Confessions (And Resolution) Of An Aspiring Bookaholic

I go nuts in a bookstore. In fact, I went nuts just two days ago when I charged into Borders and emerged with loot in the form of eight brand new books.

This is what I bought. Hmm, it’s most unfortunate that the book spine with the clearest typeface is the one with the word ‘bitch’ in it. I’m thinking this isn’t making me look very good right now.

Anyways, that aside, I hope you realise that this is a big thing for me, revealing my book purchases online. Cos everyone knows that “you are what you read” (some say “you are what you re-read” but let’s save that for another post). So if we are what we read, then I wonder what these say about me?

It can be scary to grant somebody a peek into your book shelf. (The pic above is just part of my bookcase; my copies of Ulysses, Crime And Punishment and Don Quixote are in the next room – yeah right!!) When I say that it’s scary to invite someone into your book shelf, I mean it’s scary if the person is a seriously bookish intellectual who can quote Kafka or Proust. It’s somewhat less scary if the person counts among his or her favourite authors JK Rowling, Sophie Kinsella or Stephenie Meyer (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

I have thought long and hard about doing this – about writing about reading, that is. Specifically my reading. I’ve always felt a little embarrassed that for someone who’s supposed to be mildly ‘intelligent’ (my mother and at least two other relatives have told me that I am), I do not read enough. Of course, I have no idea what ‘enough’ is – a book a week at least? And reading, to me, is books. Actual books with pages. Newspapers, magazines, direct mailers, Coco Crunch boxes, Facebook and Twitter updates don’t count! So as far as reading actual books is concerned, I’m pretty damn near abysmal. Why, you ask?

Well, for one thing, not only do I not read enough, I can’t remember half of the stuff I do read. It’s frustrating cos what the heck’s the point of reading Milan Kundera – which made me feel damn smart during the process – and not being able to talk about it several months later? You know, not be able to properly answer profound questions like, “So um, what’s the book about?”. Of course, the fact that nobody has ever actually asked me that question is beside the point. Well, once, a colleague did say he was impressed that I read Kundera. Actually, come to think of it, he said he was impressed and surprised. Bugger, what’s that supposed to mean??

Anyways, back to my abysmal reading life: there are books that I feel, as a mildly ‘intelligent’ person, I should read. Unfortunately, I don’t and this results in my suffering from a serious case of book guilt. I confess that I tried reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy once and could not – for the love of god – finish it. I tried really hard but in the end, I … just … couldn’t. I felt like an utter failure. So I went out and bought Without Feathers by Woody Allen and finished it in one sitting. Not much of an accomplishment considering it was only 221 pages long and consisted mostly of plays. Oh the shame!

So in 2010, I resolve to get out there and read plenty of books and then, write about them on my blog. Knowing me and my propensity for fluff, these are hardly going to be in-depth analyses. Instead, they will be brief descriptions of what the books are about and whether I liked them or not … and in some cases, whether I even understood them in the first place!

Hmm, why do I have a feeling I’m about to look incredibly stupid next year?

13 Sure-Fire Ways To Not Be Miserable In 5 Minutes

1  Stop caring. Caring about what people think, that is. When you care too much about what people think of you, you give them power over you (even if they don’t know it). The most liberating thing in the world is to not care anymore – if they like me, they like me lor. And if they don’t, then bite me lor. Besides, people don’t think about you as much as you think they think about you anyway. Why? Cos they’re too busy worrying about what other people think about them.

2  Stop trying. Trying to be happy, that is. The harder you look for something, the less likely you are to find it. It’s the case with car keys, it’s the case with love, and it’s the case with happiness. The moment you stop looking, the thing starts popping up all over the place. So the harder you try to be happy, the worse you’ll feel. The good news is, the reverse will also be true.

3  Be in the now. Think of the here and now. Forget the next hour, the next day, the next week. We become stressed (and therefore, miserable) whenever we think about the future – for instance, fretting about the talk you’re about to give in the next 20 minutes; wondering how you’re going to pay off that credit card bill next month; or worrying about dying old, shriveled up and alone cos you’re still boyfriend-less at 45.

