Relentlessly Superior.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009
[3:43 PM]

Aunties tend to be generous when serving food portions to boys. My lady friend and I made an order for two bowls of Laksa. The stall doesn't prepare their ingredients before hand and have only one pot to prepare Laksa as they sell other dishes as well such as tom yum and yong tau fu, which they cook upon order as well. Sounds dubiously primitive but I guess it's their way of ensuring freshness. Fresh is good! So we had to wait for awhile. When one bowl was ready, the aunty gave it to us and said "This one ah boy one." My friend was quick to assume it was the one with the larger portions of ingredients. When the second bowl came, I noticed there wasn't really much significant difference other than the fact that "ah boy one" had more chilli (ironically I don't handle chilli as well my as my lady friend, it's one of the stereotypes of being a a boy and a malay that I embarrassingly fail to comply to). When we got to our table I really could not tell the difference and so helped myself to the nearest bowl, only to be scolded by my friend who blamed me for trying to cheat and refused to have the one with the supposed larger portion. Why do people always assume that boys eat a lot more than girls? It's a skewered stereotype that perhaps has its basis on the generally larger built of men. I don't agree that our size should be used as a guideline to our food intake and eating habits. There's probably some truth in the fact that the generally larger sized people (read, fat) tend to eat more, but men who are genetically built to be larger and have more muscle mass surely cannot be subjected to a similar stereotype! I simply refuse to acknowledge any truth in such generic sentiment for I have seen the opposite to be true! So don't assume. It's as good (or bad) as stereotyping someone based on his cultural or religious practices, though I don't mind it as joke sometimes. I personally love stupid Mat jokes. (How to make a Mat confuse? Put him in a circular room, he can't relek one corner haha!) Like I was teasing an Indian friend who claimed to have never bought anything from the Indian food stall in school despite being Indian. Denouncing your own race is it? Haha of cos not, far from it. She wore this T-shirt that said "Cold Storage Kids Run" to the exam today, I couldn't stop laughing.

I never thought I would ever write anything here ever again. But it's nice to know that I still have a little abandoned corner somewhere in the WWW where I could still lament, or celebrate, or simply just write about my mundane life. How interesting is it to read about the life of a college freshman who's dying underneath piles after piles of neverending assignments. One freshman semester is about to be done in a week's time. We are in the midst of exams at the moment. I haven't written full length essays for more than 2 years so you can imagine the agony my hand is going through right now after writing 3 long continuous History essays under 2half hours. Much better now actually but at the end of the second essay earlier I was very much hoping for the paper to end there and then. It was in so much pain I couldn't write the last one without making faces and biting my lips trying to tahan.

At least two papers down, only two more to go next week. College has been a rather interesting journey of self-realisation and maturation. Why does college life in the West seem so much more fun and enjoyable as compared to ours? Or is it simply a false depiction propagated by the entertainment and films? We film history students know the power that the cinema beholds. Well actually it doesn't take a genius to realise that. I remember this famous line that I kept hearing on tv: "Let us all bow down to the power of the cinema." I can't remember who said it though. Was it Tom Hanks? Robert Deniro? How can we take a back seat and simply say oh relax it's only a movie when these movies are altering history and knowledge according to selfish needs of mass entertainment and nationalistic appropriation? It's disgusting. No actually it's quite enlightening to look at it in retrospect. They always make you go wow, I can't believe they did that. And even more amazing is their continuous success in such horrible deeds. But to blame film alone on skewering the passage of history is rather unfair. History in itself is not all about the truths. It is only as true as one would like it to be. People who write history do so with certain intention in mind whatever it may be. Our own Singapore history is not all factual. I would think of it more as a tale of mythologised culture, not at all erronous, but definitely altered to a certain shape that suits the needs of the country and the government. The entire world is guilty of it. So what's the point of studying history right? Besides people like George Bush never learn from it. I don't know. Yet I'm going to graduate from college with a degree in it. Yeehaw cowboy.

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