Kevin Low

After more than a year of waiting, my hotmail account finally grew in capacity. As you can see, it grew from a pathetic 2MB (that has been lurking around for the past 5 years), to the current 25MB. This is good enough for me since I don’t usually store large mails in my account, given the original low capacity.

Hotmail have been trying to increase the capacity of their users following Yahoo’s explosive increase from the original 6MB to the good-enough 200MB (for a brief period, it was 100MB) and then to the unbelieveable 1GB (which could be considered a response to Gmail). The emergence of Gmail really changed the free email provider landscape on the Internet. Hotmail have been a little biased. I know of users with 250MB capacity – free. So my 25MB is considered nothing.

Something tells you that the image of your school is seriously distorted and miscomprehended by the public when you step into a the lift with an old lady and an old man, in your school uniform and hear the following:

Old Lady: ‘Ah Lao ah, eh tuk ji eh ou deng eh huk sei tia tio xi ho kia.’ (Literally means: ‘Husband, can study in this school, this student must be very good child.’)

There was no one else in the lift and the lady was pointing to the wall near me so I assumed she was talking about me.

Old Man: ‘Orrr!’

The lift stopped at their destinated storey.

Old Lady: ‘Ho kia.’ (Literally means: ‘Good child’)

She seems to be pointing at me to her old man again. Then they left the lift.

I am bewildered. Was I flattered? Am I supposed to be happy or sad? For my school or myself? Or should I first applaud the efforts of our publicity department? As mentioned earlier, there are lots of contradiction between reality and perception of the public. I am not really surprised in the first place – it is just the kind of credit that is ‘credited’ wrongly. I admit the world is confusing and basically absurd, but this seem out of societal norm. Perhaps I am wrong – the society is like this: facade, fakes, nonsense, lies. I certainly hope we don’t have to be like that to continue to survive in this world.

By the way, to all teachers in the world – Happy Teachers’ Day. I would like all teachers to take note that they should correctly reflect the society to the students while in the classroom. Some may say it is too cruel or that the students aren’t mature enough to understand the world – but that simply drive students into confusion and even maddness when they see the real world. In any case, thanks all who have taught me and misleaded me into thinking that the world is kind and nice.

After a long (about 8 days) trip to Yunnan, I am finally back, at least in one piece. The place is great, the people (not counting the sales people) are nice and the mountains are hard to climb. Okay, my English is going down, now that I haven’t been really using it for the past week. The computer too, I haven’t seen a computer at work for a week! There are TVs but the channels are very limited, due to the location.

I ended up shooting more than 300 photos (thanks to a 512 MB SD card I borrowed from my aunt), and also getting scammed by a group of sales people selling worthless stuff. Well, I would say everyone in the group got conned in a way or two. Yes, we were really stupid. The people there have the mindset that we are damn rich and can afford to be conned this way and so, they feel that it is not morally wrong since they are actually ‘robbing the rich, to help the poor’. I do not agree because more than 99% of the people in our group are students and they don’t really have much money. Most importantly, they really tarnish the image of the Republic.

I know it is hard, and that we have been living way to comfortably in Singapore. I really think that most of us still don’t know how is the world like. We went there, to help the people there, provide some kind of effort to move their economy, but we ended up getting scammed. We surely won’t think it is fair. Then again, someone says, ‘The world is never fair’. Okay, so let this be a lesson to punish our naivety. Some in our group said, “Let this be a practising spot for us to sharpen our life skills. We would have fell harder if this happened in London.” Agreed. But ultimately, I must say we have really been extremely stupid. Some people wouldn’t even believe they have been scammed, or at least in whichever way they are.

Oh yah, it is supposed to be a ‘public holiday’ for voting the president today. Too bad it doesn’t come, and there probably won’t be such a day any time soon in the future because there is still another 6 more years to wait. Of course, we can perhaps think about the General Elections, but it is probably too earlier now a time to think about. Moreover, the results doesn’t really means much to the people here.

One main thing I noticed in China is their advertising. I guess that industry is probably the most powerful, booming one currently. Posters and bill-boards cover the cities and buildings or walls. These banners or whatever design are professionally-done, and possess a high level of artistic value. Most importantly, they are well-thought and nicely-done. I later read a news article about the truth behind some of these advertisements (mainly about how some people got conned by the slogans and stuff), and realised how fake this whole world is. Of course, I don’t need all these bad experience and negative news to inform me about that. The problems is that I really observe the magnitude of it occurring – it is really scary.

Bad stuff aside, the food there is good and cheap. I think it is probably the only stuff people don’t con about and really value-for-money. A huge bowl of noodles in the stalls by the side of shophouses in the cities are sold at 3.5 Yuan and McChicken in the real McDonalds going at 5 Yuan. I mean that’s really good price for fast food. Well, that’s the prices I saw, I didn’t realy go and try them because we had something else provided.

Our camp isn’t really that exciting compared to Bok’s. His account can be found here.

