It seems so often in fiction...

... that a character finds he knows absolutely nothing but anything but the one gift he finds he is so good at it leaves everyone in the dust. Well, fiction does have to make sense.
If only I knew how to use words, to string them together, to imprint a scene in a reader's head and make them sing This is what's happening! What'll happen next? with suspenseful, crystalline logic. If only I knew how to make them dance, to pound at readers and squeeze their expectancy till their throats dry and their hearts accelerate with the force of a Maglev train.
Okay. Now I know I don't. Faults I knew nothing of in my work now make themselves painfully apparent as I read and learn more, and the discouragement from my (lack of) a stable NS job does nothing to help. First person? Third person? How can I survive this period, this hour, this day, this week? When I look within all I see is sheer, pessimistic darkness. It's driving me nuts. And if God is truly with me wherever I go, why do I so dread facing each new day and week?

I know I of all people, with so little to worry about, am not supposed to feel like this. But this is as honest a reflection as I can dash off--a need to get all this stuff off my chest, if you will. Let's just hope this darkness and dryness pass...

La Caricature

Why, oh why, Messrs. Danish Cartoonists, did it have to be Muhammad when bin Laden totally personifies this terrorist trend in the Islamic world?

And why, if Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, are so many so inflamed they seek out completely innocent Jews and Christians and fellow Muslims to kill? When Christ is caricatured as He is worldwide you don't see crucifixes raised, embassies burning and police forces stretched thin in Christian countries around the globe.

I won't even get started on why this is, but whoever is stoking this totally misguided hatred must stop it at once.

I am tired

Once in a while you feel the fatigue right down to your bones. I'll spend tonight in my own bed, in my own home, in a place where everyone enjoys me for who I am. That's the one thing home is that your camp can never give. Jim Davis put it this way:

Jon: "Home is where you can walk around in your underwear. Home is where you can drink milk from the carton. Home is where you can scratch where it itches."
Garfield: "Home is disgusting."

Plus the food's so much better.

My time is now my own, or at least it will be for the next 48 hours...

Bad ads for the Panther

I went to GV Tampines Mall yesterday with my brother and cousins to see The Pink Panther. I'm pretty sure the franchise is way older than me, and the producers want to milk all the laughs they can get.
'Milk' is an understatement. More like 'squeeze'. That's not to say I didn't like the show, though--it's practically everything a bumbling-cop movie should be, only minus the intelligence. Steve Martin's Inspector Clouseau is just SO dimwitted I wonder how the French police force lets people like him in. And pity the poor Tour de France bikers whenever he's around.
In fact, Pink Panther follows the same Basic Formula as the 2003 spy spoof Johnny English: lousy agent makes mistake after mistake while his coolheaded assistant does all the deduction, the final mistake gets him sent off the force, then he makes a brilliant masterstroke that regains him the case, respect and the bad guy. It's been done to death, and frankly is no longer interesting.
But there are priceless gags to be found, if and when you're in a mood to enjoy them. Trust me, it's hard to see this movie without laughing out loud, though I don't recall any joke worth retelling.

Except maybe the one involving the electrodes.

OK, enough on the movie. What really got me mad was the Total Defence commercial that played in the ads before the movie (hey, someone has to keep ticket prices down, right?). It showed a cartoon of a man in a long-sleeved shirt and trousers (I think--the animation was bad)entering a door and suddenly getting stomach pains. He then holds up a parody of a box of paracetamol tablets (the brand name replaced with the Total Defence arrows) and his tummyache's gone. Why?
The scene cuts inside his organs, which are under attack by a giant, roaring blob that is quickly dispatched by green-clad circles spraying machine-gun fire at it, after which other anthropomorphic circles representing the rest of the Total Defence spheres cheer loudly.

It made me want to throw up. The schoolgirls who did this are to be commended for their effort, though the final product came across as oversimplifying and patronising those of us who serve 2 years and then get out as quietly as possible. Military Defence totally overshadows everything else, in other words, and the rosy, propaganda-friendly picture painted isn't helping.
And why did their school name appear in huge lettering at the end? Instead of "So this is the school that produces such patriotic youth!" I was thinking, "Ahh, now I know who's responsible for this!"

And no complaints that if I don't like the ad why don't I design my own? To which I've always been tempted to reply, "If you don't like the service in a restaurant why don't you work for it and give your own?"

Old Tintin

The money we spend to complete our Tintin collection. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets in a new collector's edition (those two magic words work every time) and Tintin in the Congo cost us a whopping $58 in all, money that could've been much better spent.

Though the books did give us an endless supply of quotable quotes:

"Idiot! Fool! Animal!" -- Tintin to a man he tricks into inflating his car tire

"Why did I take fifteen cartridges just to kill one antelope?" -- Tintin, after he's shot what he thinks is one antelope only to find he killed the whole herd.

The stories are cheap, the dialogue is hackneyed, and there are too many deus ex machina scenes to count. Congo also has the rather dubious distinction of having the highest body count of any of the Adventures of Tintin, with most of the wildlife in the Congo dead by the time Tintin is done hunting. Even the fact Christians are shown positively (what, I'm mentioning this as a plus factor? I must be getting desperate) doesn't take away from the racism and killing that runs through the story.

And how Tintin understands animal language is beyond me. In Congo some of his dealings with animals are downright impossible--wonder if anyone's strong enough to get a constrictor to eat its own tail?

