the call

a few days after having passed my qualifying interview for the masters program, i got a call. this call would be the start of a series of events that eventually became the defining moment of my service, one that shook me to my core and transformed my perception of the organisation that i had held so dear and had committed my life to.

it was one afternoon in apr 2005. i was at my desk settling some matters pertaining to some routine dk matters when the phone rang. a lady's voice came on. she sounded nice enough. hello, can i speak with (my rank & name)? i affirmed i was the person she was looking for... oh hi sir, i am (so and so) from the security department. can you come down to the department's office for an interview on (date & time)? at that very moment, i knew it was my turn. feigning ignorance (or rather, hoping against reality that it was not), i asked, what is this interview for? erm, oh, it's nothing, it's only a routine interview she replied. "routine" she said? my foot! no interviews by that department could ever be "routine". i had heard of people getting called up for "routine" interviews and i knew they were anything but "routine"... my heart pounded. we firmed up the interview date and i hung up.

once i hung up, i contacted d (who had been "interviewed" before) and told him about it. they called me, i said. he immediately knew what i meant. finally. yes, finally, it was my turn. i felt very uneasy. resigned. yet in a strange way, i bore hope that it would be a "routine" interview. on the other hand, since d's interview, i had psyched myself up for it. i had told myself that when my turn came, i would be honest about my sexuality. nothing beats being honest, i told myself. by then, it was clear to me that there was a systematic hunt going on for gay military persons. i knew my turn would come sooner or later.

read on the "interview" aka interogation....

pix from http://pinayabroad.wordpress.com/

wonderful singapore

a different perspective of singapore. and a look at the fireworks for this year's national day parade.

enjoy!

ps: and yes, do watch in hd and fullscreen to be able to enjoy the depth of the production!

wonders

amazing! reminds me of how insignificant we and our worldly desires and worries are.

ps: watch it in hd and fullscreen!

placebo effect

my mum has been making helluva lot of noise in recents days about painful joints at her hands and legs. and to help manage her pain, she would pull and bent her fingers non-stop through the day. in addition, she would pour the axe brand oil (hong you) onto her joints. her usage of the hong you was so high that she could finish 1 huge bottle a week. yup, a normal person would probably take 1-2 years to finish one huge bottle, but she did it in slightly less than a week. it was so bad that whenever i step into the house after work, the whole house would be filled with the hong you smell. and it was very choking. frankly, i never had such adverse reaction to the hong you smell until recently.  initially i tried to accomodate her complains and try to see how i could help her. but eventually after observing her for sometime, i concluded it was due to her idle mind and that she was simply trying to get attention. her complaints increased signficantly after my 2nd sis went overseas couple of days back. and it further confirmed my suspicion that her idle mind was creating all these issues for her cos my second sis has been the one who would visit her in the day to get her her lunch and teabreak.

this morning, she started throwing tantrums about her pains. she said it was unbearable and that she needed to see my family gp to get an injection. this has always been her belief - that my family gp was able to cure her of all pains cos he had done so before by giving her some injections. i was sure it was her mind again. over the past couple of years, whenever she complained of pain, the doctors (regardless of gp or the hospital) had always end up prescribing her with nothing more than panadol and that some doctors even suggested that it was psychological and that they could not do any further thing to help her. she kept on with her complaining and at one point, asked for me to give her taxi fare so that she could head to the gp herself. eventually, i gave in and drove her to the doctor. i decided that it would be easier to just drive her to the doctor and to fulfil her desire to see him.

this doctor had been my family's gp since the late 60's. he operated on me when i was 5years old. and when we moved to marine parade, we found that he had also opened a clinic there. and since then, we have gone to him whenever we need to consult a doctor. ok, back to the story. at the clinic, i explained to the doctor about her pain and all the history in pain management etc, and i told him that my mum claimed he could cure all her pains because he had done so before. he looked at me in my eyes, checked through his notes and told me this - that what he had previously given her was nothing more than vit b complex. there is really nothing more he could do because there is really nothing really wrong with her. he also shared that many elderly patients has similar complains and, like my mum, have the belief that doctors could do wonders for them. and he added that we should not underestimate this belief but have to go along with it as it would contribute directly to the patient's well-being. put simply, managing a patient's psychological well-being is part of the overall pain management strategy.

