Rant 516 / Am I Screwed?

The mire the Catholic Church is in is deep! The anger isn't ending at all, probably because of all the dirt people keep digging up regardless of age. One of the orders even disowned its founder who's been dead since 2008. What the heck? Anyway the Vatican is telling all Catholics to keep praying. Maybe if they pray enough the paedophilia will vanish. That will show the unbelievers who ridicule prayers! XD












Journalists are trying to tell LKY and LHL to stop suing them. That's stupid. If they want to avoid getting sued they should try to do some actual unbiased reporting based on solid evidence. In other words, if they don't have any undeniable and ground-breaking news to reveal to the world, they should keep their mouths shut. Doing what they've been doing is just asking for trouble, especially when our leaders already have a reputation for winning defamation suits.

I don't think they have ever lost, or at least I'm not aware of any such instances.

Telling them to stop suing is rather pointless, especially when all their actions have been legally justified. It's kinda like crying after getting caned by the principal. Only children do that. Real men stare at him angrily and puncture his tires after school.













Speaking of caning, I was caned once in primary school. Not sure if I've ever mentioned this in this blog. It was a pointless mistake I made in either Primary One or Two. I was playing catching aka police-and-thief during recess when the "thief" ran out of the school gates. So the two of us chased him out. We merely ran out from one gate and back through another. I wasn't even sure it was a punishable offence.

Then when recess ended a "concerned mother" (for a lack of a better term and a more suitable expletive, I'll use this phrase to describe her) came to my form teacher (still remember it was Ms Teo, probably Eurasian but not sure) and whispered something to her. I still remember her face as she pointed at us with her fingers. It was as if she was telling her a terrible secret and we were suspects in a serious crime.

Unsurprisingly Ms Teo picked us out and brought us to our principal Mr Jaya (Mr Jayachandran, but everyone addresses him using the shortened version). After he spoke to us some English I couldn't comprehend (yea my English sucked that badly till somewhere in Primary 3), we were caned once each with the standard rattan (not completely sure if it's rattan, but it's kind of wooden and very flexible, the sort my own mother used on us at home for the same purpose).

It wasn't exactly painful since I have suffered canings far worse than that at home, but that was still a big difference from getting a mere scolding from a big dark man.

Of course that wasn't the worst punishment I've ever received in school. In Primary Three I was almost expelled because of my lack of discipline during class. My English teacher, Mr Lingam, never showed any mercy. If we made small mistakes, he wrote complaints to the parents that require a signature from them. Big mistakes, it was either some weird punishment or a trip to the principal.

One example of a "weird punishment" that I can remember was to get the student to stand outside the classroom till the end of the lesson. Then he would tell him to walk to the opposite end of the corridor (15-20m away I think) and shout an apology to him. If we couldn't hear it clearly, he'd get him to repeat till everyone in the room can hear him properly.

That was the better option, compared to seeing Mr Jaya. That dude was fierce! Seriously I don't think I had ever seen him smile when he spoke to students except during special occasions.

I can still recall how Mr Lingam always mentioned that I was a foreign student every time he brought me to him. I never understood what the word "foreign" meant till much later. I did ask my parents but the best answer I got was that he meant I was a "forest" student, ie wild and undisciplined. It may sound funny, but remember none of them were English-educated and I never did get the written form of that word.

Anyway after one trip too many he finally decided to "sack" me. I didn't know what he was saying because c'mon, which 9-year-old (I think it's 9) has heard of this word used this way before?

I don't remember how I eventually understood the trouble I was in, but I did by the next class (Mr Heo's Mother Tongue lesson). Let's be frank. I was 9 and I didn't know what would happen if I couldn't study there. Even worse, what would happen at home?

The fear drove me nuts and I cried during the rest of the classes. I didn't even think to leave right away. If I'm not wrong it was because I thought if I stayed then maybe there was something I could do to stop it.

Of course there wasn't. So I went home after school, got my parents in a panic and then had tuition that night. Ms Lisa Ang, that was my then-tutor's name. She got married later but insisted me and my bro (both of us were being tutored by her) call her Ms Ang. Can't remember what her husband's surname was, even though we were close enough that my family and I went to her new home for dinner some time after her wedding.

After I grew up I realized the most amazing thing about her was her balls. Seriously, she had to have lots of it to ask for a $50 raise every year. According to her it was due to rises in transport costs but we knew it was because I was having consistently good results - 4th in class straight for 2 years in Pri1 and Pri 2, then EM1 (there were only about 10-15 of us in our year in our school) and top class in school from Pri 4 onwards, Best Progress Prize for one year and 5th in Standard Prize for another. My parents believed she was the reason I was getting straight A's (except for Higher Mother Tongue and maybe English), so they always complied. By Primary Five and Six she was raking in more money than any of my secondary school private tutors ever did per month even though some of them were supposed to be paid more because they were "professional" tutors.

