Official Handshakes

It's that time of year when your parents reignite their arts-and-crafts fetish for dioramas, shredded paper, fat bearded white men and a little blonde baby figurine.

Put on your torn, washed-out skinny jeans, show off that cleavage and expose your tattoos for that dreaded family Christmas reunion.

Worse than the cries of Christmas children unable to form complete sentences are your fully grown adult-like relatives who don't seem to hear themselves asking you intrusive questions.

This festive season, preempt stupidity with this list of questions.

You put on weight, is it?

Why you eat so little?

My son this year got into express stream. 

Did you go to church this morning?

Why you want to put tattoo like that? 

Your boyfriend not Christian?

So old, when you getting married?

No boyfriend?

Why is your hair like that?

What you mean you're vegetarian?

How the fuck did something once so joyous actually turn out to be one of the most evilest acts we've been committing without even knowing.

Balloons, man. Fucking evil, round, colourful balloons. 

According to the hippies, releasing them into the sky is bad for birds and ocean mammals far, far away. We've been murdering. And we've been laughing while at it. We should be ashamed.

But balloons are the second most happy-making thing for me after bubbles and before The Exorcist. And I'm the sort of guy who has no wish to hear children laughing during Christmas because I think that whole merriness is overly fabricated. And I'm trying to be vegetarian. You've never seen a happy vegetarian at Christmas reunions. Ever.

But balloons. They bring me joy. And without balloons, that old man from Up would have never fulfilled his late-wife's dream. 

And now, the joy, the adventure, and the childhood are deflated. Perhaps for the better.

I don't know whether to thank the hippies or leave my car's engine running for no reason in a primary rain forest. They have in one single hissy fit managed to make the world a better place and made us miserable forever. Maybe that's why we shouldn't replace full cream milk with soy milk in our coffees and milos. Because coffee and milo are not the fucking same with soy milk. And then we'll forget the joys of balloons and of full cream milk and we'll ban things that once brought joy, like sand castles and puppies and Facebook.

So say goodbye to your balloons. Forever. Say goodbye to your childhood. Sleep well knowing the animals in the sea and the birds in the sky are safe, and that at least the old man from Up managed to fulfil his dream.

For the balloons will never rise again.

^ Oh, the arrogance! Do you want to leave or not? If you’re not going to accept my offer for contract extension with the club, then I’ll play you whenever I want, Gary! 

I left my job as a print journalist because I saw a future expanding my career growth elsewhere. For seven years, I was a sub-editor, reporter and photographer with a national daily tabloid. Where exactly I was going I wasn’t sure, but I knew I had to get out of print.

I narrowed it down to maybe a role that involved me working online, or in a managerial role in communications or branding. A company where there would be an obvious transfer of my existing skills. A company where my proficiency in managing, language, design and writing could be applied to. But nobody wants a print journalist these days. Not even public relations firms or companies needing a former journalist and editor to manage their internal and corporate content and communications.

I ace the interviews, but they all want someone with “online” experience.

Heck, even journalism companies are saying no, saying I fit all criteria except that “background in digital or broadcast”.

Now I’m 34, jobless with four social media accounts, with dozens of anti-climatic interviews that have left me high and dry like that high school girl I was in love with who told me I was like a brother to her, and with a few dozen pending applications likely lost in some HR manager’s spam folder.

I’m 34 and relying on Xbox and Fifa 13 for validation of how good a manager I was in the newsroom. Or still am. Or can still be. Tears of rejection have been encrusted in the crannies of my Xbox controller and left joystick. I can only dribble, pass and shoot to the right now.

My girlfriend, Sue, has a job and now she’s earning more than me. She’s 25. She bought me lunch the other day. I could afford it, but she felt bad. So I used the money I didn’t spend to buy a skateboard cap with a Where’s Waldo design on it because I’m going through a premature mid-life crisis. The cap cost more than the lunch she bought me. The episode has made me realise that maybe a professional future in balancing P&L sheets is not up my alley. The shipping for a US$25 hat cost US$30. It came up to a total of US$55. With a shitty exchange rate.

It feels pretty fucked up without regular income and I still can’t find that wanker Waldo on my cap.

^ Waldo made me broke.

But what these fussy employers don’t know is that I while I do not have “professional digital experience”, I do have online and digital talent.

I play Xbox. Online. It’s connected via wi-fi. I did the networking myself. I have a Gold membership. I paid for it via PayPal. It’s been auto-paying SGD$14.95 for the last year and I never use it. Now I can’t seem to stop it. The link to cancel the account is conveniently missing from the account settings page on the Xbox website. I suspect they’ve deliberately made it tough finding it. I’ve sent them emails and I still can’t find it. I’ve cancelled my debit card and ordered a new one.  Now I can’t pay for groceries at the store and will have to convert my foreign currency to afford my tin of Milo. 

I have since developed a love-hate relationship with Xbox. I should write Steve Ballmer a sternly worded letter void of any joy.

So it’s disconcerting that the one place where limited algorithms that could be preempted by simple logic based on set parameters, repetition, and limited outcomes, ends up outsmarting you with petulant behaviour and disobedience much like my colleagues who used to report to me in the newsroom.

The computer has fucked me over.

I got a message from Gary Cahill, my central defender, saying that he didn’t want to sign the contract extension I offered him. With the burden of having to find a replacement defender mid-season, with Arsenal on my tail in the league, and my girlfriend reminding me not to be late to pick her up from the train station for our friend’s pointless birthday party (why would anyone celebrate a birthday after 35), I was feeling stressed out.

