Cars, Gas Stations and Smells

Of the 5 senses, the sense of smell seems to be the most subtle. It may not consciously register in your mind, but everyone has preferences about even the most banal smells.

For example, I hate the smell of fresh leather seats in a car. It just reeks of pretentiousness and automatically suggests of luxurious extravagance.

On the other hand, unless it's overwhelmingly pungent, my nose is quite fond of the smell of a gas station. Apparently quite a decent proportion of the population likes it too, so I'm not alone.

Go fig.

Sad endings to love stories make better reads

Since it’s February, let’s do a post on love stories, albeit Valentine’s Day being purely a Hallmark holiday.

Amongst the plethora of essays of love on the web, I have 3 favourites. What do these stories have in common, other than being well-written and hailing from the best-ofs section of Craigslist? Look at their titles and see if you can guess:

- A Letter to My Dead Girlfriend
- I Still Miss Her
- Our Connection is Over

That’s right – none of them end on a happy note. Apparently, the relationship stories that I enjoy all share recurring themes of death, fate or reminiscence. While I admittedly like a heart-melting tale of romance as much as the next person, there’s a certain wretched and sickly feeling about a couple being separated, especially by factors beyond their control, that happy endings cannot capture. Sure, you could attribute it to sensationalism, in that negative news sells better than positive news. But note also how rosy love stories tend to appear sappy by exaggerating and glossing over minute details, whereas sad endings are more delicate in describing human nature and emotions. See for example the ending to “A Letter to My Dead Girlfriend”,

‘Every morning when I wake up I forget for a fraction of a second that you are gone and I reach for you. All I ever find is the cold side of the bed. My eyes settle on the picture of us in Paris, on the bedside table, and I am overjoyed that even though the time was brief I loved you and you loved me.’

Boom. That’s powerful and instantly believable. Against the backdrop of death and separation, their ephemeral love will last for an eternity. In “I Still Miss Her”, the author is still replaying that fateful morning walk in his head and bemoaning what they sacrificed half a decade ago. And before “Our Connection is Over”, I had never read such an honest and vivid account of the desolation one feels when “falling out of love”. Through their words, you can feel how the act of writing is in itself a form of self-therapy for the heartbroken authors, a purging of feelings out into the open-air. Their emotions are raw, the scars still visible, and a wince of pain remains when memories are provoked. Not surprisingly then, happy romance stories in comparison often seem like bragging in disguise – “Oh look at me I’m flying so high!”

Make no mistake, there is little to no drama in these stories. They are not soap operas, and don’t involve cheating or unwanted pregnancies or anything of that sort, because that would be sensationalism. It’s just, as a reader, I find sad endings to be far more intriguing than happy endings.

... but still not nearly as entertaining as 'The Man Who Fell Sideways'...
                                                                                   

HK Food TV Programs

I gave up on local HK television sometime ago. It wasn't a conscious decision to become more productive or anything, but more because none of the programs were remotely interesting. Plus, after subscribing to Discovery Channel and broadband internet I had more science, reality and porn I will ever need.

But, after a long hiatus, I happened to watch TVB Jade with some relatives today. As I learned about Macau culinary delights, I noticed a few aspects of HK food TV programs that escaped me back in the day, things such as:

Not all the hosts are equal

There were 2 beauty pageants on the show. I don’t know if they were actually beauty pageants, but they might as well be since they acted like airheads. For 30 minutes, I watched food critic Chua Lam (蔡瀾) introduce Macau food delights while the girls would either A) nod their heads and pretend to learn something new, or B) ‘wow’ ‘whoa’ ‘yum’ until their airtime runs out. Apparently, the networks want us to believe the pretense of the show is education, in that the food critic educates 2 clueless people on how to taste food. There’s nothing wrong to have the host(s) learn something new while munching, but to have 1 host be an expert while the others are acting like subordinates is just cruel. Sometimes I think the networks are just messing with the girls:

Wannabe: “Can I get more airtime? I really want to revive HK’s entertainment business.”
Network Exec: “No.”
Wannabe: “What if I grovel and beg?”
Network Exec: “What if we offered you a contract to act stupid in front of plates of food?  Sort of the subtle public humiliation thing we do all the time here at the network?”
Wannabe: “Okay! But can I pretend to be smart and knowledgeable about the foods we eat?”
Network Exec: “Heck no. Who wants to see that? It’s just a show about food.”