Still, Soviets and Congo are excellent lead-ins to the more canonical Tintin adventures. I'm disgusted, yet thrilled at Tintin's evolution from adventure-seeking reporter to reluctant, resolution-seeking hero.

Now if I can just pick up Tintin and Alph-Art...

Don't you just hate it?

Don't you just hate it when the holidays are over and you have to go back to the daily grind of school and work and responsibility? Sigh. Time marches on...

Traitor prawns, high-fat and high-priced, thorns and the Hole

I'm on leave now, and on the bus home from camp I saw this ad on TVMobile for Myojo instant noodles that (pardon the pun) made my stomach turn. Several cartoon prawns were singing, dancing and playing musical instruments to herald the arrival of this new flavour made from their flesh, their bodies, their very prawnness. Gee, I don't know, would you sell man-flavoured noodles to a tribe of cannibals?

This awful promotion of consumption of one's own meat isn't new. I remember cringing at the sight of a teriyaki sauce commercial on the side of a bus that showed yet more cute, cuddly cartoon animals singing and marching with bottles of the stuff hanging from their necks like deadly necklaces. C'mon, advertisers! Is this how you market products, by turning animal representatives into traitors? Extending the above analogy, it's like promoting just the right herbs and spices to marinate your colleagues in just before they're stewed. Burger King's big enough without needing a cartoon cow.

But I won't even talk about KFC's Chicky.

On a happier (though more expensive) note, I loved the Ultimate Cheesecake at Jurong Point's McCafe, though at $4.50 it certainly wasn't cheap. And the Double Chocolate frappe was indulgence itself... though at $3.60 I felt ripped off when I could've done something similar with ice, Milo and cold milk "at home for nothing," to quote the incomparable Meera Syal on the BBC comedy Goodness Gracious Me. Much as I loved the Cheesecake and its accompanying sweet caramel sauce that left me hungry for more, the price was sufficient for me to decide enough was enough. $8.10 for a light snack? Puh-leeze!
But the barista smiled at me and said, "See you again!" When I feel rich and deserving enough once more, why ever not? :)

I'd forgotten how much I love going to the library. I throughly enjoyed rereading Pete Hautman's book Hole in the Sky, the first time I read it being six months ago. Make no mistake--Mr. Hautman knows his stuff and delivers it well. What if in the near future an influenza pandemic killed off nearly every human on earth? Eerie, action-packed and funny. I loved the book, I really did. From the race to prevent the flooding of the Grand Canyon to a journey to find a mystical Hopi portal into another world, you feel you haven't read a story but an adventure through history, time and space.

But not so funny is the way Pete sneaks in a thinly-disguised attack on organised religion in particular, near the middle of the book. Thankfully, it's all over by the time you flip the page and the story regains its magical flavour. It was something I was uncomfortable remembering, and if it were up to me I'd have it removed since it doesn't advance the plot in any way, doesn't explain anything, and leaves a bad taste in readers' mouths. If it did the first two I wouldn't have minded the third, but since it doesn't...

But HITS is truly an amazing story. To enjoy it for its own sake, forget what I said in the preceding paragraph. I heartily recommend it.

At the same library trip I picked up my first Christian-themed novel in a long time--Sigmund Brouwer's Crown of Thorns. Picking up on the adventures of astronomer Nick Barrett, Brouwer takes usthrough a dark tale centred around Charleston, North Carolina, a priceless painting, an ancient murder, and a deadly cult. God's grace is given freely, and it shows his ability to meld the Christian issues of morality and redemption into a real-world framework.

They're in there somewhere, I'm sure of it. Too bad I never finished reading it.

It's not the story, which is thrilling.
It's not the writing, which is suspenseful.
It's not the author, who is on my favourites list thanks to his Christian writings, and whom I have every desire to emulate.

It is... the viewpoint. For the life of me, I can't figure out why Brouwer switches between first-person narration by Barrett and the third-person omniscient, which is just, well... odd. That, coupled with the time Brouwer takes in introducing the exciting stuff, just made the first few chapters a plod to read, and after the third I got lost and gave up. Someone more erudite than me might enjoy it, but I can't. It's a good book, it really is; it's just not my kind.

But I'll give Brouwer's novels another chance. After all, he is a brother in Christ, and a crackling good writer to boot.

"Have You Ever Seen God?"

I've given some thought to this question I've been asked a few times in camp, and the answer, I must admit, doesn't immediately come to mind.

I'm so, so silly not to have thought of this.

Have I ever seen Him? I believe we do, in this earthly realm, so long we have the eyes to see. The 19th psalm says it all: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies display his marvellous craftsmanship. Day after day they bring forth speech, night after night they display knowledge..." The more I read up the natural world around me, the more I see God in His creativity, in His ability to build and sustain a universe simply because He longs to love. Every time I look at the sun, the moon and stars, I realise there's truly more to nature than blind, random chance.
True, others come to different conclusions when they see the same thing. But the question is, do we have the eyes to see? His stamp is in the stars of heaven, just as it is in every cell and every creature. Scientific exploration tells you that much. And all this, I believe, is God Himself, calling us to seek after Him for a meaning greater than ourselves. For our lives are vapours, come and gone in the blink of an eye.

The universe will one day end, but in the meantime it speaks of a Creator who never will.