Alright back to the original story. For that evening my studies were put on hold. There wasn't any reason to discuss my homework if I wasn't going to return to school for a while. So she tried to help by instructing me on how to write an apology letter. Well actually she narrated while I wrote the whole thing. In the end, there really wasn't anything I could do.

The next morning before I even got out of bed, my parents went to the principal's office, only to find that he was away for some reason and it was my vice-principal who spoke to them. That was a lucky break because Mr Tan was Chinese. My parents would have had a lot of trouble trying to communicate with Mr Jaya.

They handed him my apology letter and brought my past homework and test papers to remind him that I had a pretty good track record (like I mentioned, 4th place in my class every single semester for the previous two years, like some sort of almost-winning streak). In the discussion they somehow also mentioned we had received our Singapore citizenship a couple months before.

That changed the whole situation. My father did instruct me to inform my form teacher about that, but I didn't understand the significance and never did. However, it seemed students who were citizens got different treatments compared to foreigners. On that basis I was not expelled from school.

Before everything was wrapped up, my parents added that Mr Lingam had been calling me "HongKong boy". He gave nicknames for many students, but apparently Mr Tan and my parents found it too offensive (maybe even racist, but I'll never find out) and he actually spoke to him personally about it.

When I returned to school the next day Mr Lingam apologized to me for calling me that name. No other schoolmates ever tried to tease me with that nick, and for those few exceptions who did, I only had to remind once them what Mr Lingam did that day to stop them.

But I still didn't know what "foreign" meant till years after.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I do not thank Mr Lingam for anything. For one, he was my English teacher and my English still sucked so badly that I didn't know what being a "foreign student" meant. Also, my discipline never did improve much.

For example in secondary school I was copying all my Math homework every morning before the first class for years. I think it is a little strange that I did Further Maths in JC (pre-U) after that. Damn I'm smart. XD

Nah I was just decent enough at last-minute cram revisions.

In JC I was always either talking or sleeping in lectures. I never was and still isn't a good student. Being in EM1 in primary school meant nothing because I kept getting shitty almost-fail/actually-fail grades in Higher Mother Tongue, the only subject EM1 students studied that differentiated them from everyone else. Being the only one in class that Mr Lingam said to have done pretty well in the Screening exams meant nothing because I didn't get into GEP. Getting into NTU's Mechanical Engineering course meant nothing because my grades have been horrendous.

Come to think of it, my life's rather similar to Demandred from the Wheel of Time series, being one that's full of "almost". Many things almost happened to me and I almost achieved many things. Close but no banana.

Speaking of Wheel of Time, Obsidian Entertainment (the guys who made Neverwinter Nights 2) will be making a new WoT game together with Red Eagle Games. There is no release date announced but it's going to be on PC, PS3 and the 360.

As for the film possibility, there hasn't been any news ever since Universal announced plans to make a movie out of the first book. Probably like the Runelords movie, problems arose in pre-production and got suspended indefinitely. Unless they're trying to keep it quiet.




From my Pri5-6 form teacher, Mrs Wee, whom my ex-classmates and I had been visiting every Chinese New Year for the last few years, Mr Tan never got promoted to principal, which wasn't normal considering the past trend before him. Apparently the Ministry of Education changed some policies and decided he was not in the right age group to be promoted. Hence, he was destined to stay in that position till retirement even after Mr Jaya himself retired. What the MOE did was that they got some new guy out of nowhere to take over the position instead.

To make things worse, he had some sort of problem with a teacher in school about teaching methods that eventually led to his decision to have an early retirement. Pretty drastic, since he had about a decade to go before hitting retirement age. No idea what he's doing now to get by. I'm very sure it's incredibly hard to get a decent job at his age, even with his resume.

Mr Lingam retired years ago, nobody knows what happened after. I think he's probably enjoying life after retirement since his daughter had graduated from uni when I was still in primary school. I remember him telling us once how his daughter asked him to help her with her 9000-word thesis (not sure if I remember the word limit correctly). 9000-word essays sounded like an impossibility to primary school kids, but now it sounds like it can be done with some effort. I bet this tale alone has around 1-2k words. It's also just as likely that he's dead since he was pretty overweight.

Ms Teo was still spotted in this neighbourhood till my primary school was merged with another. She was a nice teacher but I have no idea what happened to her after. Mrs Wee didn't know much about her because upper primary school (Pri 4-6) teachers do not interact much with their colleagues teaching in lower primary (Pri 1-3) . The clearest memory I have of her was when she told me that butterflies ate nectar and bees honey. I still didn't understand the difference between the two till a long time after that, when I finally learnt that honey is partly digested bee vomit.













I never knew that NTU students are supposed to receive their University Transcripts. Are we supposed to get it after every semester? What the heck? I've never even heard of the term till recently. Am I screwed big time?