breathing, sack of protoplasm.