4  Three things. Think of three good things you’ve got going for you. Come on, life can’t be so terrible that you can’t even do this. Okay, I’ll go first: (1) I have a great family; (2) I have a nice home; and (3) my hair looks cute today. Embarrassed at how trite your three things are? Don’t worry. You’ve just given me the perfect segue to Tip #5.

5  Expect nothing. Or at least have expectations so horrendously low that you will not only meet them but surpass them. So on second thought, forget listing three good things. Make it two (or one) not-so-heinous things that you’ve got going for you.

6  Read. About people who have it worse than you do. Go ahead, google it: miserable lives, suicidal people, celebrity has-beens, losers, whatever. Or just go look in the local paper – there’s bound to be a politician who’s recently been accused of corruption or been photographed nude in the toilet or something. Think of how wretched he must be feeling right now.

7  Fake it. 25 minutes of faking happiness and your brain may just buy it. If it doesn’t, don’t worry. The people around you may buy it and think you really are happy and start responding to you as if you were happy (instead of scampering away) and this might, in the end, boost your mood after all.

8  Buy it. Whoever said money can’t buy happiness … has no money and is a real dum-dum. Money may not be able to buy some things (although my mind’s drawing a blank right now) but it can buy plenty of other things, many of which can make you pretty darn happy pretty darn quick. Sure, it’s fleeting superficial happiness but hey, being superficially happy for 5 minutes sure beats being genuinely miserable for 5 minutes.

9  Move. As in move away from the bad situation that’s making you miserable. Of course, if the bad situation is your whole life, then I can’t help you there. But yeah, move away. If standing in a puddle of crud is making you unhappy, for god’s sake, step out of the crud. Some crud might be harder to get out of than others, so admittedly, this tip might take you more than 5 minutes.

10  Say no. Don’t do what you don’t want to do. One source of distress is saying ‘yes’ when you really mean ‘no’ and spending the rest of the day desperately trying to weasel your way out of it. Go ahead, say it: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no-o-o-o-o-o!!!!!! And if you worry that you might offend someone in the process, see Tip #1.

11  Laugh. Watch something that makes you laugh. Put it on and really get into it. After a laugh-out-loud session, the crud that had ailed you earlier will look smaller and more distant. You will then feel less crap. But if you have no sense of humour or can’t afford pirated DVDs, see Tip #12.

12  Sleep. Nothing cures (or at least alleviates) misery like sleep. And if you’re too upset to sleep, pop a pill. Who cares how you do it, just stop being awake. Things almost always look better in the morning.

13  Trick your brain. Assign a time slot for misery, say from 5.15 to 5.45pm. For these 30 minutes, you have complete freedom to whinge, wallow and feel as wretched as you wish. You can shove your face in as deep into the crud as you want. But until the clock strikes 5.15pm, you are to go about your business and not feel like crap. You’d be surprised to discover that by the time 5.15pm does come around, your urge to whinge, wallow and feel wretched would’ve lessened considerably or if you’re lucky, totally vanished.

Hi Dad, Remember Me?

I saw my father today. This might not sound particularly newsworthy except for the fact that the last time I saw him was something like 15 years ago. The whole experience was … if had to pick a word: indescribable, and I don’t mean it in a knock-your-socks-off spiritual epiphany kind of way.

Walking into the lawyer’s office, I scanned the room quickly. Aside from the few girls at the reception area, there was only this balding, pot-bellied old man hunched over by the door. It took a few minutes for realisation to hit me that it was him. And by ‘hit’, I don’t mean like a startling lightning bolt. I mean like somebody threw a mini plastic anvil at me [insert dull thud here].

The whole ordeal was weird. It wasn’t even surreal like in a dream – thanks to the harsh fluorescent lighting of the law office, the mousy legal advisors, the mounds of paperwork in manila folders and the muddy brown carpet, everything was obviously all too real. Sitting next to him was weird. It was even weirder when he turned to me with a friendly smile and asked if I was a lawyer with the firm. It was a polite smile; the kind you give to a total stranger, eyes vacant of any hint of recognition. I said no, and turned away.