Perhaps, it’s also a Confucianism thing, and the girls are expected to know their place below the ‘expert eater’? Just a thought.

The co-hosts have no reason to be there

They’re clueless like rolling eggs in a maze, yes. They’re pretty, maybe. They should be on the show, definite no. See above. There are a dozen shows where I can watch an attractive girl show me food and teach me how to cook. This is clearly not one of them.

Nonetheless, I do commend the TV networks for their boldness. Usually if people play the beauty card on TV, they try to avoid casting a bimbo image. Not these guys. Not at all.

They don’t like breaking the Fourth Wall when dinner’s on the table

The purpose of the show is to introduce good food. So just tell me what tastes good and why. Simple right?

Instead of talking to the audience, the food critic must only speak to his clueless co-hosts, even though the co-hosts have no reason to be there. The food critic will tell his co-hosts how to distinguish seawater fish and freshwater fish, or that he enjoys the shark’s fin soup (by the way, shame on you sir!). But we all know the real audience is us, aka ourselves. In what may be the most thinly veiled form of exhibitionism, we learn about his tastes and recommendations through his dialogue with the co-hosts. It’s like the hosts think they’re stuck in a TV drama where they must never acknowledge the audience’s presence, so they comment by speaking in riddles for us to solve. Wow.

There’s no evidence of rehearsing

A TV production need not be flawless and, depending on one’s demand for perfection, may never be. You would expect, however, the hosts to act like they want to be in the show.

The beauty pageants had sparse lines, far and few between, while the main food critic gobbled his way to happyland. I noticed every time as they spoke their lines, they would have this perfunctory glance at an object on the dinner table. In those eyes, you could sense fear and uncertainty, as if they are thinking “Shit, I knew I should’ve read my script twice!” Plus, as the hosts talk and eat, there’s an uncomfortable tension between them that usually exists at annual family gatherings in real life, but not on television. Your hosts could be incompetent, a monkey or an alien, I don’t care. But wouldn’t it be nice for them to act like a family as least? You know, pretend you’re with real friends and not with the colleague you want to bitch-slap real bad but can’t because the boss is there? 

With this sort of performance, what other explanation could there be, than the lack of rehearsal?

Her name is just begging to be used.

Family History

Tonight I was watching the historical documentary "World War 2 in Colour" on Discovery Channel with my family. It is a great TV production and does a decent job in telling a neutral war story(of course there's some bias - the Allies won the war after all). By digitizing and adding colour to wartime film, we can now see scraps and bits of the war story without having to squint at grainy black and white footage. I highly recommend it, especially if you haven't seen it before.

This episode recounted the battle between US and Japan for the Philippines. It showed how Japan's naval fleet was decimated even though they were on the verge of winning, and explained how US troops tasted enough blood for the whole America to lose its appetite for more war, a premonition for the future use of atomic bombs instead of launching full-fledge warfare on the Japan mainland.

As we watched clips of guerrilla battles on the streets of Manila, my dad casually remarked "Yea, my grandpa and your grandpa were there when the Japanese invaded". I felt I had picked up a six-sigma radar signal. "During World War II?" Turns out my grandpa had been captured by the Japanese, held captive and tied up with no food for seven days. By collecting raindrops on his tongue, he managed to last until he somehow got free. He was so weak by then, however, that he was only able to continue living because some (fortunate not to be captive) residents saved him and nursed him back to health. That's just the gist of a long story, but as I listened to my dad one thought stood out in my mind:

"My grandpa was a war survivor."

