where are you now?? i can hear footsteps. maybe im dreaming.....

hmmz its sad but true, ive made up my mind. seriusly though, i thought that the band had potential. i was already picturing us playing at a 3 letter sessions type gig one day but den i tot we were already cursed when he said those words. first gig, first band, first chapter. and yeah thats where the story ends for me. the first chapter. hope everything goes well for them. good luck for your future endeavours.

thx for the memories.....

yeah im feeling this!!

marchtwelve - telephone

my finger remembers the buttons to press
even after i tried so hard
to erase your number from memory
and failed to detect the need to forget
the hurt
the urge
to hear the voice
that for many times had kept me going

and when i get too tired
i fall asleep with the phone clutched close to me
its ringing constantly
i doubt that anybodys picking up
but then i hear a voice on the line
it wasnt what i needed to forget
the hurt
the urge
to hear the voice
that for many times had kept me going

and when i get too tired
i fall asleeep with the phone clutched close to me
i want to forget the memory
i need to be away from misery
(pick up the telephone )
i want to forget to pain
i need the sun more than i need the rain.

we sucked just now. honestly we sucked. i made a hellot of mistakes.. and i wish we could have played find a way a little better.. argh dammit.. sorry jon!!!! argh!!!! madness..

i simply loved the people i hanged out with today, fir,dan,alif,aliff,allen,azura,lina,dynn,din,zack,taufiq,lukman and hmmz there were a lot.. cant possibly remember all... but nvm.. the fact is i had fun throughout the gig... the music was great. a losing streak, dead end, pop whizee, shoe size nine blew my brains out.. all of them were suiperb!!! learned a lot just standing and looking at them.

so niehows.. the whole group ended up at s-11 after the gig ended... me,zack, taufiq,dynn,din,alip,allen,aliff, dan, lukman... there was lizard, tasya, sammy and his girl, so yeah.. said hello... den we caught leeds vs birmingham live... which was a stupid match cause leeds lost.. but nvm.. it was very kecoh man with they all... had a fucking fun time.. laughing my guts out at every single little joke. superb lar... had so much fun... wish i could hang out with this particular group of people.. like the extended pp.. heh.. haish.. weeee wishful thinking yeah?? argh but nieways went back home late... got scolded.. but nvm.. dat cant take away the super fun that i had... love yea guys untill mad...!!!!

the emptiness has found its way back into me. urgh just feel the urge to make love with a tree or a lamp post or even the fucking mailbox ala rob schneider in the animal. heh.

hmmz something else i like to add which irritates me alot

have u guys ever been turned of by people saying that they hate poseurs in the I hate section of their blog. I mean doesnt it ever occur to them that they themselves might be poseurs?

something for u guys to tink about. heh and yeah name taken fucking rulez!

been awhile since ive blogged. i mean really really blogged. Last few entrys were typed down just for the sake of updating. Guess my life isnt worth writing about.

Read massy's blog and yeah it does really suck to have people diss and cuss you online. No matter how nice you are to people, there are some idiots who dunt give a fuck. The net is littered with them. At audioreload, band sites, blogs, literally everywhere. I for one dun give a shit. say wat u wanna say. im fucking ignorant.

Feel really sorry though for her and apis but its something that some people might have to get used to if theyre writing stuff about their personal lives. Thats why having a blog is kind of risk. It lets people whom u dont even know, read about your life. and they will of course, make automatic assumptions.

most people i know in real life are different from their personality online. I know dat for a fact. I mean an absolutely emo,sad, pathetic bugger who complains to you everynight on msn might be the most cheerful person in real life. An outgoing or bubbly person on msn could be as quiet as a door mouse

so yeah dun put ur trust in someone behind a computer.
especially a person like me. heh.
i have a maths test tomorrow so im gonna hit the books now.

reply to the taggers: shaw tee- haha no no u mean the sun is getting hotter. im dark until mad
linda- hello
alif - discuss ur nenepop lar
xthrowdowx- ye ye discuss this sat
tweet - yeah emo sucks, so does everything else
sinaran kejayaan- yea yea bawah block!serius!
her- yeah your linked too!

ok bye??

its raining and i cant seem to sign in my msn. haish. my relatives are in the living room but i dun really tink i should be out there catering to their needs. not in the mood to do dat.

