The Stupid, clever, ugly, good-looking, rich and the poor...
Dear TomHa,
What had happened to all the people these days? Isn't this suppoesed to be a happy week? Afterall, Liverpool won the champions league amid all the adversity posed onto them at half time, and given that we, living in this little island named Singapore, which was a crown colony of the British imperial past, should be celebrating about it for at least another week! Well, not everybody watch football and understand the significance of sports on the lives of an average person like me... No matter...

Well, I guess somebody really need to wake up and look around at what they have and stop whining about what they don't have (I hope that whining is not too strong a word here..). I guess it gets pretty distracting when people all over your own hometown keeps talking about how lousy the local guys are, that the rigours of Army life is not turning our guys stronger, but whinier. And all this woohaa is really making me feel sick. Can't this guys who are like that stop what they are doing, me inclusive.. Can't they take a look around and feel that serving their own nation for only 2 1/2 years a discount already? What do we owe the nation? We owe them our lives and livelihood and I certainly believe that we are obliged to maintain them at this status quo, if not, for the better. Perhaps that is why I signed on, I don't know, perhaps I signed on because I knew from the very start that my parents would not have a good time putting me through such an expensive education which their son hates in the first place... How disappointed would they be to learn that their son would prefer to be stupid and not know anything. Yes, the education had done wonders in making me a study-phobic. Perhaps I am just emulating the heroes who had done their part in serving their nation with such pride, dignity and gutso and live on in the hearts of the many generations that followed their departure from this Earth. Perhaps I only want to keep myself from spending that much money on a product like education which I know I would never have liked in the first place. I like to be stupid, as I would like to stress again, but the workings of the society decreed that I could not.

So, I guess this is how the almighty or whatever up there like to do, to make fun of us, the lowly beings which in the end, turned out to be not so lowly afterall, as you compare how our brain works to say, a goldfish? A rich and competent man who was born ugly. A poor and incompetent man who is born handsome, pretty, aesthetically appealing, whatever. Any permutaion of them will do, but the conclusion is that no one gets everything that they want. I would prefer to be put in the situation of being ugly, but being rich and competent. Afterall, I had started slogging ever since I started looking like a adult. Tuitioning kids while telling them that I am some graduate majoring in chinese (Hey, their results really improved ok..), waitering, gardening, even dish wahing at some coffee shop. I had done it all. I think I can be called a part time king. Now, SAF forbids me to work and I had obliged. The trade off in accepting this scholarship is that I would not be rich at the end of my uni days. Trust me, I whined about that quite some days/weeks/months ago. So, so what if you can't speak well but write well? Do you have to cling on the ambition on being a lawyer? Or do you have other choices like journalism to work on? If you choose your ambition over what you do best, I guess it is best that you learn to cope with whatever you have now and improve on it. I have never seen a good looking lawyer (REAL ONE!!!) anyway, and like what my mum always says, Smart people are always the ugly ones... Also, Beethoven is deaf...

Nonetheless, I must stress that as a person with eyes that sometimes stray by themselves, and kicked off a scholarship interview before even being interviewed due to lousy grades, as a person who is doing what he hates most now, but have no other choice and have a set of teeth that does not want to line up properly when he was young and has an odd sense of humor that not many people can understand and am poor and poor with social skills, I am in no position to comment anything. But, as what I always say, No teacher can fully understand why his class finds him boring...