Word of the day: "opsimath"

Had a conversation with Gabriel two nights ago. He called from Brunei; clearly the tedium of serving President and country in faraway lands must have been getting to him. His monotonous, deadpan voice betrayed cracks in his usually placid shell; the damage of ennui no doubt exacerbated by the absence of access to the Net for weeks on end. I shudder at the prospect; it's to be cut off from the world's true hivemind, fount of useless knowledge, catalyst of instant communication, and last haven for the socially dysfunctional.

At any rate, he exhorted me to resume blogging again.

"Entertain my audience," he said

Me: "Andrew's doing a game enough job of it in your absence."

And our conversation ended abruptly there.

The ironic thing is that in the last six months, quite a lot has happened - certainly enough to have actively blogged about as a form of catharsis. At the very least, it would have helped arrest the mental deterioration I seem to be slipping into these days.

The problem is, those events have either been:

a) The angsty, emotional melodrama stereotyped events that cause me to gag blood whenever I read their ilk on other people's blogs - suicide attempt, relationship soap opera, destructively masochistic tendencies, slide towards alcoholism, bipolar depression, lots of anti-heroic brooding (all one needs is a cape whipping around one's limbs while gazing melancholically into the face of a thunderstorm while standing on the edge of a precipice), lurid descriptions of lucid dreams, major angst about dead end job, pittance pay and psychotic boss, bemoaning social withdrawal and inability to relate to other human beings, blinding waves of rage and injustice at hearing about wanker poseur fucktard educational failures getting great jobs or making piles of money effortlessly, followed by bold resolve to better oneself through further education, psychological self-help, positive thinking and greater human interaction, followed by cyclical decline into depression again, yada yada, all interspersed with song lyrics chosen for their mood-empathic value.

And it would be dead embarrassing next to Gabriel's dryly entertaining stories about NS bureaucracy and beating off dogs with a stick. And his cool links.

b) The type that form a "cultural" or "political" or "daily observations around me news column" kind of blog. Examples would be events surrounding our recent election, commentary on how well traffic is now that the NPE is up, this great sup kambing place I discovered behind the Honda showroom off Jalan Pudu, or the latest business shenanigans surroundong Proton, or lambent observations regarding the EC's cock-ups, or just some odd tangential rant about something I read in The Star - or Malaysian net punditry's current favourite bugabear; the various Khidmat Negara (Malaysian National Service) scandals - like this one:

Ghostbusters called in to exorcise NS camps
1:05pm Thu Apr 8th, 2004

Ghostbusters were called in to exorcise spirits at a national service training camp after two groups of youths claiming to have seen ghosts became hysterical, a report said today.

On Sunday night, 13 girls and three boys at a camp in southern Negeri Sembilan state went berserk and started screaming that their toilets were haunted, the New Straits Times said. They were hospitalised and discharged the next day.

The perceived hauntings continued with another four girls becoming hysterical late Tuesday after claiming to have seen the same apparitions in the toilets, the daily said.

Faith healer Abu Bakar Hassan and his assistants were summoned from Kuala Lumpur, and a camp instructor told the newspaper that Abu Bakar had "caught the spirits and thrown them into the sea." The group also spent time "cleansing" the area, he said.

The instructor said all the affected girls were having their periods when they became hysterical. There are 508 trainees at the camp. - AFP

Menstruation. Always a great catalyst for the supernatural.

If any one wants to know what the Malaysian version of NS is like check here. It's not the total nightmare some of the opposition party demagogues make it out to be, but definitely it's not a three month OBS either.

Anyway, not entirely comfortable with becoming a "observations" or "politico" blog, mainly because that territory's been turfed out quite thoroughly by a variety of psuedo-intellectual liberals or rabid nationalistic types among the Malaysian blogs extant. And as uninhibited as I am about spewing my opinions, venom and vitriol in conversation, ICQ or even on the occasional newsboard, it feels.. unseemly to create another online ego shrine, whether it be of the "political awareness discussion group by people dissatisfied with the system seeking outlet for bitching" variety, or the cliched "bucolic life and all its attendant weirdnesses on the raw streets of KL from a urban professional's perspective." There are way too many sites dealing in this product, and a lot of weirdness to regale a reader with, but somehow to me, they would seem better told as a verbal anecdotes than as blog entries. But some of them are surprisingly good. (Check out this lotophagic here) Maybe it's just a subconscious sense of nicety - I've haven't really got anything to say, no sustained personal narrative of opinion that could keep a blog going; or maybe it's a certain embarrassed envy - knowing that I probably couldn't come up with anything better, so why bother.

Hm. After all that time, I've actually written a blog entry to explain why I don't (won't) blog regularly anymore. And that feeds my hypocrisy quota for the day. So I think I'll go back to answering questions on okcupid.com - I'm sure a 100% match is out there.

"Can't remember to forget you."