The rest of the hour passed by in a flurry of mindless signing and initialing. Every once in a while, I would sneak a sidelong glance at him. I still couldn’t get over how old he looked. The sparse gray hair … wrinkled, leathery skin … droopy eyelids … the paunch … the shriveled size (I was wearing high heels so maybe that had something to do with it) … even his voice sounded different. This person wasn’t my father; he hasn’t been that for a long time now. This was somebody else’s father, somebody else’s grandfather, somebody else’s … somebody.

The anger I had expected to feel … never came. Instead, I felt a smidgen of sadness. Of disappointment. It wasn’t even a big emotion, just a quiet little one that I could easily brush off and pretend never existed – which was what I did the moment our time with the lawyers ended. I gathered my stuff and headed straight for the elevator. I left the building and … that was it.

As I drove off, what struck me most was how insignificant the whole thing had turned out to be. When I was first informed about this meeting a week ago, I had envisioned what might happen. I’m not about to plunge into a full-scale description of the insanity that went through my head but I can tell you, my version contained a whole lot more drama. I realise now how far off the mark I had been. After 15 years, this was it? I feel almost cheated. If this were a movie, the scriptwriter should get sacked.

I will probably never see him ever again and it won’t even matter. It has made me realise that life is just a series of non-events – events that we think will matter greatly but in the end, never really do. I guess we overestimate the significance of things all the time, or at least I do. Maybe I’m nothing but a drama queen. Who knows. And the most ironic part of it all is, life goes on … which essentially means that whatever has happened doesn’t matter … or will cease to matter as time goes by. I still can’t decide if that’s uplifting or depressing.

Skeletons, Sliced Ham, Grandma & Barbecued Chicken

My mother screwed me up the other day for missing breakfast, lunch and eating dinner right before midnight. She launches into mother mode and tells me I must have regular meals, otherwise I won’t have energy to work. I tell her, on the contrary, I feel absolutely fabulous and full of energy. And no, I am not being sarcastic. I wasn’t denying myself nourishment; I was just too busy to eat. She doesn’t buy it. I accuse her of not eating too. How is this different from fasting, I ask. It’s true: you fast for days, eating no food, sometimes not even drinking water. That’s different, she says. How so? That is ‘starvation’ with a purpose. Such double standards. So ‘starvation’ is okay only if you’re doing it in the name of world peace, an end to poverty and other ‘noble’ goody-goody causes? Well, I have a purpose too. It’s called meeting-my-deadlines-otherwise-I-get-screwed. She warns me to knock it off or I’ll wind up all shriveled and skeleton-looking and people don’t like skeletons.

Speaking of skeletons, my uncle came by for a visit the other day. His first comment when he sees me is, you’ve lost so much weight! (He makes it sound like I used to be a two-ton truck). Better eat more rice, he says. Too skinny, not nice. He pokes at my collarbone. So bony, he says. Um yeah, if I didn’t have bones, I’d collapse into the ground like a packet of sliced ham.

Speaking of sliced ham, my grandmother used to chide me for not eating enough rice. Her definition of “enough” was two full bowls. I could eat a truckload of vegetables, meat and lotus root but as long as I didn’t chug down two full bowls of rice, she’d wonder why I was ‘starving’ myself. She was really old and aneroxia hadn’t been invented yet, so she couldn’t accuse me of not eating to be thin. She just thought I was a crazy person who wouldn’t eat rice. She warned me that I was getting too thin on the face. She thought I should have a nice round face, like the moon. Look at her (she pointed to my fat cousin). See how nice and round her face is? You should look like that. Uh sure, grandma, whatever you say.

