Was helping to sell tickets for Arts Bash 1, at SMU yesterday. Sort of.

Helped them set up the booth and everything, but other that that, I just sat there and helped them watch the stuff at the booth and their bags against the wall behind us. :P And Ivan brought his lappie, so we were listening to techno for the better part of two hours, while the rest who'd come along to help were giving out pamphlets and stuff to promote the Bash.

I find that SMU's atmosphere is really nice and homely, very un-school-like; but that's probably because the place doesn't really even look like a school. Most of the Bash Comm people who'd been selling tickets at NTU before also noted that the place (SMU, that is) is really homely, unlike NTU, where they were apparently quite rude. The difference was quite obvious when they started to set up the booth; we arrived at the bench that was allotted to us, and found that a piece of paper had been stuck to it, saying that the bench was reserved for us; from "9 am - 5 pm, for NUS Arts Club, for the selling of Arts Bash tickets", undersigned by SMU's SA (Student Association). Xuzi and Diana gushed about how they were so nice for quite a while. :)

People there are also quite different from NUS people, especially the guys. I mean, in NUS, most of the guys are often dressed semi-sloppily in very casual wear; in SMU, the guys actually dress well. To make a point, Chong Han looked really out of place there in his singlet and berms and slippers; in NUS however, that'd be quite common. Ivan pointed out that it might be because there's no on-campus accomodation in SMU, which might be a significant contributing factor. Might also be because, given the nature of their studies, and if they're anything like the Business School in NUS, they probably have to make lots of presentations and stuff, so I guess they have to dress well.

Saw quite a few people from my secondary school there as well, though I doubt they'd recognise me. :) Jeannette Tay and Christie from my Sec 2 class are just two of those people; wonder if Christie's still as fervent a Manchester United fan as she was in Sec 2, and if Jeannette is still as full of lame and dirty jokes as she was then.

We packed up the booth and everything at about 3 pm and moved the stuff into the SA's room for safekeeping; noticed that their clubroom was only about half the size of ours, but they still managed to keep it much neater. Speaks volumes about us, doesn't it. But then again, I guess SMU's SA doesn't have anyone besides the SA people coming into their room all the time; we have affiliates who literally make the Arts Club Room their second home.

Ivan and me went off to Orchard to buy Jie's (rather long overdue) birthday present, and we stopped over at Kinokuniya after that, during which we saw bits of the extended version of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King! They were playing it in the store, next to a display of all the Lord of the Rings books and CDs and DVDs that were on sale; finally got to see the scene where Saruman dies (a rather gruesome death), despite the fact that he wasn't supposed to have died at Orthanc, and the drinking game scene!! Hahaha.... the expression on Legolas/Orlando Bloom's face is absolutely *adorable* in that scene; Elf tasting mead for the first time, hahaha...!

Wandered over to the poetry section then, not surprisingly; I kinda gravitate towards that section whenever I'm in Kinokuniya. :P Saw a lot of books that I want (which explains the sudden increase in the number of items in my book list, which is just over to your left in the sidebar; take your time to peruse it and if you like, make a generous "donation" to the "Feed Gerri's Brain and Diminishing Vocabulary Fund"), and as usual, I can't afford them. Although that collection of Robert Frost's poetry was just screaming out to me; it was only $36 for that thick book, and all his works were in it!! I was hugging it and grinning madly for about ten minutes, during which Ivan just stared disinterestedly at me and remarked that I looked like a kid in Toys 'R Us, holding onto a toy that my parents wouldn't buy for me. And I just grinned even more and giggled.

And then, this strange old man decided to show up. (We realised after this that everytime the two of us are together on our own, something unexpected always happens.)

This old Japanese man just came up behind us and said "How are you?" I didn't turn around at first because I thought it was someone talking to someone else behind us, but when the question was repeated again, we turned around and the old man asked us if we were students at NUS, to which we replied in the affirmative. And then he asked what we were studying; I said that I was majoring in Sociology, and when he found out that Ivan was majoring in Geography, he got started on the tsunamis and stuff and went on for a bit about how "stupid" he felt the Indonesian and Sri Lankan and Thai people were.

Ivan and I had to remind him that these people were not "stupid"; with the possible exception of Thailand, they're probably just too poor for the government to be able to set up a decent network for information and knowledge transfer, resulting in the lack of warning. And he kept going on about how stupid they were, going out to collect crabs when the surf retreated all the way out just before the wave hit; well, HELLO, they wouldn't know now, would they?? When's the last time this region was hit by a tidal wave of this magnitude?? And how're they supposed to know what to expect in the event of a tidal wave if the majority of them aren't even educated?

And then he started talking about how if they wanted to be educated, all they really had to do was strive for what they wanted, and he used the example for Abraham Lincoln, but I kindly pointed out to him that Lincoln lived in America, and America has social strata with varying amounts of wealth; Lincoln may have been poor and the part of the country that he grew up in may have been poor, but other parts weren't, and he knew how to get there. Indonesia doesn't have a lot of "better opportunities" within their own country, and plus, the country's a helluva lot bigger than America; it's a lot harder to govern that way, not to mention with all the added corruption and such. Although the corruption might be less if the country were more well-off, and most of the people were living comfortably, but.. well.

