A few posts ago, i touched on the phenomenon of 'hooking up'.
This is a journal article shedding light upon the issue. No, i don't read the
Journal of Sex Research.
been building up a sleep debt for the past fortnight. there's a short break between the quarter-finals and the semi-finals of Euro 2004 for me to reduce the deficit. days pass quickly when football tournaments are on; too liitle time is available between work and football to ruminate on the little things in life or irritate other people, whichever is your thing.
A Day In The Life
i wake up, feeling strangely under-aroused.
i brush my teeth and shave- taking great care not to brush with my razor or shave with my toothbrush.
i shower (somehow this mitigates the fatigue) and get dressed (when i spend some time pondering on which of my three shirts to wear).
i have breakfast. My breakfasts are usually heavy- a lesson i learnt from Napoleon Bonaparte, causing me to feel awkwardly bloated till 11.
i take a dump (this may occur at any stage in the morning). The number of times i shit in the morning depends on the strength of my anal sphincter.
i leave for work.
i get on the bus. if i'm lucky, i'll have a personal space of radius 20 cm. if i'm unlucky, i don't get on the bus cos everyone else decides that my bus looks especially appealing that morning. Perhaps they recognize the bus driver as being THE non-homicidal one. i can only take one bus to work. Most people are heading towards the MRT (train) station, which can be reached by many buses including mine. They take mine.
i see if the very pretty girl, who stayed in the same hostel i did, has boarded the bus at her stop. Despite my best efforts, i cannot get her bus-taking schedule right. Once in a while i get lucky- both she and her equally gorgeous younger sister board my bus.
i watch the news on the bus Mobile TV. i realize that none of the presenters sport local accents.
i reach my workplace.
i work- very hard, very long.
i knock off in the evening, feeling the combined effects of middle-of-night footie watching and paper-pushing drudgery.
i get on the bus home. Most of the idiots who compete with me for space on the morning bus re-appear to compete with me for space on the bus home. i wish some of them would die untimely deaths to ease congestion. Same for the car-owning folks who clog our roads.
i get home, have a shower and dinner. i attend to these activities in a daze. i can never be sure if i'm having my dinner in the buff or showering with my plate of rice. it may have occurred, which explains the strange looks i got.
i muck around for an hour or so.
i go to bed very early.
i wake up very early too. Before most of my family members have gone to bed.
i watch football. i never feel more awake.
i go to bed before any of my family members have woken up. But it takes some time to drift into slumbers cos adrenaline is still coursing through my blood vessels.
RetroCRUSH's The 50 Coolest Song Parts
Strange deaths
Signs of life
Hero of the day: Ouch to the power of 10000
reminds me of
one of the Village People, dunno why
Soccer clips
Oh my God! There's an axe in my head!
Why women smell like fish
My colleagues accuse me of being sexually deviant. which is hard to justify considering my lack of sexual activity. and contrary to popular belief, i run far more football fantasies in my head than sexual ones. Fantasies are a waste of time, and time isn't my most plenteous commodity at present.
in any case, their accusations stem more from paltry knowledge regarding human sexuality than anything else. i don't blame them. We were taught about zygotes in sex ed class, not positions. if you ask me, i think sex is boring. the sociocultural edifice surrounding the act itself, on the other hand, positively exudes interest.
We were having a lunchtime discussion on pornography. the best thing was that we could, in a roundabout way, have justified it as a work-related exchange. anyway, i was struck by the dogmatic positions held by some towards porn, viewing it as some form of deviant aberration. Things are rarely wholly good or bad. when people start to roundly condemn a form of expression prevalent in our society without consideration of diametrically opposed positions, one suspects this stand of apparent moral rectitude is the result of gut irrationalism, rather than careful, nondiscriminatory thought.
as i have already allude to, porn is neither wholly good nor bad in my humble opinion. but then again, i've always been wary of judging something's merits and faults based on incomplete knowledge (i'm bullshitting, i know... social desirability you see). And i'm not saying this because i haven't the foggiest what the arguments for and against pornography are.
To correct a common misconception, porn does not primarily comprise of individuals performing really nasty acts on one another. Sometimes they do, but they usually stick to the conventional stuff. The porn industry is the best example of a macroeconomic system where supply actually corresponds to demand. if one thinks about it carefully, it is the classic liberal economy Adam Smith was writing about in
The Wealth of Nations (no jokes about the Invisible Hand please). i shan't go into details. To cut a long story short, what this essentially means is that the macroscopic distribution of porn content reflects the consumers' interests at large. there is no reason to believe that there is a Big Organization manipulating our putative desires or over-regulating the economy, so to speak. There will always be a minority that enjoys the nasty stuff, and they can still satisfy their urges with the comparatively smaller output from the producers. The general public distaste towards the stronger poison means that the minority interests stay in the minority. Nonetheless there'll always be something for everyone.
I attended my teacher's wake last night.
He had been one of the more influential (in the good way) figures in my life.
He left on Friday morning, leaving behnd his wife, another teacher of mine, and two very young children at a relatively tender age.