Speaking of grandma, I was talking to a friend the other day. She is really skinny and I’m talking really skinny (italics all mine) even by anorexic supermodel standards. She tells me to eat more cos I’m “very thin”. I look at her in disbelief and wonder if she’d looked at herself in a mirror lately. I wonder if all anorexics suffer from body dysmorphia. Meanwhile I’m shoveling barbecued chicken down my throat as she slices the two peas on her plate with a knife.

Speaking of barbecued chicken, I got myself weighed after completing the 10K at the Singapore Marathon. As I was standing there waiting for my turn to tip the scales, I wondered why the organisers decided to have a weighing station. It would be so de-motivating to discover that you’d gained weight or hadn’t lost an ounce despite all that hard work earlier. I spoke too soon. I had gained 2.5kg. Sure, I was wearing my running shoes which were caked in mud (could’ve contributed a hefty pound or two), I had guzzled five paper cups of water and 100PLUS (sugar is heavy) and I was still wearing my running bib (it wasn’t made of feathers, you know), so the numbers were probably inaccurate.

Speaking of feathers … um, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah, skeletons, sliced ham, grandma and barbecued chicken. I did have a point somewhere. If only I can remember what it was.

Pardon Mwah French

Sure, we know that all languages borrow (read: steal) from one another all the time, craftily slipping a foreign word into its lexicon, changing one tiny letter and then, tacitly claiming ownership. After a while, the word is so commonly used that we think it’s English when it’s not.

Of course, there are words we all know had been so obviously dragged kicking and screaming from another language. Words such as habitué (French), raison d’être (French) and dénouement (French again!). The accented letter … the difficult pronunciation … the blatantly high level of pretentiousness you exude whenever you use them … these are all killer giveaways. But there are those that aren’t quite so obvious. Like who knows ‘memorabilia’ is Latin, ‘honcho’ is Japanese and ‘wanderlust’ is German? Okay okay, so some people probably do but I certainly wasn’t one of them. Here are 15 more that I have – until recently – thought were English.

1   Alibi (Latin)

Means ‘excuse’ but in a more serious, witnesses-required kind of way. It’s like when your boss asks you where the hell you were all day and you tell him/her you were at a meeting and drag a colleague in to back you up. That’s an alibi. Without your witness, you’re just plain lying.

2   Angst (German)

Means ‘fear’ or ‘anxiety’ in a very severe, troubled-soul, on the verge of self-mutilation kind of way.  It’s not the same kind of ‘anxiety’ you experience when you catch a rat scampering wildly around your kitchen or when you’re about to give a speech in front of a bunch of people.

3   Camaraderie (French)

Means ‘comradeship’ and ‘fellowship’, just in a prettier way. It’s like when you’ve enjoyed a 10-year relationship of trust with your colleague. It’s nicer to call it camaraderie instead of ‘comradeship’ (as if you’d been serving in a Communist regime) or ‘fellowship’ (as if you’d been in a church choir).

4   Chagrin (French)

Means ‘great annoyance’. It’s like when somebody finishes all the water in the water dispenser bottle and doesn’t put in a new one and you have to do it yourself … much to your chagrin (!!!!).

5   Critique (French)

Means a ‘measured assessment’ – it is objective, well-thought out and balanced. Somebody who comes to you and tells you that your work sucks to high heaven is not critiquing your work. He/she is criticising your work.

6   Diva (Italian)

Means ‘accomplished female singer’ but the word has expanded to include men, actors, athletes, celebrities, makeup artists, hairstylists, supermodels, wrestlers, chefs, architects, writers, doctors, bakers and butchers. Basically, anyone who is egotistical and insufferable.

7   Hubris (Greek)

Means ‘arrogance’ but not your everyday arrogance. It’s the kind of arrogance where you think you are God and own the planet. Then one day, God gets tired of your hubris and strikes you dead. So hubris is arrogance followed by God coming to bite you in the backside.

8   Idiot savant (French)

Means ‘learned idiot’ – somebody who’s a complete moron in some areas and a complete genius in another. For instance, a person who can’t tie his own shoelaces but can remember the birthday and vital stats of every boy band member since the birth of mankind.

