meantime in bricklane

i was having a beer on bricklane in London, and there is this completely sleazy guy, obviously trying to pick up a girl half his age.. and he said, amongst many hair-standing things.. i don't feel old, when i am in my shorts and T-shirt, i feel like a boy again! He, with his huge beer belly, looks about 55 to me and the girl, about 25. Likening himself to being a boy is quite a stretch. and that idea of him being in shorts - yikes, yikes, yikes.

as my gay friend would say, "Shine the Mirror, shine the mirror at look at you!"

The reward for love is the experience of loving

so the last of my inner circle friends have gotten married and i attended the wedding in London. as with all solemnisation, when the couple said their vows, i just cried like a tap. maybe bcos that left me to be the last spinster standing, damn it. anyway, i am a romantic that way. Just to listen to two people (in love) telling each other into one another's eyes how they want to spend the rest of their lives taking care of each other and loving each other, til death do they part - never fails to move me. perhaps because i have never made a vow as such. and i know if i ever should, it will be for real. i take my vows very seriously and if i should make one, it has to mean it. so whenever i believe people are taking it the same serious way, it is truly one of the most romantic thing you can ever say to another person. and the groom, Mark, in his speech, said to my dear friend Klara, one of the toughest and funniest person i know , that, "every time i looked at this woman, working next to me (they work together), i have no doubt that this is the woman i want to spend the rest of my life with." i just cried like a baby. gosh, we're hardly near Notting Hill. Too much romantic comedies!!!

im thankful for friends, as always, who in their strange ways make their silent vows of being with you forever. and today i was, as usual, hanging out with my very pregnant best friend Joce, who has been thru a hell lot of a live, in consolation for me or in jest of herself, told me about this man she is marrying. When they broke up, she literally chased him out of the house to stay in Hotel 81 (hahaha) when they broke up (he is a foreigner here so no family home to go back to), for 3 years they figured out their lives, and they are married today. and yes, they actually used to live in Notting Hill. Romantic Comedies do happen, and i am so glad it happened for my dear dear friend. it's an amazing story, and it made me cry again. Argh.

The highest state of celibacy

i was on the plane to HK today and after i was seated comfortably, as usual hoping the next 2 seats beside me will be empty. when you are cramped in the coach, that is the biggest luxury, like striking 4D. Just when i thought it was my lucky day, what looked like a father and a daughter came and sat themselves next to me. Bummer. No luck. The girl was extremely jovial, speaking in a mix of Mandarin, English and very bad Cantonese, even by my Teochew standards.

The 3 and a half hours turned out to be a complete torture of feeling like a spare tyre (yes, 3rd wheel) even though i don't even know them. But that kind of cramped situation, even with my headphones, inflight movies and little inflight snacks, made me a reluctant voyeur (with little pleasure). The schmutzy mushy hair-standing meaningless lovers' talk coupled with the touchy-feely hum sup action going on, I am not sure if i was on a flight or in Tian An Men. It was completely lusty with no sense of romance, and when the girl started to do her in-flight shopping spree while her hum sup man eagerly whipped out his credit card completed the story.  I took pain to be subtle and observed a ring on the 4th finger on the left hand of the man and nothing on the girl's except gory manicure. 

That girl gosh she looked like 21 and that man damn he looked 55. Every time he rubbed her exposed thighs and she reacted with rubbing his balding head - i cringed with the intensity akin to watching a butcher kill a pig. the cold stale inflight air with that action going on made me feel like i was being contaminated. I feel dirty just sitting next to them and in my mind, i was pouring a whole bottle of dettol over this undesirable couple, as if it would cleanse away some of their sins and some of the dirtiness they made me tolerate. and that girl, torturing the old man with some childish orders of random commands of making him smile and frown, like 20 times, in very rare moments of devastation, i hope the plane will crash. it was that intolerable.

someone once told me, taking a flight pumps up her adrenaline and somewhat makes her high in a sexual way. In this case, the unfortunate mind of mine takes a dive into what happens in some dodgy hotel between this old man and young girl, and that makes whatever little food there was in my stomach wants to charge out of my mouth, which would propel me to the highest state of celibacy.  

Our Embarrassing Budget Terminal

I just came back from a trip from Phuket and this is the first time I've tried a budget flight. It was a last minute trip and to book a ticket to Phuket on Silkair on the desired dates, it cost roughly about S$1200 round trip, a price i could fly to Europe in less desirable dates. It is very complex how they calculate these fares, a day can make a difference of a few hundred dollars, and booking a day after you consider can see a sudden rise in the fares, and you can hardly even try to conclude any certain trends, studying these fares and strategising when to buy your ticket makes watching the stock market feels as relaxing as having an ice cream with my little nephew. At this time of the year, to book a flight, it is a profound decision to decide how much you want to be chopped - with a small, medium or big parang (huge meat-cutting knife, if you wonder what parang means). One way or another it is going to be painful. 

Anyways, so i got a reasonably humanely priced ticket from Tiger Airways and nervously i told the Taxi driver to go to the Budget Terminal. My nightmare hence began. The Taxi Driver started to ask me how much i pay and if the budget planes are safe to travel in. I really want to know too. He made me really nervous, reminding me of a few plane crashes with various foreign budget air. The part where i was close to asking him to turn back and take me to the warm comforts of my home with no life-threatening vacations and the warm fake furs of my teddy bears as when taxi uncle said, "I think their engine not so good hor!!" i had a nauseating feeling which was positively not from his 60km/hr driving. It was from the brainwashing. When we were approaching the terminal, the bright-red handwritten-type font that screamed "BUDGET TERMINAL" aggravated my nausea. I felt a sense of panic. 