Having the leisure and liberty to not change out of yesterday’s boxer shorts should be what some would call “the good life”. But there I was, stressing, having to deal with a timely girlfriend and a petulant English man. I wasn’t like Gary when I sat in front of my editor three months earlier when I told him I wanted to quit. I didn’t flip-flop like Mr Cahill here. I quit. That was it. No ifs, no buts. I’m done.

With an hour and a half to shit, shower, wear actual clothes and sort out my managerial problems, I checked my watch. 5pm. I would need to pick up the missus at 6.30pm. Having not played Cahill for five games since his contract refusal and relegating him to the reserves, I did something I hadn’t done for a few weeks. I put the controller down and got ready to meet the missus.

5.30pm. I was done surprisingly fast and even updated my Facebook while taking a shit. Add “multi-tasking” to my skills, Mr Employer! 

I had an hour. With David Luiz injured, John Terry fatigued from the last match and sleeping with the various wives of his teammates, and Branislav Ivanovic playing right back in place of the injured César Azpilicueta, I did what any good manager would do; I called up my under-21 defender, Nathan Ake, to the first team.

Then I did what no employer had done for me for more than three months of job hunting: I ignored Cahill’s lack of match experience over five games and put him back on the first team because he showed me passion to play for the team. Then, I gave him the captain’s arm band.

We beat Arsenal in a tough home match. 2-1 was the final score. Frank Lampard got on the score sheet, as did Gary Cahill with a thumping volley on a poorly cleared corner for the match-winner. The joy was short-lived, though. Post-match news reports speculated that Barcelona and Bayern Munich were now in the hunt to get Cahill’s signature, with his weasel of an agent keeping mum.

6.35pm. Message: “Hi babe, I’m here at the station in the usual spot.”

I proceeded down to the match calendar for my next match - an away game to Olympic Lyon. I want to play another game and test Cahill out.

6.36pm. Message: “Where are you? Have you left?”

Then, I got another message, but it wasn’t form Cahill. It was from my young striker, Romelu Lukaku:

^ Another good day of being a manager. 

^ “It’s all because of those bloody Bangla Indians and mainlanders bringing up the cost of living and the COEs and the ERPs and all the abbreviations,” says your drunk uncle.

If the Little India riot in Singapore has taught me anything about our online community, it has taught me this: it’s like everyone’s drunk uncle.

That painfully obnoxious uncle who hears only the sound of his own voice, and whose uninformed opinions are the gospel truth that everybody must subscribe to.

That self-righteous guy who has only one tenuous, baseless opinion for the year but yet has something to say on every topic brought up at the dinner table.

The guy who ascribes the country’s problems to generalisations about ethnicity, religion, nationality and culture.

The guy who somehow blames the birth of a panda in the zoo to the influx of Chinese migrant workers here.

The guy that doesn’t think twice before opening his mouth.

But that’s the drunk uncle for you, hijacking every issue with his obtuse views formed likely by sitting down with other old men who know secrets to an issue no one else knows, much like many immature, racist, spiteful bigots logging on to their computers and smartphones here formulating theories and solutions to the riots to fit their agenda.

And while it may be unfair to generalise the entire online community and the internet.sg machine as a whole, many people really do not think twice before saying something, let alone before clicking “post”, “tweet”, “publish” and “send”. 

Internet.sg seems to be made up of people who, like the drunk uncle, also resemble the loudmouth, nosey aunty whose first question to you at a family reunion is, “Wah, you put on weight, ah?” or to ask, “Eh, how much you earn?” making it a point to remind you somewhere in the night that it’s still less than her children’s salaries.

But don’t get me wrong. It’s not that stupidity is more rampant in Singapore than other parts of the world. It’s just that Singapore is small, so we tend to encounter the stupidity more often. All our education and, yet, comments like the ones passed at every turn of every breaking national story still make people cringe.

Like comments that can’t tell the difference between a Tamilian and a Bangladeshi.

Perhaps the online community should be given jobs solving every issue there is in Singapore because they’ve all become overnight experts at solving a riot, how it started, how to stop it and finding out who to catch, blame, cane and deport: It’s those damn Indian Banglas and their drink, I tell ya!

Without pause for thought, Singaporeans tend to say what we feel at the spur of the moment, but never putting up our hands when it’s question time at a seminar or in class.

We’re shy and reserved in general, but arm us with a keyboard or a smartphone we can hide behind, we’re like a crack addict typing with caps-locked opinions based on flimsy hearsay.

Kudos for wearing our passion on our sleeves and being quick on the draw. But it’s not going to do us any good when we really need to move forward as an intelligent community making educated guesses, informed decisions and insightful opinions.

These citizens are going to increasingly look like the cast of extras who play  the ill-informed, neurotic, childish, selfish and bigoted citizens on political satire TV shows like Veep, In The Thick Of It and Parks and Recreation.

The aftermath of the riots should really be about the need to consider alcohol laws in Little India on Sundays no matter how knee-jerk it may be, or to reassess our labour laws, or to highlight the plight of foreign workers and hiring techniques from greedy construction and manpower companies here and from the source, or even to reevaluate Singapore’s socio-economic model.

Instead, the aftermath has brought about another consideration: Turning everyone’s smartphone into M&M’s dispensers so we forget what dumbass, racist remark we were going to post online. 

Like a Singaporean aunty, I’ll end off by saying, “I hope the Government can look into the matter, find a solution, charge those involved, and find the appropriate coloured M&M’s.” 

PHOTO: officialhandshakes

I sometimes stay up late looking out for the latest gadgets of the future on late-night shopping TV. Sometimes I even record it to watch a couple of years down the road. The last item I bought was a Ginzu 2000 knife.