Vegas: Sins Of The Flesh

When I first went to Vegas as a 10 year old, I never got to see the seedy side of it, because I was the victim of an elaborate con.

Once we got to the hotel, it was as if my brother and I had died and gone to heaven. You see the Pay Per View TV, my father said, you can watch all the Disney movies you want. You see the fridge minibar, he gestured, eat all that you can eat.

The only catch was that we had to stay in the room the whole night, but heck, as far as we were concerned my dad had suddenly morphed into a Ren Ci Charity monk. After all, the young male mind is not geared towards looking past immediate gratification. We didn’t even notice my parents slip out gleefully and return past midnight looking decidedly happier.

Years on, the more I read about why Vegas is Sin City, the more bitter I got. The only lasting memories I had of Vegas, after all, were of nice hotels and Bambi running around in fields of green.

Coming back to Vegas as an adult, I was determined to wallow in as much filth as I could. After all, I was of age, was financially solvent (at the beginning at least), and no longer had to worry about outsmarting my parents. This was my chance to see if Vegas deserved its reputation.

And it does.

But it’s not because of the sheer availability of call girls. Nor the endless rows of slot machines and card tables. Nor the abundant alcoholic oases that litter this desert town. The way I see it, the one thing that makes Vegas Vegas, is the… Vibe.

The Vibe is this intoxicating, heady mood that chips away at your inhibitions, that makes all the wrong things somehow feel right. Ever been in a club before, where it’s dark and it feels like you can do anything and get away with it? Multiply it a thousand times, and you’ve got the Vibe.

And that’s the allure of Vegas. Here, whatever your desires may be, there’s a whole bunch of people alongside you, and their company dilutes your guilt and concentrates your indulgence.

Within minutes of hitting the Strip, we chanced upon vendors handing out little cards with barely-censored pictures of girls, complete with expected charges and numbers to call. It was mildly titillating to get these cards at first, but when I saw how many of these cards were abandoned on the pavement, the crassness of hit home.

Upon reflection, I guess it was the way these girls had endured the indignity of baring themselves to strangers (albeit on cards), and yet people were simply just… walking all over them.


Thankfully, the adult-themed Cirque De Soleil show we caught was quite tastefully done. Here’s a quick snapshot of the theatre that I managed to get. We were to go to a strip club too, but an unscheduled snowstorm on the way back from the Grand Canyon was our main entertainment for the day instead.


Unsurprisingly, for all the enthusiasm I had for exploring the dark underbelly of Vegas, I discovered that unless you're willing to throw yourself in fully and participate, you're just going to be a dispassioned bystander.

In a way, I can better understand why my father would have preferred me to stick with those cartoons all those years ago. And yes, the tone in this post is schizophrenic. Haha.

More to come!

Spring Break Statistics

I'm back! Here's a quick summary of the statistical side of things, will post in detail soon!

Male companions on trip: 2
Female companions on trip: 0
Paid female companions on trip: Also 0
Miles driven in car: 1400
Cars which were better-looking than ours: ~ 2000
Parking tickets: 1
Speeding tickets: 0 (car not powerful enough)
Was overtaken by: ~2000 cars
Overtook: 15 cars, 1 truck, 1 scooter, 1 dead cat
Trips made to Grand Canyon: 1
Snowstorms in Grand Canyon of all places: 1
Theme Park visits: 1
Puked: 0
Vulgarities scolded: 794
English vulgarities: 44
Hokkien vulgarities: 750
Squatting outside Wifi zones to leech internet: 4
Getting chased away by zealous security guards: 1
Missing Fergie in concert: 1
Cameras spoilt by dust: 1 (mine, grrr)
Sinful meals: 7 x 2 = 14
Early morning gym workouts: 0
Money lost at Casinos: USD $21
Hours playing Blackjack: 1 hour
Rate of loss of money: USD $0.30 per minute
Amount of planned alcohol consumption: 50 Tequila shots, 20 Beers, 10 Flaming, 10 Margaritas
Actual alcohol drank: 2 Soju shots, 2 Margaritas, 1 alcoholic sweet
Getting chased out of pharmacy for being high / drunk: 1
ID checked on account of looking youthful: 6
Half-naked women seen: 7
Girlfriend faithfully thought of: 7 x 10 = 700
Cost of seeing half-naked women: $70 USD
Average cost per each half of each half-naked woman: $5 USD
Distance from said half-naked women: 80 meters
Conversations initiated by beautiful women: 1
Friendly women who turned out to be prostitutes: 1
Times we said we would ring up call girls: 56
Times actually called said girls: 0