i wish you would miss me the way that i miss you. honestly.....

feeling so hyper right now but at the same time super shagged. Jamming went well... amazing how time flies when ur having fun. played find a way. A song i never thought i could play but it turned out alright. But if u ask me. I would honestly say we are not prepared for the gig this sat. but nvm. heh. ok super tired shall sleep now.

just updating for the sake of updating.. work was a bore, got lost in sengkang while on the way to hafiz's, finished the stupid swe project which i knew nothing about, went to compass point, got lost on the way back from compass point, reached home at 2200 hrs, watched man yoo beat hotspurs 3-0, watched blade 2, chatted for a while, updating blog. updated blog. goodnights.

work was 'happening' yesterday. Honestly was. Had a lot of fun with naim, baqir and bunch. bunch fell into the water twice well not his whole body but both his legs. One for each time. And it was fucking hilarious but yeah MAintAin CooLnEss yea?? hahaha.

Didnt go to the mosh launch cause i was given overtime. Which was fine by me cause i needed the extra money. I mean heck it was ska anyway, so i guess i didnt really miss much. Got to do the flume ride!! albeit ticketing but sangeetha was kind enough to teach me the controls i even got to take the ride for testing. it was freaking high... and the plunge was punishing.. urh... lost my heart for a while there haha but yeah. i also did a matrix kinda manoever in front of the guests. well as u know the flume ride has 2 plat forms. one for exiting and one for entering. it is seperated in the middle by a conveyer belt which moves the boats. so i was crossing the entering platform to the exit platform to basically brief the guests. so when i stepped on to the conveyer belt. sangeetha accidentally moved the conveyor belt so i spinned 360 degrees, fell onto the platform and immediately got back up in one sweeping move. wah madness... hahah didnt know i could do dat..

*maintain coolness*

nieways im now a big fan of alif's blog. i mean seriously i tot all he wrote in there was crap but now hor.. hehe yeah really love it.. k im off to prayers now.. see yea guys later..

ah mad why do i always have to have sucky days... or sucky endings to happy days... argh.. yesterday was fun but it all ended sucky cause i accidentally throwed my sisters shoes away... argh madnes... there goes another hundred bux... haiyah

todays outing with han was refreshing.. really really refreshing... i mean when u go out with someone new, there are like new topics to talk about, new things to learn and even though me and han have been friends for 2 years already... ive only met her a few times. haha so yea considered new oso. And heck she had a lot of things to talk about so yea really enjoyed her company.... thx! whooPz

felt as though i need to write something. so im gonna.

okie dats all for today... good nytes

4 days is quite a long time duncha tink?

i have a distinct feeling that somebody is ignoring me. donno.. maybe im jumping to conclusions but den again... o well just miss her company dats all...

decided to go the ska fest after all and it was boring ar... i came late and saw only cesspit. They were great but somehow i remember having more fun at the cesspit/59mins cd launch several moons ago. the crowd was better ar. 4 bands doesnt really constitute the gig being called Ska fest. would have been been way better if zakko's band played. Plan to fool ring a bell?? heh. tired of life. already byebye...

dotz

sending out my condolences to huda and her family. Sorry for your loss.....

at work time flew past extraordinaryily fast... my only regret though was it didnt rain.but heck now den its raining...

eating mint ice cream now while lsitening to blink 182's enema of the state. I got reunited with it yesterday. like after 2 years or so of finding it. Donno if it was dat long but heck sure it felt dat way. *mental note* NEVER lend any more cds to friends yang takleh harap!) ok go!!

anyways session was great yesterday. well i tink so.. haha. 4/5 of your- ass came.. bassist not included.. hurhur... Managed to work out several songs. azura was limping because of an injury sustained in a soccer match.. and i was like.. hurhur wah madness happening siolz...!!! ahha east hammers got team to challenge already.. haha so merepekz lar... k... so during a break.. i sat down with din and i looked up at the sky.yes ar i dpt TGK STARS... hurhur but den ar... zura corrected me dat some were satellites.. in fact all the twinkly twinkly stars are satellites... so it was lame lar..

twinkle twinkle little satellites...

nieways... i was really disgusted by all those couples exchanging saliva at the esplanade.. i mean cmon lar.. go do it in behind some bushes or sumthing.. not in full view of the public. even a lesbian couple were doing it. ARGH!!! in times like this i wish i had my own dat i could smooch... haiz... http://friendster.com .....