Having been going through Intertext classes for almost a term, I was bombarded by an avalanche of interpretation of Absurdist literature, and forced to link the whole idea with the idea of Existentialism. It appears, that to the young, especially the apathetic ones of this age, is extremely vulnerable to being converted to this form of atheist-ness. In any case, they ignore rather than strongly oppose the possible existence of any God or divine, supreme being. They speak of how the universe is essentially illogical and that everything has no purpose or meaning. They asserts that one must adjust oneself to get out of the social conventions and be indifferent to the rest of the world because it is simply too hard to fully subscribe to any existing structure of religion or belief.

The whole irony is that human beings are somehow endowed with this form of logical reasoning, a term given to this process of explanation given by us, and yet it does not fit into the rest of the picture. Fundamentally, it has not been able to answer many questions. The question that remains deep in the flaw of what known as logical reasoning is the real purpose of existence. And the answers themselves, usually branches out to several possibilities or motivates further questioning that brings about essentially no meaning to the initial question. Even Douglas Adam’s warned us of how absurd the universe is (even when he has gone so far to make the one in his story much weirder than that of ours). Because of such, there really exist no causal chain – what happens is all within our mind, our psyche and our ‘logical reasoning’ that brings about all these nonsense.

At the end of the day, the existentialist are questioning whether our lives is all about waiting. The answer they have come up with is a combination of their beliefs and derived from the original set structure that humans traditionally abide by. We are to invent a structure for ourselves, for we are the only being who can truly define ourselves. In fact, we are already bound by the earlier matrix that we have no way of changing – because we can’t find a way around it – our names. Names are simply tool of identification used by the others to aid their definition and recognition of you. As a joke puts it: What is yours but used by everyone else more than yourself – you name. Can we eventually get out of the system? Are we born to survive only in societies as Plato has somehow postulated.

Treat this as a practice for my essay writing on philosophy and basically existentialism. If it appears too chim, forget it. Take it that I am crapping.

It appears that Mib just realised that the front page of erpz.net have been changed – a major makeover event that occurred more than one and a half month ago. Nah, that’s not important. What matters is that he agrees with me with regards to the working erpz.net

Maybe we shouldn’t just handover some space to anyone. I thought getting Bryan Tee in would be a good idea, except that he seems too novice a writer to me. But he does have the tongue of critics though he isn’t that serious about most issues we usually discuss.

The basic reason why we are seemingly neglecting erpz.net is that we are simply too busy with our school work. Then you might ask, why do we still blog? This is similar to the question some traditional teachers ask their blogging students who claims to have no time for school work. Well, I guess it is because we still have the passion to argue for what we really believe. Other than that, there is an element of self-publicity – not that it is very important. But the fundamental benefit for me is the writing part. I can vouch that if you bother to blog in the best language you can, you will improve in writing (only, if you don’t really speak) and verbal expression in no time. You can talk crap but ultimately, it is a fact that your mind is generating words – the text that you may have come across and wanted to comment on and so on.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if you add a touch of Singlish, or Chinese, or even dialects for they are beneficial to the readers in understanding the Singaporean’s point of view towards things. It is ‘Uniquely Singapore’ (To quote from STB’s slogan). And you can also be Uniquely [something else]. Say, Mib wants to be ‘Uniquely Mib’ and decides to scatter anti-japanese propaganda all over his blog, there should be no reason why you should scoff at his views. You can only decide to disagree with him and then scoot off to somewhere else.

Thanks Bingyuan, Leonard and Wei Sheng. Everyone did a good job – it is just not good enough – but nevermind. I think we have put in everything we have. Recognition from oneselves is more important. Call it self-consolation if you like, but I thought we should learn to attach and dettach from society readily so that our emotions are not affected. Of course, if I want to go extreme, I can always go existentialist and say, “Grand Finals is just the society’s way of showing their recognition, and I wouldn’t accept it even if I was offered the opportunity”.

The term is nearing its end, and so is the year. While we may dangle from the leftovers of this year, I truly hope the next year would be a really new and great one.

We have come to the end of this project, and it shall end for now until we pick it up later, soon. Yah, that’s all, I am quite pissed actually. If you are free, and is looking for something to do, I suggest you go and vote for the president. This election is designed in the Singaporean-style, please do not be surprise by how strange the voting process is.

Haven’t been blogging. I know. I was trying to type a Chinese article. It is supposedly about how my perception of Chinese Language change as I grew. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my laptop (which contains the file) to hook online. Too bad, that will just stay in my laptop for now. In any case, I soon won’t be blogging because of the coming overseas camp. But when I am back, I probably be spamming a hell load of photos coupled with maybe 4 days long of blog entry – that is supposed to be posted when I am there.

I am going to Yunnan, and there is definitely no access to a computer, not to mention going online. Well, it isn’t that bad, because I am writing all the stuff (I want to type) down on some book or whatsoever I can find in the room of the motel. This is a great time for slacking.

Speaking of returning from Yunnan – going back to work, I thought I would be able to see our Third ‘Elected’ President of Singapore on the day of return, which is supposed to be a public holiday if there really is an election. Well, it turns out that I have met him – he is the same as the “Second Elected” one. No point being frustrated, it is alright anyway. In fact it is quite good that there is no need to wait for results and all these sort of stuff.