and with this, he looked at my mum and told her that he will once again give her the injection to make her strong (i noticed he did not say the injection will cure her of her pain). as he did so, he spoke of how good the medication was and how the one could smell the medication once the bottle is opened, etc. he then gave her the same vit b complex injection. as he administered the injection, i looked at my mum and for that moment, i felt sad for her... about 15min after the injection, as we sat at the coffee shop beside the clinic, my mum exclaimed in amazement how good the doctor and how effective the injection was. she then held out her palms, gave the twinkle twinkle little star gestures, and told me that all her pains had totally disappeared.

i looked at her. i kept quiet.

i continued drinking my coffee.

gay-hunt

last month, i chanced upon a friend's pic in fb. i had lost his contact couple of years back and was happy to see him again. he was one of the few gay military person i know back then and i had taken special efforts to keep in contact with him (as i did with a couple of others). somehow, i have this instinct to want to care and show concern for those who were in the same shoe as me - gay and in the military. and i would play mentor to them and guide them along the way as i strongly felt that as a senior, i could help guide them in their career and wherever possible, we could also support each other given the difficult and highly homophobic environment that gay service persons have to operate in (not in an activistic way but in a way where we can lent each other a listening ear whenever we face any tensions). this person was no exception despite the fact that he was rather nonchalant about our friendship. i supposed i was simply a friend of a friend. anyway, i kept in contact with him and would frequently ask about his well-being. that was until i lost my phone and all the contact details inside.

so, you could imagine how happy i felt when i saw him in fb. without hesitation, i wrote him an email and asked how he had been. he did not reply until a week later. his reply sounded curt and unfriendly. he said something along the line of "don't pretend as tho you do not know how i am...". it was a rude shock to recieve such a kind of email from someone whom you had cared for and had monitored his well-being from afar. i replied simply - no, i do not know. i left service 2 years ago... i simply did not know where he was coming from nor what he meant by the hostile-sounding email.

i got his reply yesterday. when i read his reply, i understood straight away why he responded the way he did in my email to him. but on the same token, it made me sad and angry. sad because his email reflected his lack of trust in me, sad that he was naive enough to believe the lies put forth by his interrogators. and i was angry that words had been put in my mouth. words that wrongly led him to doubt my friendship. and worst still, words that reflect the freaking state of affairs the security personnel in the forces had resorted to as part of their witchhunt for gay servicemen! well, in his email reply, he said that they (altho he did not explicitly mention the security personnel, it was clear to me) had told him that it was i who outed him to them. wtf! if i had ever outed any of my military gay friends to them, may i die a horrible death right now! damned! talk about professionalism and integrity! f-u! (see! tell you i was, and still am, angry!)

unable to contain my emotions, i smsed another friend (another ex-service gay person) and told him about it. like me, he lamented about the state of things. and he added that he was not surprised about the naivety of this friend. i wished my friend well in my email reply and ended with a take care. i saw no need to explain myself too much. sighs... much as i wanted to put my past behind and move on, it is news like this that remind me of the past and i would get all flustered and angry again. how stupid of me to have given my life to them in the name of protecting the country. not only did they not thank me for my service, they even went so low as to use me to kill others. despicable people! f-ing despicable people!

sighs...

man am i glad i can see things clearly now.

memories of wild swans

i am going to do some aimless rantings in this post.

and these rantings came about following a short online/ sms conversation with a friend on friday evening. you see, just as he bade me good night, he shared that he would be heading back to read the book "wild swans" before retiring. hmmm, the title sounded familiar i thought. so, after our conversation ended, i googled the title and realized i had read the book some 7-8 years back (or perhaps even more?). and the image of the book reminded me of a couple of things...

i was with james back then. and that was the time where heading to the bookstore was a routine thing for us. we would head to either kinokuniya at taka, or borders at wheelock. yes, borders at wheelock. the one that recently closed (in a way, its closing marked another closure of a piece of my past). for james, he would head straight to either the gender studies section or the magazine section (he was a huge fan of entertainment weekly). as for me, i would usually hang around at the fiction, the self-help or the cooking/ recipe section... that was how we spend our evenings. reading.