I assume it takes a lot of balls, guts and, most certainly, help from lady luck to survive any war as a civilian. Yes this isn't a story of my grandpa being involved in any combat conflict, and he wasn't able to fight back (other than by defying death) to become a national hero of sorts. He (or more accurately, his dad) was just a casualty on the side of war, taken as roadkill, people typically unaccounted for in wartime stories. Yet in a flash, to quote a friend*, "for the first time in my life, the concept of war had been personified". Sure I have friends who served in Iraq for the US military, but it still feels a lot more harrowing when you learn that one of your family members has experienced the pain of war firsthand.

In a way, I'm proud of my grandpa even though I have never heard a first-hand account from him. C'mon Bear Grylls, why aren't you demonstrating how to drink falling raindrops directly from the sky, huh?

Oh wait, that's man vs wild, nevermind.

*His photoblog is way cool by the way. Go check it out. 

 Pictured: Genghis Khan. Not my grandpa, but technically also another war survivor.

Goldilocks - leaving home after rescue

Last night I watched a TV show about hostage rescue. It recounted how a blonde girl (code named 'Goldilocks') was rescued from a house in Mexico, where she had been forced into sex slavery by the drug cartels. She was kidnapped from her US home at the tender age of 17 and had been in captivity for over three years. After the mission succeeded, she underwent a month-long drug rehabilitation program before being sent her back to her parents in the US. The show ended on a high note that her life finally resumed to normal…

Or not.

Two weeks after returning home, Goldilocks slipped out and ran away. Sadly, she has never been seen nor heard from again.

Reportedly, she left because she could no longer adjust to her old way of life. Her parents couldn’t recognize her as the daughter they once knew, presumably because she had in fact become a different person altogether. Perhaps because she had become accustomed to using drugs as a way to adapt to new surroundings, going back to a suburban home was more than she could handle whilst sober.

Really, did this come as a surprise to anyone?  The wretched girl had just gone through sexual exploitation hell, and people just expect her to reintegrate as if everything in life was rosy? It's not like the authorities didn't know of her dire living conditions as a whore. They knew she was constantly abused and vehemently beat up by the drug cartel. They knew she only learned to pass each living day by relying on ecstasy and cocaine, which the cartel generously supplied and fed to her. When the rescue team broke into the house, they found other kidnap victims inside - hooded, handcuffed and huddled together on the floor of a urine-reeking room (sorry for the pciture). Goldilocks herself was in another room, lying naked on a bed and cuffed to the bedposts. The show didn't say it, but she was probably high as fuck at the time as well. 

Fast forward two months from that moment, and it's incredible that nobody foresaw the problems that Goldilocks would encounter at 'home'. She was a mere 20 years old. At an age when most of us are saving money for shiny Apple products or desperately trying to stay in school to avoid real work, her introduction to the world was through being kidnapped, raped, beaten, flogged, degraded and drugged by her 'bosses' and 'customers'. In practical terms, Goldilocks knew more about the real world, and especially its dark side, than did her parents and family. To her, they must have seemed to be living in a bubble.

It was tragic that she was kidnapped and subjected to abuse – fate dealt her an unfortunate hand. But the real tragedy was how nothing was done to ease her back into her society. Although she had returned to her family, all search and rescue efforts were ultimately undone because Goldilocks was unable to nurse the scars on her own, and her scars ran very, very deep. She needed the help, but it wasn't there. So she left.

Experts generally agree that young adults between the ages 16-22 are the most malleable and easily imprinted by their surroundings. It should not be surprising, then, that Goldilocks after captivity was not the same Goldilocks prior to captivity at 17. She probably wasn’t even a shell of her former self. Heck, I'm surprised she recognized her parents at all. Her parents, though not blameworthy, were fools to expect only a ‘slightly changed’ daughter. Why weren’t her parents put through therapy or orientation? That would have better braced them for her return.

It’s a sad story, especially since it’s one that actually could have ended in joy instead of sorrow.

And here's a cute kitten picture for comfort. You're welcome.