THE SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK NOOS

People, I have had my eyes opened and my retinas violated. It was tops!

Lately I’ve been prattling on with this baloney about seeing and tasting and touching and sniffing things to make sure all your opinions are based on fact. With this baloney in mind, I dragged my poor unsuspecting parents along to a tack-ridden kitsch fest to rival the late Liberace on his best day in Vegas.

Haw Par Villa
The Lonely Planet guidebook sent me there. The words ‘grotesque statuary’, ‘gory comeuppance’, and ‘10 courts of hell’ leapt off the page at me. Made me all a-tingle. And only $5 entry. How could I resist such a tourist mecca? And there was a story to go with it—the Tiger Balm fortune story. Next time you go rub a bit o’ balm into your corked thigh, you can think of this place.

Two quick observations
1) The $5 entry fee has evaporated. It may have been used in the past to actually maintain the joint, so the absence of it perhaps gives some clue to Haw Par’s run-downedness.

2) If you want to make your parents look completely aghast for a couple of hours, take them here. I’m sure if the place had been in full working order, it might have been a better experience for them. But it’s run down. The water isn’t running through the channels and paint is flecking off statues all over the shop. But still. As I said to them in my wise and all-knowing manner, “You have to see the bad in life—it makes the good look better.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re the kind of kid who believes you can tell a lot about a person’s frame of mind by simply looking at the books they’re reading, then cop a load of this. I just spent my lunch hour reading a literary masterpiece to rival The Grapes of Wrath titled, I could do anything if only I knew what it was.

I picked it up in the bargain alley of the Kinokuniya bookshop for the princely sum of five smackers. When I sat down at Starbucks to flip through it, I realised the reason for the dramatic price cut from $25 to $5 was because the first 30 pages are actually from a different book called The Schools We Need And Why We Don’t Have Them. But no matter.

I mean, who cares if my first step on the road to finding out what I’m supposed to be doing starts with 30 pages concerning the state of the education system in America, then switches rather dramatically to a half-written sentence stating, “…parents who thought lawyers were certain to be safe and prosperous?” Cryptic, no?

This is my first self-help book.

Read the rest of this entry »