I came out a nervous wreck from the Taxi, and upon first sight when i stepped out into the Budget Terminal, i thought i had arrived in the Phuket Airport. As if i had a hallucination, the world's best airport (in most years) boast of such a sparse shoddy architecture. 

To my horror, when i stepped into the check-in hall, i thought that i just stepped into a foodcourt, horrible lighting, bad details, bad materials, all bad. The lines of people at the check-in counters is reminiscent of people Q-ing for Cha-Kway-Keows or Carrot Cakes in a hawker centres. I want to be clear - I am all for budget airlines that make us so much more mobile, but this airport architecture is excruciating. Why is it that low-budget must mean no design? Does the design have to reflect the word "Budget Terminal"? There are so many bright young designers in Singapore who will be able to make this a bit more presentable. There as as much thoughts put into this as designing a foodcourt. How many young designers would kill to have the challenge of making a budget terminal look cool? Many. 

The nightmare continued when i stepped past the passport checks and i felt nothing less than stepping into a JB Mall shopping for cheap Attack washing powders or Head & Shoulders Shampoo. As i was having a panic attack and looking for the washroom, it is time to board. You know, there is this feeling when you are really high tide and when you stepped into a toilet, it heightens that urge to pee.. When i got into the gate area, i had that terrible urge-to-pee feeling because i thought that i just stepped into a huge public toilet and lines of people Q-ing at different "cubicles" (the gates, really). The 20by20 homogeneous tiles a bit beige-y, a bit brownish, you can only find in all public toilets in Singapore - it is all over. Complete with uneven grouting lines, it was hard-core public toilet aesthetics. 

When i finally got to the Phuket Airport, it was actually a relief. At least i feel more at home with that, feasting on the food of the push-cart hawker food. There is at least no pretensions to be first-class in everything, it is consistent and consistency is important to keep an individual or a nation sane. 

I flew back to tonight and as i boarded a taxi to get home, the very good natured taxi driver told me that he just dropped an Aussie traveller who asked to take a taxi from terminal 1 to the budget terminal. Very little money and he said some taxi drivers would complain but he said, we all just have to do our job. Very nice guy but really very bad budget terminal.  

Chanel could rock

I am recently recruiting and suddenly i remember an interview i once had with a candidate (not very potential one).

She came for the position of assistant editor. we stated that a knowledge in design and architecture is essential and we were honest enough to state that we are a publisher of that nature. And yes we do state our company name. Unlike some ads that vaguely and almost always Urgently seeks certain positions e.g. "Waitresses with customer experience needed. Able to work late hours. Commissions." Hardly a Crystal Jade or a school cafe position. They are really either seeking a Tiger auntie in Ang Mo Kio or a Tigress in Orchard Towers, or possibly a new position for one of our upcoming integrated resorts.

So back to this little Arts and Social Science grad with a little literary ambition. Wide-eyed and narrowed-brained, she might actually be more suited for the late hours with commissions position. After some small talk of her hobbies and family background checks, just to be sure in case she is going to ask me for contacts for Orchard Towers, I asked her, "So you like design?"

"Yes..." the tone a bit unsure..

Technically a must-have for this position.

"So can you name a few of your favourite designers?"

"ERm.. i don't really have any favourite designers..."

Hmmm.. ok not very boomz .. but i've decided to be kind and try again.

"Any designer - product, graphic, fashion....?" I've decided to leave out architects, the most misunderstood design profession.. when i once did a vacation stint for quick money in a not-so-design-driven firm to do quick designs, I handled many confident tow-kays and rich aunties who pointed enthusiastically to the neighbour's multi-cultural pediments and bastardised corinthian columns complete with boy statues peeing and told me that is their dream home. And it was not uncommon that we have requests for "country style" which is their dream home. The term dream home was at one point a nightmare term to me. Why would you want a bloody country style home when you can't really keep cows and horses in your 1500 sqm semi-detached house? And i don't really know how to handle that fireplace. We do not study that in architecture schools in Singapore, for reasons that are very hard to explained to these country-loving aunties. Really, our country-house equivalent in this part of the world will be the attap house in Chua Chu Kang, if they still keep pigs. 

So back to Miss Not-very-Boomz, she was really tensed when i apparently pressed her for an answer. She asked for 5 minutes to think. I obliged and in the 5 minutes, i cut and filed my nails like any bored secretary should do to kill time. It felt like 30 minutes and i hope i had more nails. 

Finally, she said hesistantly, "Chanel...?"

Before i could say "Next!" like any impatient Polyclinic doctor in Tiong Bahru, she saw a drop of blood dripping from my left eye. But i am no miracle Mother Mary statue. I am her nightmare, and she declined the position before i even offered. I could have, if i was working on a movie script about how i picked the most unlikely candidate in a highly competitive interview (as we set it up like it was) and train her into a rock star editor. She didn't give me the chance. We could be famous for different things. And maybe i could evolve my publishing business into the movie world, very much in line with the MDA's crossing platform initiative.

If the movie "Coco before Chanel" came before her interview, she might have uttered that name with much more confidence, and actually Chanel is cool about 80 years ago (now maybe she really meant Karl Lagerfeld..), and if she could really sell me that how she admired Chanel (and not Karl Lagerfeld), she could be truly unique above all the rest of the candidates who threw out the name "Philippe Starck" as if they were throwing out an amah-bra (aka granny's size 48DD bra) at me - a big gift on their part, but on my part, a bit embarrassing, a bit dated and just doesn't turn me on too much.