talking about wild swans... well, i couldn't really recall the story per se. but it did remind me of a specific remark that james made one evening at kinokuniya. he remarked that i only read stories that depict lives of people (particularly women) during the period of the cultural revolution. heh heh... indeed i was. i supposed in a way, these stories reminded me of my mum's younger days. and through these stories, it also gave me a glimpse of what china was like during the revolution.

lastly, i was also reminded about how anal i was about spelling mistakes/ typo errors. you see, while reading the book, i noticed a couple of typo errors. and being someone who's rather anal about such mistakes, my first thoughts were - this is so unprofessional! how could the author possibly make such mistakes! i felt sufficiently disturbed to google for jung chang's email and wrote to her about it. i was rather surprised when i got her reply, but when i read her reply, i was totally unimpressed. she sounded super nonchalant about it, so below my expectations of a professional writer. well, i couldn't recall her exact words, but it went on something along the following tone... oh, it was no biggie, really... i mean, it's only a few words out of the whole book... damned! i thought, that was so unprofessional! she should have at least acknowledge the error and promised to change it in subsequent reprints. and she did not even thank me for reading her book! anyway, after that, i kinda lost my interest in jung chang's books...

:-)

7 nieces

yup, all-in-all, i have 7 nieces. yes, all nieces. not a single nephew... the first 6, of which the oldest should be 23 years of age this coming dec, are all children of my 2 elder sisters, while the youngest, just a little pass 1 year old, belongs my brother.

not too sure the reasons behind why all girls, but i am certainly not complaining. to me, all children are beautiful. it doesn't matter whether they are boys or girls, as long as they are healthy... then again, it would be nice to have a little boy for a change.

heh heh...

ps: and as for me, i have a female doggie! heh heh...

1 year old

have not met my niece for almost 2 months and when she first saw me this afternoon, i could see the apprehension in her eyes. but before i knew it, she warmed up to me and soon enough, she was literally crawling all over me! ahhhh... such an adorable 1-year old! (1 year and 2 weeks to be exact)... heh heh! missed her birthday but managed to buy her a gold anklet last evening.  got it on for her after some tries and she was rather amused by the little bears and bells attached to it!

such an adorable girl!

:-)

drinks

and i do not mean the physical act of drinking. i mean "drink" as in "alcohol-intake". well, after more than a year, i have started taking alcohol again. i stopped taking alcohol last august after listening to one venerable's sharing.

but of late, my body felt rather uneasy, the kind of uneasy where i could feel the "cold" from within. and so i thought, perhaps i should just try to take some alcohol to warm my inner core up. it might do my health some good. and so i started taking alcohol again. the first drink was when i visited sentosa 2 weekends ago. and i took some beer again over this weekend (ya... beer, so man right? so ah beng chek right? lolx) i actually down a bottle of heinekan over my pepper crab dinner on fri evening and can of asahi over my marutama ramen last evening!

and woh! my whole body literally heated up! now, i cannot really be sure it was the beer, but well, what the heck right? i felt heat coming right from within my core and i was literally hot! (no, not that kinda hot. i meant, temperature hot)... ha ha... and on both fri and sat nights, i ended up tossing and turning in bed through the night!

tsk tsk tsk!

ok, so... back to the issue of alcohol. now, do i feel i have broken my vow to observe my precept? no, i did not. i was in control. i took the alcohol in moderation. and what was most important, and the crux of the matter, was that the motivation to drink was not my attachment to wanting to feel "high from alcohol" aka drunk, it was for health reasons. and from that perspective, i thought, well, i am still managing and conducting myself well as a good and proper buddhist.

happy children's day

happy children's day everyone!

don't let the child in you disappear, no matter how old you are! I strongly believe there're many characteristics of children that we need to retain as we grow older. and they include innocence, curiosity, dare, openness, and laughter. so, yes, on this children's day 2011, let us remind ourselves again of these characteristics, and go out, make friends, experience life, smile, and be happy!

bad uncle!

bad uncle! bad uncle!

omfg! i actually forgot about my niece's first birthday!

and i only remember it today! 2 weeks late! and to think that on that day itself, i was on leave to take my mum to the clinic (2 clinics for that matter!), and i congratulated one of my staff for being a father the fourth time round, and i thought - ooo, it's lky's birthday, etc... and i forgot about my niece!

yes...

bad uncle! bad uncle!