Xingyiquan once more

I returned to my Xingyiquan wuguan (training hall) for the first time since 2006 (or was it 2007?) last night. The place looked mostly the same as always with the altar and fridge against the back wall bracketed by racks of rusty old weapons, the (defunct?) lion dance group's props stacked in one corner, the table with its kettles and cups in another corner, the sandbag and falling-apart gym equipment in a third, and the display case of medals and trophies in the last.

That's our wuguan in the day. The caucasian dude is Daniel Verkeke, who visited us briefly in 2005 and showed Mike and me a couple of moves with the short stick.

Shixiong (senior disciple) Avery had apparently added a number of interesting things sometime during my two-year-odd absence, however: there were a stout wooden pole fastened with cord to the sandbag, presumably for forearm conditioning (he's a Hung Gar man), a well-used Wing Chun wooden dummy with dents and discolourations on its arms and leg roped to the parallel bars, and a bean punching bag hanging against one wall, among other things.

And this is our wuguan at night. I haven't seen some of these folks for years now. Ah, the good old days.

Sienwei led the training last night, as he'd been doing for a while now. We started with shuai shou (hand throwing), moved on to paida (self-hitting; sounds masochistic, I know), did some Jianshenyiqifa (a qigong set), tortured ourselves with some zhanzhuang (standing meditation to correct structure, build power, and toughen the body), then did yimasanjian drills (that's a short sequence often seen in Xingyi). Laoshi's explanations of this sequence made me grasp a few things about it that I had not formerly understood. Good stuff.

Our solo drills became paired tests, and Sienwei gave me a few good ones in the ribs. We also clashed heads accidentally at one point, ouch! We ended with a few rounds of the Jintuilianhuan set and an explanation by Laoshi of various ways to use the forward step in the dragon form takedown move.

Last night's lesson was more technique-focussed than principle-based, but that was probably good for me since I'm so rusty. I managed to ask him about basic spearwork after the class as well, and he told me that I was using baofali (explosive power) rather than soft power. That explains why my older spear snapped in midair - I was using it like a tool rather than integrating it into my body structure. Breaking your own weapon on the battlefield is a really bad idea, so I'll be sure to try and do it right from now on.

My new spear.

Laoshi will be going to Shanxi again soon. Everytime he makes one of these frequent pilgrimages, he returns with noticeably better skill and more refined power. It will be interesting to see what he will bring home on this trip. Also, when I showed him my new spear last night, he told me he can get a similar spearhead from China perhaps 40% cheaper. Ugh.

My new spearhead weighs about 350 grammes. Doesn't sound like much, but trust me, it's pretty heavy when mounted on the end of a 6-foot-some pole.

Ah well. What's spent is spent. But tell you what: if anyone reading this is interested in purchasing a heavy spearhead, drop me a message on Facebook by this weekend and I'll ask him to pick one up for you. If I don't know you, just introduce yourself and it'll be just fine. He estimates each spearhead will cost about $60.

The rudeness problem

If you've spent any length of time in Singapore, you're surely aware that many of my countrymen today are rude and inconsiderate beyond belief. Often have I witnessed pedestrians road hogging, confident that motorists would not go so far as to run them down. (I have it on good authority that some well-educated youths would, when honked at, challenge the driver to do just that.) Our motorists aren't any better behaved, of course. It seems that vehicular indicators are an optional accessory in Singapore, and lane markings and parking boundaries are entirely decorative.

A large number of bus passengers fear some unknown thing in the rear half of the vehicle and stand staunch against all exhortation for them to proceed past the exit doors. Strapping young men suffer a mysterious form of blindness or perhaps paresis whenever they get on a train and are consequently unable to offer their seats to the infirm. Once several years ago, when I noticed a frail old man teetering and tottering on the train, I asked an athletic-looking young chap sitting not a metre away - sotto voce, so as not to embarrass him - to offer his perch to the other. The muscular fellow stood up as requested, but proceeded to harangue me with violence in his eyes. I think I escaped a brawl by a hair's breadth that day.

Just this morning, while on my way to meet the girlfriend, I stopped a middle-aged man to enquire directions. I picked him primarily because he had the most casual gait of everyone in my gaze and was therefore least likely to be inconvenienced, but my judgement was obviously wrong. Before I could get more than five words out of my mouth, he showed me the underside of his chin and said in a voice heavy with irritation and contempt, as he continued to stroll on, "No time, no time." Stunned by the hostility of his response, I blurted out, "Wow, that was rude."

Believe you me when I say that I was not angry at this point, but merely surprised. My tone, therefore, carried not the least hint of antagonism. The other guy's was quite another matter though. He spun around fiercely and hurled me a heartfelt, "Fuck you!"

Somehow, I managed to rein in my famous temper and bite my tongue. I thought that maybe he'd just had a very bad day (never mind that it was only nine in the morning), and a wave of compassion for my fellow human being came over me. Ok, maybe it was more like an indifferent splash than an actual wave, but still. Taking a breath, I told him in a level tone without the least hint of steel or sulfur, "Never mind, dude. Just... have a good day, ya?" But I guess those were fighting words in his vocabulary, for he proceeded to give me detailed instructions on what to do with my mother's unmentionables. At that point, I wisely walked away (yay, me). The brutish caveman part of me wanted nothing more than to charge over and demonstrate to him that he'd picked on the wrong martial artist, but the inner struggle was brief. Superego 2, id 0.