The last time I saw his wife cry was when we received our 'O' Levels results slips. We had disappointed her bitterly with our atrocious results. She was heavily pregnant then. Now she could hardly be more haggard.
He didn't have many kin. So a good number of us accompanied his immediate family in performing the Buddhist rites. Appropriate in a way, aren't we all his children?
On a less serious note, Euro 2004 has started. i don't expect to sleep more than 3-4 hours a day on average for the next three weeks. Don't irritate me.
60th anniversary of the Normandy landings, never forget...
Responsive face
taxi girl
Life's a beach!
Impossible Objects
A good partner is essential
Sex Science Timeline
Much as i expected, the paper was found to be unreadable, which is never a good thing. you'd never guess from perusing this blog. i don't blame anyone; i gave up proofreading it myself after the second page. the German Enlightenment philosophers can get away with writing impenetrable prose, but not me. cos nobody needs to study my works in order to pass examinations.
i stunned my Corporate Support Officer by suggesting, in all seriousness, that she sell her body if she found working in a regular office too much of a drag to bear. she wouldn't be the hottest property in the pimping circles, but at least there is no risk of starvation. we can for, convenience's sake, divide our material possessions into liquid (cash, shares, etc...) or non-liquid assets (property, luxury goods, etc...). Women, collectively and in general, have one more non-liquid asset than men. we exclude the male homosexuals and the pretty boys from the male group for obvious reasons. if i, a heterosexual and unattractive member of the male persuasion, refuse to work, i'd pretty much be reduced to destitution in no time (we don't have a welfare state); unless i swallow some dignity (or cum) and offer my ass for sale. women can always hire a pimp and spread her legs for money. technically it's work, but as far as i know, it's the only job in the world where one can file nails or read the papers while servicing clients. and don't make the mistake of thinking only relatively attractive ladies can be sex workers. there are Vegas call-girls and there are sordid, back-alley strumpets. you have no idea how desperately some men are for pussy. if you think about it, the pursuit for pussy constitutes a large component of the male psyche. some of us wouldn't get our butts off the couch if they wasn't pussy to be potentially had. this is an incredibly sexist view i'm suggesting but nobody's ever thought the world's PC Disneyland.
i love
this article by Benoit Denizet-Lewis. His articles are usually too prolix for my taste, but this one sustained my interest throughout because of the subject matter. in a nutshell, he's telling us what many of us already know teenage girls are sleeping around and giving blow-jobs to acquaintances, but the male recipients celebrate the greatest sociological advancement since late-night porn on cable. personally i'm not as excited as i might have been cos i doubt the girls i know are into 'hooking up'. but if they are doing it secretly and i haven't invited to participate in their activities, i'd be endlessly infuriated. anyway i'm not so much concerned with the issues of female empowerment as with the implications for male-female relationships.
this isn't the first time i've encountered stories about girls sleeping with their friends. in Taiwan. i heard about girls sleeping with their guy friends who have difficulty finding dates, sort of as a consolation. which is why i readily tell my female acquaintances about my single status. you never know when Lady Luck will smile on me. then of course, we have Angelina Jolie's hotel room romps with her close guy friends. to me this arrangement is logical. Let's examine the premises. Guys and gals want sex, some in larger quanitites than others. Sex requires a partner (i think solo sex is an oxymoron). Suitable partners are not always readily available. Sex with strangers is unfulfilling (however, to paraphrase Woody Allen, as far as unfulfilling activities go, it is certainly one of the best). People have friends of the opposite gender. They like their friends. as the haughty maths professor would say, you can follow it up from here. Society at large would certainly be more interesting if hook-ups become commonplace. we can do so by indoctrinating women (like credit-card companies often do for different reasons) into believing that casual sexual encounters with friends are safe and liberating. for one, the phrase 'having a wide circle of friends' would gain a whole new connotation.
new month, new title heading, as usual. needless to say, i've been reading Nietzsche.
wonderfully refreshing to have a public holiday bisect the working week. one common complain we have here is the lack of public holidays. if i'm not mistaken, we have the fewest public holidays in this region. i suspect one of them is reserved for a certain former Prime Minister's birthday when he passes on from this world. if not i guess the next best thing is to recognize another official religion. Judaism would be nice. we could import several thousand Israelis from the hitherto Palestinian lands and grant them citizenship. preferably atheletes in accordance to our foreign sporting talent policy. and ironically this move could earn us the kudos from Arab nationalists, but i doubt our immediate neighbours would be too pleased about that. anyway it's just a suggestion, no need to take it too seriously.
i just completed a 8000-word paper in three days. the writing part that is, research took a whole week. strange that the most substantial academic undertaking i've had (this one) should take place in the school holidays. i won't receive feedback on it till Friday, but no doubt there will be significant alterations to be made.
watched Ravi Shankar twiddle with his sitar on TV a few days back. i wonder if he can, or anyone for that matter play the electric guitar at that speed. if we could find a drummer who can match him for pace, then we could have quite a rock act.