Phew! Ok so that wasn't a real, classic American Wet 'n Wild Spring Break, more of a Soggy 'n Mildly Exciting Spring Break. But it was still my Spring Break, so it's special to me.

Talents

There was a farm on the edge of the moor. Aside from the normal produce, people could also pay a small sum to adopt, and bring home, any one of the animals on the farm.

Every Saturday, the farmer opened the gates that were normally closed, and put up a large sign which invited animal lovers in. He would then shoo his animals out, and prod the sleepier ones so that they might better endear themselves to visitors.

One of the Ducklings was very perceptive, and it occurred to him that he had none of the charms, skills or antics of the other animals. Waddlequack! he thought, I need to improve myself! Or no one would want me!

The Duckling thus begged the Rooster to teach him how to strut. Cockakoo! crowed the Rooster, do you not waddle perfectly well already? But the Duckling was insistent. It is true that I can waddle pretty well, he said, but your strut is a most majestic way to walk too!

The Duckling also entreated the Sheep to teach him how to bleat. Whyforeeee! bleated the Sheep, you are good at quacking your native quack! But the Duckling was insistent. It is true that I can quack pretty well, he said, but it is not better if I knew how to bleat too?

The Duckling also requested the Cow to teach him how to give milk. Whatthemooo? went the Cow, you are really better off… not giving milk! But the Duckling was insistent. It is true that… I am not good at giving milk, he said, but isn’t that all the more reason to make an effort to?

And so the Duckling went around the farm trying his best to learn from the other animals. When Friday night came, the Duckling fell asleep, exhausted at rehearsing all that he had learned in preparation for Saturday.

The next day, the Duckling was the first out on the field, and when the visitors started coming in, he proudly displayed all the various skills he had acquired. Who could possibly resist me, he thought, when I am all that the other animals are too?

The hours went by, a number of animals changed hands, and yet no one had requested to bring the Duckling home. As closing time loomed, a little girl ran towards the pond where the Duckling was. This encouraged him to once again show off all that he had learned, despite all the disappointment already saddling his heart.

The little girl stared at the Duckling in puzzlement for a while, then slunk sadly back to her parents, She took their hands, and as they were walking out of the farm, the Duckling overheard this:

“There was a mighty energetic Duckling there, darling, was he not to your liking?”

“Well… I wanted a Duckling who waddled, not toddle around like he was drunk like Grandpa always is. I wanted a Duckling who quacked, not squawk like he was being stepped on. I wanted a Duckling who could be cheerful, not always look oh so very constipated.

“I just wanted a Duckling to be more, like, well, a Duckling… so no, that wasn’t him.”

Spring Break!

I'm off to Vegas! And LA! And San Diego, if I haven't crashed my car in this silly left-hand-drive system by then!

Will be away for about a week, will try to blog from there! Back with pictures soon!

Once In A Lifetime

Last week, I learnt that a friend here was about to go skiing. She then called me up to ask for a favor, and I must say, it was a most unpleasant experience.

I mulled over how to handle it, but decided that brutal honesty in the end would do best. So I trudged over to her place yesterday with a heavy heart.

Me: Hey, here's the ski pants you wanted to borrow.
Her: Oh ok, thanks! Hmm, is something wrong, you look... kinda upset.
Me: Yea. I wanted to tell you that I'm pretty disappointed in you.
Her: Huh?
Me: I mean, I thought you were different from my other female friends, but, at the end of the day, you also just want to get into my pants.
Her: ...