9   Incommunicado (Spanish)

Means ‘solitary confinement’, which can be involuntary (like if you’re in prison and beat someone up and then get locked up away from everyone as punishment) or involuntary (like if your colleagues are driving you crazy and you go to Penang to be incommunicado).

10 Malaise (French)

Means ‘feeling sick’ but not in a physical way. It’s like when you work in a really ugly office with fluorescent lighting and mud-brown carpeting. Everybody who works there is in a general state of malaise – just feeling ill at ease all the time.

11 Maven (Yiddish)

Means ‘expert’ and is a word that’s used way too often in women’s magazines. Everybody is a style maven. The qualification? Carrying an eight thousand dollar box clutch and being able to pronounce Yves Saint Laurent without flinching.

12   Pique (French)

Means ‘wounded pride’ at its worst and ‘stimulate’ at its best. We (and by ‘we’, I mean me) tend to over-use it in the shamefully unimaginative “pique one’s curiosity” instead of “he was piqued by his agent’s lack of enthusiasm over his work.”

13   Spiel (German)

Means ‘sales routine’, obviously used in a pejorative sense, of course. It’s like when you go to what you think is a free all-you-can-eat buffet only to find yourself forced to listen to some guy’s spiel on timeshare vacation packages.

14   Vendetta (Italian)

Means ‘blood-thirsty revenge’ and is as horrifying as it sounds, at least in its original meaning. Of course, today, we have personal vendettas against everybody and more often than not, they consist of nothing more than giving someone the evil eye and praying for a wart infestation.

15   Furore (Italian)

Means ‘excitement’ but with a dash of outrage thrown into the mix. It’s like when you think all the shoes in the bargain bin are 70% off when they’re really only 50% off. That’s when a furore is unleashed. Frenzy! Rage!! Uproar!!!

2 Nights In A Glorified HDB Flat

“Come experience living in a Singapore penthouse” was the tagline of this bed & breakfast in Singapore called um, rather predictably, 1 BnB Singapore. Well, we needed a place to stay, the price was decent and it looked all right online so we booked a room.

Upon arrival in Singapore, we drive over to Spottiswoode Park. We round the area searching for number 103 but all we see are HDB flats. Where’s the B&B? Number 103 looks like a … HDB flat. We’re puzzled and a bit weirded out. The place looks dodgy – far from posh, questionable-looking characters here and there. We reach the elevators and I feel icky. It looks like the kind of place you hide a body after a crime in the middle of the night.

Never mind. Let’s check it out first, we tell ourselves. If it’s really as dodgy as it looks from the outside, we’re going to make a run for it.

We take the lift up to the 25th floor. The doors open to reveal a tattered old couch under a tacky ‘Welcome Home’ sign …

… next to rusty piping leading up to a hole in the ceiling. Gulp. That’s probably where the body is.

We inch our way out of the lift. The door to the unit on the left is open; we peek in. We ring the bell. Nobody comes to the door.

From the entrance, the inside looks … not as horrifying as the outside. It’s the nice soft lighting. If it had been harsh fluorescent lighting, I would’ve run screaming in the opposite direction.

The owner (or manager or whatever) appears and shows us to our room. She’s very cold, expressionless and business-like. I don’t get the feeling we’re particularly welcomed in this ‘Singaporean penthouse’ but the sting of her indifference is somewhat ameliorated when we see our room …

… it’s spacious, has one double bed and a single bed, both of which have many pillows, is clean and air-conditioned …

… and the common bathroom is spacious, clean and has a leopard on the shower curtain. We loosen our grip on our luggage bags. We decide not to run screaming in the opposite direction. We decide to stay.

Pic by Susan Ng

For two nights, we call the BnB our home. It’s a little weird – it’s like your own penthouse, except that it’s not and you’re sharing it with other guests (there are six bedrooms and from the looks of it, we probably have the nicest one).

Pic by Susan Ng

Each guest is given a key to the main door and his or her own room. You can come and go as you please.