The list goes on. What I want to know is: what on Earth is going on here, and why are all the government's courtesy campaigns failing so abysmally? Is it that Singa, our chosen champion, is too gay to get the message across? Or is our epidemic of ill grace rooted too firmly for a few insipid posters to cure? If the latter is the case, what can we do about it?

Some problems can be actively solved, but other problems have to be left to solve themselves. I'm beginning to wonder if this is one of those that only get uglier the more you scratch at them. In a way, the very laws that were passed to protect the public peace may be part of the problem. To understand this, we have to understand what politeness is.

People are courteous to you for one of three reasons: they are decent people who do not want to hurt your feelings, they have a good solid reason to be afraid of what you'd do to them if they weren't courteous, or they are cowards who unduly fear the unknown. People who are polite for the first reason choose to be polite and do not need to be strong-armed into smiling at strangers, so let's leave them out of this. All of us are sometimes polite for the second reason; we don't tell the boss what we really think of him, or inform the policeman who has pulled you over that his body odour is overpowering. People polite mainly for the third reason, however, are often nasty as all hell if they think they can get away with it.

And they can get away with it in today's Singapore. You see, this is a lawful place that does not condone casual violence. Under the law, we are not even legally entitled to self-defence if there is any possibility of seeking governmental protection instead. People like me (and probably you, the reader) have a lot to lose and therefore are unlikely to partake in violence without just cause - and getting insulted does not constitute just cause. Our laws actually protect the swine of the nation from immediate retribution. The police can't be everywhere, and the law requires evidence. These people know this, and so they continue to abuse the heck out of everyone. Street justice - or at least the fear of it - is what keeps such people in line, but that particular institution has been neutered quite neatly by the statutes meant to enforce peace.

Ok, gotta go. The girlfriend's waiting. I'm aware that I haven't quite fleshed out my arguments yet and I haven't even begun to discuss the broader-ranging implications of this situation. I haven't yet talked about how complacency and an entitlement mentality interact with these circumstances, or about today's ill-equipped parents and their ill-bred kids and how they affect and are affected by what I've written about so far. But all that will have to wait for another day

The best band in the world

The Bell Curve

This is a late response to the gift, but walking into my room, I just saw the book on the table and felt a renewed sense of appreciation for it. Thanks, baby, for The Bell Curve!

Unhappy with Starhub? Join the club!

My friends know I have a really wonderful impression of Singtel because of their exemplary customer service attitude. I loved the way they treated me back during the Magix days, really admired their championing of customer privacy during the Odex saga, and absolutely melted with respect when I read about how they had charged a number of customers tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (that's four to five zeroes; count 'em) for a single month's use of their data services.

Because of my boundless love for Singtel, I have been with Starhub for quite a few years now.

My dalliance with Starhub may have to come to a sad end soon, however. Their broadband speeds have recently been nowhere near acceptable. Maxonline slows to a crawl on weekends, and it takes minutes to stream through a short Youtube video or load a webpage (any webpage). While no-one's pointing any fingers here, one cannot help but wonder if the service is massively oversubscribed to. What's oversubscription, you ask? Read ab0ut it here.

What's more annoying than this weekly slowdown is the constant non-performance of my months-old mobile broadband plan. One would think that web surfing on a 2 MBPS package would be tolerable, but it's recently taken several minutes to call up any one website on my laptop. Need to check a word on dictionary.com? Cook some instant noodles while you wait.

I finally lost my patience with this nonsense tonight and called up Starhub to demand an explanation. I am paying good money and if my service provider is not providing, I would at least like an apology and a promise of socks being pulled up in the near future. So I called, and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

I honestly believe that it wasn't unfair of me to become irritated after being kept on hold for 47 minutes. Even so, I was civil when I called up Maxonline technical support instead. Some Filipino-sounding chap named Michael answered the call immediately but informed me he could not assist me with mobile broadband issues. He offered to transfer me, and I of course turned him down. 47 minutes of the same muzak are quite enough, thank you very much. I got him to take down my number and get his colleagues to call me instead, which they did after a few minutes.

Makes you wonder why they couldn't attend to their ringing phones for nearly an hour earlier on, eh?

So this lady whose name I couldn't quite catch - who also sounded Filipino, incidentally - told me that my broadband modem needed a firmware upgrade. Their servers had been improved lately (*right eyebrow goes up*) and my modem's current firmware could not sync with the new servers properly. All right, if that's the case, why didn't they tell their customers about this? Apparently, it was because not all customers have been affected. (*left eyebrow goes up*)

It does seem that surfing's gone back to normal on my laptop following the application of the patch, but I will reserve my jubilation and continue to nurse glum pessimism for a while more. Let's see how this plays out.

Lastly, before poor Michael had managed to get off the phone with me, I had made him promise - very unwillingly - to forward my dissatisfaction with Maxonline speeds to the people in charge. (He had kept trying to get me to send in an email myself, but a near hour of waiting had made me perhaps a mite truculent.) Let's see if he will actually do so or if he will conveniently forget to do as he had said he would.

Here be slutty Disney princesses

Sharon, this is for you. Told ya Disney princesses were less innocent than they looked.

Interested in losing my WHAT?!

The following Facebook ad made me sputter in outrage.
How dare they offer to help people lose their overall health and wellness?! Don't they know that assisting suicide is a crime?!?!

The nerve of these people.