The guilt trip had such great scenery

I realized one of the unexpected hazards of having friends in firms on the opposite side of a case you’re handling. Even if they’re not actually involved.

After returning from a half-day of trial, I was blissfully wrapping up some work at an idler’s pace, thinking rather dreamily of being able to leave the office early and lie in bed and wriggle around and letting my little brain rot, and watching CSI and going to sleep. Such things were not meant to be. There was a sudden explosion somewhere near the region of my left shoulder and my boss, eyes bugging clear out of his head, snapped something preemptory and outraged in my general direction, gesticulating wildly with a bundle of documents. I hardly had time to register what had happened when he was stomping off out of my office. Cautiously, I ventured out and peeked into the corridor. I could see the pounding veins from where I was standing as he mapped battle plans in his head.

Well, not going into details, but basically my nice peaceful night was blown out the water like a rubber duckie with a bazooka from a bathtub.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. Buddy happened to be online and mentioned something about snow in NYC, and I could feel the palpable yearning reach out through the modems and cables and plonk me right in the middle of Times Square.

I’ve never seen snow. I always just miss it by that much. I think the closest that I’ve ever gotten to snow was that time when me and the SpaceCadet were running through Charles de Gaulle because we needed to catch our connecting flight home and we heard it was snowing, and so we managed to press our noses pathetically against the glass like woebegone puppies in a pet store, and little white flakes drifted down, so close but yet so far, before resuming our mad dash for our flight back. I’m sure that by now, the SpaceCadet has gotten her fill of snow and she’s bloody well fed up of all that damned white stuff falling from the sky and making everything cold and nasty.

But I’ve never seen snow, and I remain enchanted by the idea.

Somewhere about 4:30 in the morning (after I finally had my dinner) I managed to get some sleep, hoping to dream of snow.

I woke up with a start three hours later with my father pounding on the door saying “Are you going to work? What happened?” One look at the clock revealed that oh fuck, I’d overslept by an hour. I was practically catapulted from bed by the sheer panic that seized up all my muscles and threw me into wakefulness.

I was forced by circumstance to endure an MRT ride to work. Normally I refuse to take the MRT unless I absolutely have no bloody choice. Buses, I feel, are far a more civilized way to travel. Only one person, maybe two, is/are within uncomfortable proximity at any given time, and usually they keep to their allotted invisible holding areas. It’s generally quiet, I always get a seat, and I sleep all the way to work.

(Caution: long digressive rant ahead)
The MRT is a different story. To my mind, it’s the equivalent of those Maldivian ferry boats we used to see which took the eight-hour journey from Male to Khorendu with a horrifying number of people crammed on board. It was so crowded on the boats they couldn’t move through the boat to get to the toilets, and used to carry plastic bags for the express purpose of alternative bathroom facilities. MRTs don’t require you to piss in a bag, but you get the idea. It’s just fucking uncivilized. Unlike buses, where you usually get some sense of personal space, people pack into the damned trains in the morning like fucking sheep in a slaughter pen, and have absolutely no qualms about invading your space. Usually this takes the form of stomping on your feet, or assaulting your head with their elbows and newspapers. With buses, you get breathing room because no matter where you are, there is always clear space on one side of you. On an MRT train, you are usually pressed between the fat housewife who decides that the best place to park her wet stinking groceries is right next to your shrinking naked calf, and the freakishly tall, broad JC boy who just came in from basketball practice and doesn’t believe in deodorant. Not to mention the girlfriends who you happened to stand in between and decide to solve the problem by talking through you. Even getting on and off the train is an ordeal, because it appears that Singaporean are completely color-blind, but only to specific colors and hence the helpful yellow boxes and arrows mysteriously blend into the floor and become an identical color. And which fucking wise guys decided that it would be great idea to pipe in audio advertisements onto the trains? And who decided that the ideal warning noise for closing doors would be that klaxon wail which registers somewhere north of the upper ear register and makes you want to bleed from the nose? Or that yes, they will ensure that the seats are just the right size so that you always negotiating a silent arrangement as to whose shoulder overlaps the other. Or that the seats are just the right height so that you’re invariably staring at someone’s groin?