this is a very interesting article dat i got from someone's blog. it kept me company for quite a while... if u guys donno me dat well. I reallly love to read. I would buy a book and keep reading it day ang night till its over. The only reason i stopped reading nowadays is because my library card got revoked.. so.. heh happy reading


The Racist's Apology
by Alfian Saat

Introduction
This is an email written by 24 year old Singaporean writer Alfian Sa'at. He had earlier written to the artscommunity e-group saying that he was willing to hold creative writing workshops, but only for "indigenous Singaporeans". Somebody asked the obvious, and this is his reply.


I walked out of the house this morning and feared I had become a racist. I passed by a newsstand and a magazine tells me about 50% of the world's most beautiful people are from the West, 10% from Singapore, 45% from HongKong and Taiwan and 5% from India and Malaysia. A JC Decaux billboard says that a lot of people read their ads and they have faces to prove it: Chinese people of various ages and occupations and genders. There are some which show non-Chinese people but they don't have the dignity of individual names, and they are put under the heading 'The Changing Face of Singapore'.

This can mean that perhaps the media is using more non-Chinese people in their ads (which I don't see) or that Singapore's demographic makeup is being altered by the arrival of other races (which I am not aware of, historically). I take a bus and TV Mobile is screening a Taiwanese variety programme. A Singaporean beauty contestant wears a cheongsam as her national costume and asks for an interpreter to translate her replies from Mandarin. The Speak Mandarin campaign informs me of what assets are missing from my life.

Tanya Chua's music video comes on and I unconsciously tally the number of Malay people that appear; I have been doing this for some time now, when I was in JC there was a 'My Singapore' music video which showed images of corporate-looking Chinese women walking through the CBD and Malay women in factory uniforms walking through a bus interchange. Tanya Chua's 'Where I Belong' shows three instances of Malay people populating the landcsape: a husband and wife riding a scooter; a father and son on a bicycle, the son carrying a box one presumes is filled with curry puffs or goreng
pisang, and a group of Malay youths playing soccer in a housing estate ghetto so rundown, it looks like an opposition ward being denied of upgrading, or one of those satellite towns built when Jurong swamps were still being filled.

But perhaps this is an improvement over other images: the satay man, the songbird owner, the mee rebus Makcik, the Malay bride and groom getting married in gold-embroidered finery (and situated on a dais, we Malays like to call them 'royalty for a day', playing the illusion of being king and queen in a country where the royal bloodline has been evicted from their home and told that the ruins of their palace will be converted into a museum).

I think about what Sang Nila Utama really did when he threw his crown into the sea to calm the raging storm; whether the gales spoke to his inner ear: 'if you want to live on the island you must surrender all memory of having once been a prince'. At the Sentosa Merlion there are signs that say that Sang Nila himself saw the Merlion rising from the waters, a fact that the Sejarah Melayu, the Malay Annals, failed to mention. Evidently there is someone called 'Sang Nila' somewhere in the executive committee of the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board.

At the foot of the Raffles statue in Boat Quay there is an inscription that says the man's genius transformed a 'sleepy fishing village' into the modern metropolis it is today, this at the foot of a man who recorded in his journals how he saw the tombs of the Malay kings, and inscriptions on a fortress wall, when he first landed: evidence of an empire, of civilisation.

In an interview a doyenne of Singapore theatre laments that all Singaporeans are 'cultural orphans', including the Malays, because they migrated from Malaysia and Indonesia, and that makes them immigrants too, no matter that one can take a sampan from Johor to Singapore.

I walk through a park in Tampines and see Chinese boys playing basketball at the court and Malay boys playing soccer on the field; I am comforted that my complete uselessness at ball games has prevented me from taking either side, has by default made me a conscientious objector to such disturbing polarities. In the army a sergeant major never called be by my name; I was called 'Melayu', which I suppose was better than 'Ah-Neh', used to address the Indians in the platoon. I remember a fellow Malay platoon mate who told me to give it my all when I was fasting, this was to prevent anyone from saying that we could use religion as an excuse for our weakness. He was eventually posted to the infantry (not logistics or engineers, much less the Navy or Airforce) and I used to imagine him burning up his pre-fasting morning meal to be the first to charge up the hill, yelling the pain of hunger and the pain of being different. The Malay staff sergeant in Officer Cadet School gave me a lot of shit just
to overcompensate, to show everyone that he was not into any form of racial favouritism. I became a victim of the sidelong glances he made as he watched me doing mypushups, those eyes constantly seeking approval from the eyes of the majority.