Pic by Susan Ng

There’s no curfew; just make sure the main door is locked at night. The owner is nowhere to be seen, so you’re given free reign of the house.

There are a couple of maids around to do housekeeping and cook you breakfast in the morning. You choose your poison (coffee or tea), you get juice and a plate of dry crinkly fried ham, two slices of cold wholegrain bread and an egg so smothered in salt and pepper that you can’t taste anything else (maybe that isn’t such a bad thing after all). They won’t send your tastebuds into rapture but as far as filling up the stomach before getting a real meal outside, they will do.

Location’s all right. Just 10 minutes away from the MRT station (Outram). Not great if you’re bogged down with shopping bags but otherwise manageable.

A plus point is all the pretty little rows of restored heritage shoplots in the area.

Very quaint, very clean, crisply painted, there’s a sense of spic and span newness …

Pic by Susan Ng

… which kinda takes away from the authenticity somewhat. Everything’s so … sterilised. But I cannot deny that they still look really good.

At SGD80 a night (for a double room), the BnB isn’t too horrendous a place to stay … that is, if you can look past the dodgy bits like um, everything outside the penthouse. I just find something very disconcerting about the area downstairs and the old clunky elevator. It’s not exactly a comforting place to return to after a long day out. But as far as experiences go, I think it has been interesting (I’ve never stayed in a HDB flat before) although I admit there have been times when I have wondered if they could actually do this – as in, run a place of residence as a B&B. All in all, my verdict: would I stay there again? Only if I had no other choice. Would I recommend friends to stay there? Sure, but not without a long discourse on the downsides of the place so that they’re not scared when they first arrive, plus a bit of advice that they book the room we got: room A2.

Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009

I love Singapore. This is a momentous occasion for me, sort of like a gay guy coming out of the closet and I will say it again: I lurve Singapore. Was there last weekend with some friends for the Singapore Marathon 2009 and I loved it! Oh yes, did I mention that I love Singapore? Well, I do. And this is why:

THE RACE PACK COLLECTION

On the day before the run, we drove to the Expo Convention and Exhibition Centre to collect our race packs. There were tons of cars but it was a gloriously huge parking lot, so no frustrating fruitless rounds were required.

No waiting or lining up either; we walked right up to the row of counters. Young girls (school kids, they looked like) were manning the booth. They were professional, cheery, fast and even wished us a good run the next day. Being Malaysian and therefore, used to bad service, I was a little taken aback.

This is so different from the KL Marathon when we had a horrendous time circling the area at Dataran Merdeka hoping for a parking spot to magically appear. It didn’t appear of course, simply because there were no spots. We had to dump the car in some god-forsaken corner, pray a truck wouldn’t ram into it, make a mad dash to the collection booth, put up with the grumpy staff who shoved our race packs at us and dash back to the car.

THE FLAG-OFF TIME

Flag-off was at 8.30am, so we woke up at 6am, were at the MRT station by 6.45am, reached Raffles City station by 7am.

We had arrived way too early cos we were supposed to meet two other friends over there at 7.30am, so we had some time to kill.

The flag-off time for the KL Marathon was 7am, which meant we dragged ourselves out of bed at 4.30am, drove to Dataran and got there by 6am, spent the next hour lining up in front of the few lousy portable toilets, then made a mad dash for the starting line at 7am. I think flagging off at a decent 8.30am is a much better idea.

THE STARTING LINE

We were all gathered near the starting line at about 8am. The emcee was great and did a fab job getting everyone up and in the mood.

Pic by Susan Ng

He cracked a bunch of jokes and led the runners through a silly dance routine before the horn finally sounded at 8.30am.

I can’t even remember the emcee for the KL Marathon – he (or she) was that forgettable. The Penang Bridge Marathon emcee I can remember however, but for all the wrong reasons. She didn’t talk to us; she talked at us. She was like a matronly schoolteacher admonishing a bunch of silly kids (that was obviously us).  She added nothing to the atmosphere; just tossed out instruction after instruction. It was quite a turn-off really.