Look, if you were me, you would never have passed up the opportunity to say that. =)

Ponytail

It's much harder than you would think, keeping long hair.

I've had short hair most of my life, and generally I've had the same dead-sea-animal of a hairstyle since Primary 1. There were times, of course, when I tried to break out of the mold.

In Primary 3, I discovered to my absolute amazement I could flip my hair the other way, thus creating a mirror image of myself. It was intoxicating, the feeling of being able to do something so radical to my hair, all with a simple swish of the comb.

You know the feeling - it's the same one you get after you receive a fresh, bold, new haircut. I proudly flipped my parting every other day, and only stopped after I realized no one noticed, or, even after I pointed out my cunning, gave a flying fish. I guess I was ahead of my time.

In Secondary 1, hair gel made its grand entrance into my life, and I eagerly poured my meager allowance into these Little Pots of Guaranteed Happiness (just ask Mr. J). But it didn't matter if I used gel, wax, mud or bear fat, I just couldn't get my hair to behave the way I wanted it to. According to my hairstylist (the $10 auntie), I just didn't have the type of hair to pull off those Japanese anime haircuts.

My hairstylist was also the same one to stoically veto every one of my planned hair innovations over the next few years. She refused to dye the front locks of my hair white ("boy ah later you look like ah kwa"), resisted my requests for cool, short, spiky 'dos ("eh your forehead very big, must have hair to cover") and most helpfully pointed out the failings of my hair growth ("waa you so young only but I think you got bald spot already leh!").

As my options dwindled, I finally decided to embark on that one project most guys undertake at one point or another in their lives: the Ponytail.

See, I started off this way in Singapore:


Then, over the new few months it happily grew out:


Eventually, from the progress I've been making, this is a mock up of what I should look like in a few more weeks:

We'll see how it goes.

Mother Tongue

Before I came over to New York, a professor advised us exchange students that we would have to modify the way we spoke so that we could be understood easily.

So I brushed up on my English by watching Youtube tutorials on American (for practical reasons), Irish (to dazzle and charm) and er other-ethnic-group accents (so that I could tell whether the guy chasing me in a back alley wants my wallet or wants my body... not that it would change how fast I would be running).

4 Youtube tutorials and 80 House / Heroes / SATC episodes later, I was pretty confident that my faux American accent was polished enough. This was a good thing, for upon coming here I blended in pretty quickly, and never really felt left out.

That is, I blended in well with the English-speaking world. Not, it seems, with the Mandarin-speaking world here. I mean, seriously, who goes to the US for exchange and expects the cohort to be made up of 35% Mainland Chinese?

The beginning was the worst. Most of the Chinese students came up to me speaking in heavily-accented Mandarin, and were rightly stunned when they discovered my Mandarin was halting. "Your English is better than your Mandarin?" they would say. In Mandarin. I could hear my ancestors writhing in their graves in shame.

Yes, the shame! I knew how my friends must have perceived me - I must have looked like a Japanese who hasn't heard of Origami, or a Brazilian who never watched football, or a RI boy who didn't know how to charm the socks off girls. It struck me then how language is such a distinguishing hallmark of heritage.

Yet one learns fastest when one is thrown into the deep end. My conversations were like this last August:

朋友：喂， 你选了哪些科目？选到你想要的吗？
Me: 我... er... 很幸运， 学校给了我... ok look this is more painful for me than for you. I got Securities and Patents, which is probably 安全科目 and 不可以偷用我的东西科目. Just kill me.

For a while I continued speaking English with them, but things got to a head in one of my study groups. There were 2 other Taiwanese, and whenever the debate got too heated the 2 of them would switch to Mandarin, and then revert to English so I wouldn't feel left out. It occurred to me then that I had to cut the excuses and just practice my friggin mother tongue.