I see a schoolgirl from a madrasah wearing a tudung on the MRT and she is filling in the pictures in her colouring book. There are many choices among her colour pencils which she can use for skin, but she will use orange, and colour lightly, not brown or black. I have seen her schoolmates before, eyeing branded scoolbags at pasar malams, wearing branded sports shoes, like every other kid. I want to go up to her and hug her, and tell her how her tudung is not just a symbol of modesty, but a symbol of inscrutability. That layer of cloth makes her suspicious to others, it can be used to smuggle in a grenade or an agenda, so she will never get a frontline desk job, she will be expected to hang around with other tudung-wearing women in the university. I think about the fathers who sent their daughters to schools in tudung and reflect on how the media has framed them as shit-stirrers rather than citizens who practised their right to civil disobedience, the same way Gandhi fasted, or Rosa Parks refused to sit at her negroes-only seat on the segregated bus. If I can tell the girl one thing, it is 'integration is not assimilation', or 'tolerance is a failure in understanding' even though it is something she will take time to understand.

I think also of the men who filmed different locations in Singapore with the heinous intent of planting bombs. Did they not consider the various innocent Singaporean lives that could have been claimed by what they were about to do? And I wonder if they had already chosen another country to live in; a country in which they do not have to face a creeping sense of alienation, of redundancy. And I am not talking about an Islamic country, not Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, but an afterlife paradise, where everyone is equal in the eyes of God, where wearing a sarong or having a beard does not immediately make you a proto-terrorist. Or perhaps a country that exists in their minds, nurtured by a growing sense of insularity and isolation, where they walk the streets and everyone else is just a ghost, in whose dead eyes they cannot find any light of empathy or understanding.

Once someone told me: 'But the government is bending over backwards to accommodate you Malays.' I smiled and wanted to ask him if it wasn't the other way round, that the Malays are made to bend forward to be fucked senseless. Another time a journalist asked if the statistical evidence of 'progress' shows that Malays are being given the same opportunities as everyone else. I told her that statistics don't do shit for me, as someone who has to live day by day as a Malay person in this country. I told her one Malay Air Force pilot poster boy, and a few bar charts and graphs, don't make me feel more at home. The only thing they do is to convince non-Malays that the country they live in is truly multiracial, that there are no tensions beneath the veneer of newsprint and newscasts and the rosy speeches of Malay MP's.

I have always believed in multi-racialism. I can say with utmost confidence that I have more friends who are non-Malay than those who are. And I mean real friends, who I confide in, who I've shared many things with, who I do love dearly. And yet, of late, I have the feeling that alot of the things I'm saying, a lot of this talk about alienation and marginalisation, only feeds subconsciously into their sense of how fortunate they are to be born into the status quo. I have written a poem before where I say, 'But more than that we prayed for ourselves,/treading the rosary of our blessings,/for what is pity without thanks for/the opportunity for such pity?' And sometimes I feel as if the more my voice is raised on the fast-eclipsing fate of the minority, the more it feeds into the majority's smugness and arrogance about their assured place in the sun. And this only makes me feel more powerless than if I had kept silent.

So I say now, forgive me if you think my desire to work with my own people marks me out as a racist. Forgive me if you think that my preferences are actually prejudices. Forgive me for retreating into something one can so easily call 'cultural chauvinism'. And I will forgive you for thinking that this person writing this isn't the Alfian that you know, that he has always been moderate and liberal, and I will forgive you if you look at me differently the next time I meet you. For some time already I have felt that as a Malay writer writing in English I have had to carry the burden of articulating so many unvoiced concerns. And the responsibilities associated with this are frightening. I just think it is time I pass on whatever skills I have to other Malay people, so we may tell our stories to those who want to hear them, even though they are stories of loss and loneliness and accidents of birth.

hmmz i donno wat to say lar huhr.. this issue.. has been going on far too long.. but this alfian saat rulez.. shall go find out more about his works... anyways working later.. so shall sleep now.. goodnytez...