The times that local newspapers like the bloody Straits Times, who fancy themselves to be a real newspaper, breathlessly report that Ministers have ridden the train and talked about how nice it was, how clean and surprisingly un-vermin-ridden and how advanced a society we are (give thanks to the Great White Wave!), make me want to grab their PAP-licking arses and ream them out a train. What they fail to mention is that they clear the whole goddamn train for them so they don’t have to deal with the screaming kids, the overcrowding, the man who body odor which could fell a rhino, and the fact that on a normal day, these guys sit in their goddamn Beemers in blissful solitude. I fucking loathe MRT trains. I hate everything about them.

(Back to main point)
So understandably, when I got out, mashed and squished and still reeling from three hours of sleep, I was not a happy Slinky. So maybe when I bumped into Ego on the escalator he shouldn’t have mentioned the fact that I was really late, especially since it was his firm that was responsible for my ungodly sleeping hour and the resulting need to take subject myself to a mode of travel which should have been outlawed by the Geneva Convention. And maybe he shouldn’t have had just the tiniest smirk. After some rather unladylike yelling, stomping and general display of extreme displeasure, we parted ways at the lift.

Remembering sometime during that frantic hamstering about which resulted from the activities of Ego’s firm that we had arranged the other day to have lunch, I fired off an email which made it explicitly clear that lunch was going to be very out of the question, and it was all his fault. Smart man, he did not respond.

Witness the following communications (please note all correspondence has been edited to spare you from technical details and protect moi from getting my ass sued off):

From Slinky at 11.46am
"I cannot go an eat lunch with you today because [something unpleasant done by Ego's firm] yesterday. I will be hungry and alone. Hmph. "

Imagine more of the same.

Sometime between “Hungry” and “Sulkily ravenous and contemplating eating my foot”, one of the secretaries comes bearing an envelope with his Ego’s firm's letterhead on it. I took it, found out that it was oddly lumpy, and in a moment which indicated exactly how wound up I was, nearly grabbed the poor bewildered secretary, who must have seen murder on my face and scuttled off.

Opening it with shaky hands, I blinked a couple of times before I really understood what I was staring at. It was a bar of Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate, with a note wrapped around it.

That chocolate was gone before you could even sneeze, you’d better believe it.

Following communication:

From Slinky at 2.04pm:
"AAAAAAAAAAH, chocolate!!!!when it come, at first I thought "Fuckers!!!!!! What now!" You are an angel. "

From
Slinky at 2.06pm:
"Ooooooh, special dark too..... "

From Slinky at 2.08pm:
"shit. The chocolate has derailed my brain. This was an evil ploy, wasn't it?I am such a sucker ."

From Ego at 2.08pm:
"i would have put a 'service copy' and 'urgent' chop on the envelope but i couldn't find the damn things. ;) apparently this is the modern day equivalent of the innocent indigenous tribe sending
sacrifices to the goddess of the volcano lest she visit her wrath upon them. oho so you're feeling happy and spacy now eh? time to [initiate acts of legal evil] !!"

From Slinky at 2.19pm:
"i like the goddess image. I smite, therefore I am. and I think 'happy and spacy' is stretching a bit. More
like 'less homicidal'. But then again, I still have to [performvarious acts of legal miracles] and try not to get blown out of the water. So 'homicidal' is deifnitely still an option. And if you initiate [acts of legal evil], please be very aware of the fact that you are in the same building and hence,
extremely easily accessible. "

No further response from Ego.

Update as of 3 March 2003:

I was today reliably informed that Ego later complained to the person responsible for this sequence of events and claimed that said person woed him money for chocolate. Said person apparently laughed and told him who asked him to buy it?

Never mind, good karma has accured from that act of kindess. I have been the White Angel of Karma for once.

In other news, I really, truly do not understand this. (scroll down for Stephanie Seymour) Generally, I adore the Fug Girls. They rock my world. But Stephanie Seymour, skank-ho outfit or not, looks absolutely bloody amazing.



At 37, if I looked like that, and had an ass like that, I’d be goddamn well showing it off, hell yeah. That woman’s ass is AMAZING.