Point here is that, he was completely glossing over the fact that sometimes the material constraints of the world around you can pretty much shackle in your dreams, no matter how badly you want them.

And then he went on talking about how he was a poet who'd run into financial problems while in Singapore, so he'd been sleeping at the airport for the last three weeks, and he showed us some of the stuff he wrote; at which I got rather apprehensive, because written in pencil in the upper right corner of the "book" (just sheets of paper stapled together in the form of a book, really) was "$20.00". I knew then that he was going to try to sell it to us, which I suppose was really the reason why he wanted to talk to us in the first place.

And then he asked if we were Christian, because he claimed that he could "smell it". Just for the kick of it, I wanted to tell him, "No, not Christian", but although I'm not a very good Christian, I do know that denying one's faith is just completely wrong, so well, there wasn't anything for it. And I swear, I just saw it coming; he started going on about how God is love and how if everyone loved one another, the world would be better off and about how Christianity was like, wow, the best religion that the world had to offer, and a lot of other evangelical-like nonsense.

That got him started on Muslim extremism and about how he felt that Muslims were a violent lot and that they were stupid because all they read was their Quran.

When he started on that, at first, I thought that he was being a wee bit too "passionate" about being against Muslim extremism, but then he started on how going against America was wrong because if America went down, then the rest of the world would go down with it. I agreed with that, but only partly. It is quite possible after all, that with the introduction of the Euro, the European countries might become a force to be reckoned with in the future.

And then, he said that America was "the best nation in the world".

And that irked me to no end.

His reasons for that were that America was a "Christian country; 61% of its people are Christians; even their constitution mentions God", unlike places like England where they "worshipped people" by saying things like "God Save the Queen", and so as a result, places like England had racism and a lot of other shit.

My reaction: Oh really. And you mean that Americans are all exceptionally tolerant of people of other races? You mean that the Ku Klux Klan never existed and does not still exist today? You mean that even when the USA professed to be a God-fearing country, it didn't still condone the slavery and persecution of millions of black people simply because of their skin colour? You mean there aren't white people there who call the American-Chinese people among them "Chinks"? And for goodness' sake, get your facts right; the Constitution of the United States of America never mentioned God initially; that was only added in years later. I told him so, but he completely ignored that obviously. And "God Save the Queen" isn't worshipping the Queen or King or whoever's ruling at the time. It's asking God to protect the leaders of their nation, isn't it? And what's more, the phrase is just a leftover from the time when the English believed that their rulers were given the divine right to rule by God. So no, I don't see any of the disrespect for religion which he claims the English are guilty of.

And when he said again that the Muslims were "stupid" and "violent", I started to see it differently; it's just a lesser kind of extremism-- he just isn't out there with guns blazing yet. But since he's 60 years old (so he says), I'd guess it's pretty safe to say that he won't ever be doing that, although I dread knowing how many people he's managed to pass his opinions on to.

So, it turns out that he's a Japanese poet who writes in English, named Hideo Asano, and apparently two of his books have been rated as the two best books in the world on Amazon.com at one period in time; critics have also apparently written wonderful reviews about him, although Ivan and I don't see all that much to rave about. He said that he was going to the Japanese Embassy the next day (today, that is) to see what he could do about getting some money to fly home to Japan or whatever; I asked for his contact information, coz hey, if it turns out that he is who he says he is, I could use the connection to get my own work out there. ;)

But well, whoever you really are, I hope you do some thinking when you get home; America isn't everything that you make it out to be, and the rest of the world sure as hell isn't "stupid" in comparison.

But, on to happier stuff. :) Had an OG dinner on Tuesday night!

My O week OG, I mean.. Kryda, that is. :) It's good to know that while almost all the other O week OGs have fallen apart, the OGs from Teltan are still very much alive, no small amount of thanks to Clement, who keeps planning activities and outings and simple get-togethers for the whole house and such. And even my OG has been meeting for lunch quite often whenever a few of them are free during the last semester; never got to join them though, because every time they asked if I'd like to have lunch with them the next day or something, I'd be having a lecture at the time that they wanted to meet! And they'd also want to lunch at the more expensive places on campus, like Genki Sushi and Munchie Monkey and stuff... I'm naught but a poor uni student. :P

We went shopping after dinner because Rayner wanted to buy new shirts for school, and being the only guy in attendance (Thomas decided to go home after dinner since he was a bit under the weather), he had all the girls to um... "assist" with his choices; namely Wan-Tsin and Cindy, though. Haha. :P Then we passed by Hang Ten and Wan-Tsin managed to talk me into buying two tops; they do look quite nice. :)

And now we're all busy exchanging timetables on the YahooGroup; I'll be taking modules with at least four people; Philo with Rayner, Wan-Tsin and Emelyne, and Military History of Singapore with Thomas-- add one more person to my list of contacts for SSA2208, haha... :D

I love my OG... :) And my house! Haha... the T House is always the best, haha! :D