THE RUNNERS

There were 50,000 runners (hoo yah). Men and women were separated into different categories and had different start times.

The moment the horn sounded, everyone started running. Damn semangat. Nobody seemed to be slowing down but that was normal right? The crowd would probably start to thin out (and slow down) by the fourth or fifth km – or so I thought. But no wor.

Pic by Susan Ng

And what was more, most were running throughout the entire route. Even the ones who did slow down only slowed down for a few moments before picking up the pace again. These people were doing this for real – don’t play-play! I was impressed!

You have to understand where I’m coming from. As far as my experiences with Malaysian marathons went, some runners are already walking within the first few hundred metres. And as the kms go by, the crowd thins out and more runners start to do the half-run, half-walk thing (including yours truly). So in Singapore, I was impressed … and of course, stressed. Had to work harder to keep up, otherwise no face!

THE WATER STATIONS

There was so much water here, the only risk runners could possibly suffer from was being over-hydrated. There were water stations and at times, 100PLUS stations, every 2K or so.

I found myself giving the last water station a miss cos I was so well-hydrated. That has never happened before, at least not with Malaysian running events. I have never understood why our organisers are so kiam-siap with water. Aren’t these things sponsored? It’s inhumane (not to mention kinda dumb) to expect people to run in such hot weather and offer only one or two water stations along a 10K route.

THE FANFARE

There were so many people stationed along the route – school kids who played cheerleaders for the day, the first aid folks, supporters, volunteers and at one point, even a band.

Pic by Susan Ng

And these people weren’t window dressing either. They were really cheering us on, encouraging us to step it up. It was real motivation not to slack off (no face leh) … there’s hardly any fanfare here in Malaysia. The handful of people stationed along the route is usually either busy yakking with one another or simply looking utterly bored, swatting mosquitoes by the roadside. They make you want to ram into them with your running shoe, then give them paper cuts with your bib.

THE LAST 2K

While I was more than sufficiently hydrated through the entire 10K thanks to the many water stations, there was a downside to this. Because I was used to having water stations pop up every 3K or so, after having passed three water stations at the Singapore Marathon, I was under the impression that I had already done over 9K.

That was before I saw the sign, which said another 2KM – %$#@$#$#@!!!

… and then, this sign – %$#@%!!!

THE FINISH LINE

Despite my cussing, the last 1K before the finish line was really a lot of fun. There were so many supporters and cheerleaders along the way you couldn’t help but be boosted by their really loud enthusiasm. So there we were, running running running … 800m … 600m … 400m … the cheering got louder and louder and I heard strains of Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69. It was such a rush as everybody picked up the pace and gunned for the big finish. It was great

THE MEDAL COLLECTION

The moment we finished, we were herded down a designated path. I had no idea where we were going, so I just walked along. Within a few short minutes, I found myself inside a massive tent, the Finisher’s Medal placed in my hand and a warm “Congratulations” from a volunteer. Talk about efficient.

Pic by Susan Ng

At a Malaysian running event, not only is there no fanfare at the finish line, once you are done, it isn’t immediately clear where you’re supposed to go. Case in point: after finishing the KL Marathon, we were pretty much left to figure out for ourselves where to go. We asked around and were told to queue up to collect our medals. We spent the next 30 to 45 minutes queuing and the last 5 minutes shoving our way through to the collection counter (the crowd was merciless) to claim our hard-won piece of metal.

THE TOILETS

On the way out to the MRT station, I caught sight of rows and rows and rows of portable loos.

And rows and rows and rows … they looked exquisite.

If my remarks disturb you, again you must understand where I’m coming from. I come from a country of deplorable public toilets. So this beautiful row of toilets, to me, is nothing short of exquisite. Sublime. Divine. And look ma, no queues!

THE MCDONALD’S

As is customary after every run, we stuff our faces with the unhealthiest food we could find. Delicious.

And the McCafé Oreo cookie cake slice wasn’t too bad either.

THE END

So in conclusion, I love Singapore. Oh wait. Did I already mention that before?