I figured that since there's about 0.8 seconds of lag time required for translation of my very English thoughts, I would take the initiative of greeting my friends in Mandarin. Then, in the time that they opened the conversation proper, I would have time to prepare my thoughts. This strategy, however, saw mixed results:

Me: 你们好！哇， 今天风和日丽，乌云满天！好久没见， 光阴似箭！
朋友：... 你是不是生病了？

Obviously they weren't buying it. After perusing a few self-help books on making friends, I figured that I needed to bring up a common topic, something which would clearly show that I was one of them:

Me: 同志们！毛主席万岁！台湾抢回来了吗？
ex-朋友：...　我们是来自台湾的。

There's a happy ending to all this, despite what my Chinese teachers fervently believe. Just last week, I bumped into a Chinese friend, and it was only after we parted ways did I realize that our entire conversation was in Mandarin. Apparently, my past few months of practice have done me some good.

Of course, my journey is hardly over. I've got years of practice and immersion ahead of me before I will fully appreciate my Chinese heritage / identity, but hey, 千里迢迢的路是一只脚开始的.

Phantom

I finally managed to catch Phantom the other day, with a bunch of other law school friends who were visiting in NYC.

I hate spoilers, so I’ve taken every effort in my adolescence to avoid finding out about the story behind Phantom. When Channel 5 screened it, I would hide in my room and do sit-ups. When my friends talked about it I would sprint hastily away. When Phantom came to Singapore, I would… ok you get the idea.

So I got very fit. And I was blissfully unaware of the plot, aside from the nugget that there was a girl, and that there was a guy. I also suspected that one of them wore a mask, not sure who.

Last week, as I sat in Majestic Theatre and watched Phantom unfold, I was entranced, beguiled, captivated… and eventually horrified. Horrified!

What do you mean, Christine doesn’t end up with the Phantom!? Wait, is that Raoul she is going off with?! The Phantom forced her to choose, and she sacrificed herself to keep that smirky-slimy-opulent-arrogant-ratass-toyboy safe?!?!

I remember sitting there long after the curtains fell, long after the cast came on stage to receive the applause, long after the lights were turned on and people started filing out, just to see if the Phantom would prance out from behind a rock and stab that bilebag Raoul. That would have gotten the standing ovation from me.

Outside the theatre, I was righteously indignant at the way no one else gave a damn about the Phantom:

Me: Wait, so it didn’t bother you guys that the Phantom ended up alone?
Friend 1: Bo pian la, he must have been really fugly.
Me: But he was sincere! And nice to her! And he really loved her!
Friend 2: Raoul also what. Plus Raoul handsome.
Me: But, but…
Friend 3: If two girls loved you equally, and one looked like Fiona Xie and one looked like Boon Kiat, who would you pick?
Me: But, but…
Friend 1: But what?
Me: … but the Phantom got his own Bat Cave also ma. How cool. Right?

Later I realized that I had been insidiously poisoned by Disney. I had smugly expected that Christine, temporarily smitten with Raoul, would come to see how his soul was much uglier and darker than the Phantom could ever be. Like, it would come to light that Raoul trafficked in babies or something.

The Phantom, in a dramatic rousing scene, would then snatch Christine away from the evil clutches of Raoul, and spirit her away to a land of grassy plains, blooming flowers and cheap facials, and they would live happily ever after.

To my great distress, the plot for Phantom doesn’t vary much across the movie, the books, the comic books, the audiotapes. In every single iteration of the story, I kept witnessing the Phantom climb that heady staircase of Hope, only to inevitably fall so ungracefully after. It’s a most irksome story.

Some friends have tried to figure out why the story bugs me so. Some believe I see myself in the Phantom (ok maybe the singing bit only), some say that it's the disgust at how Raoul had everything whilst the Phantom ended up with nothing. It's simpler than that, I think.

I read elsewhere that humans are fascinated by tragedies – if a happy ending and a tragic one were to compete for the privilege of finishing off an epic story, chances are the tragic one would win out. That sense of injustice, of what could have been, would haunt audiences much longer than a cheesy nauseatingly happy one would.

Makes you wonder which of the endings we all subconsciously seek in our own, personal lives.