confusion

Yes, you read the title correctly. That is the nickname of Orchard Towers. Which is where I ended up last night as two of my companies sales men are in town for the GSM Asia conference. Chris, another of the guys who is here, and I meet up with the two salesmen at around 7 for dinner. Well dinner was good, and their was more than a bit of drinking involved. This precipitated a ‘where to now’ conversation. We settled on China Black—a dance club on the twelth floor of a building or Orchard Road.

China Black was cool but it was too loud to carry on much of a conversation and all the seating areas seemed to be reserved so we decided to head out. We ended up at a place called Top Ten which is in Orchard Towers. Everything was fine when we got there; the four of us sat down in one of the little U-shapped booths and ordered some drinks. Then the sales guys went to work, telling us to invite some of the girls over.

Now, Chris is engaged and I have an—call it illogical—objection to buying sex and these girls where there for one reason: To be taken home and payed for sex. They don’t approach you, because solicitation is illegal but you can approach them, they sit with you and dance all over you and kiss on you and touch you and… I know this because one of the sales guys succeded in inviting three of them over to the table and setting them on Chris and I.

Good thing for Chris he ended up with the shy one. I was not so, um… Lucky. I got the aggressive girl. Now I won’t say it was not enjoyable to have a girl basically all ove me, but if I had a girlfriend then what that girl was doing would have been considered cheating. The worst part was the sales guy kept trying to get me to take her home, and was telling her to take me home! I had to remind him that I am not a customer—I work with him. I felt like saying ‘Mike, I’m not going to sign a contract for anything.’

So it was an interesting night. I had way too much to drink though and that brings me to one of the odd things about Singapore. Being only 137Km from the equator the sun is up 12 hours a day all year. It rises at 7 and sets at 7. This does not sound like it would be strange, but it feels like the hight of summer her and the sun is set by 7:30pm which is odd to someone who grew up much further north where the sun is up 16 hour a day when it is this hot an humid. I bring the sunrise up because I left the curtains open in my room last night as I was a bit out of it when I got back and this morning at 7am—because my room faces East—I was nearly blinded when the sun woke me up and I opened my eyes. The fact that my head felt like someone hit it with a sledge hammer made it all that much more painful! God sales men drink too much…. And somehow I ended up S$100 poorer and some girl at Top Ten S$100 richer, even though I went home alone!

I have seen a few of the pictures of devastation caused by Hurricane Ivan along the Alabama coast and the Florida pan-handle. Quite a few of them from Gulf Shores, where my grandfathers beach house is, or was—I don’t know how it fared but considering that the island Gulf Shores is on was for some time totally submerged and the amount of damage I have seen in the pictures I doubt it fared very well.

Having just been in Gulf Shores before I came it Singapore, it’s a little surrealistic to see pictures of places I know — places several miles inland, under three or four feet of water. To see places I just shopped now leveled with their wares scattered across the parking lot. Places I ate with their roofs upside down and their interior filled with sand and water.

It’s the price you pay for living along the Gulf coast. No different than earthquakes in Southern California. But it’s still surreal. I just posted a few of the better pics I took while I was down at my Grandfathers—you can look at them here [confusion.cc].

I don’t know when the next time I will be in Gulf Shores might be, but it won’t be the same. For some time the relentless march of capitalism has been ripping up the small homes and businesses and replacing them with high-rise luxury condos for visitors. Now I expect that process will be greatly accelerated as people sell their land rather than rebuild. The well backed investors will come in and buy up every plot of land along the beach—wherever it lies now—and they will build up make as much money as they can before the next big storm huffs and puffs and blows all of their houses down again.

This is going to be a really lame first post from Singapore but I have not had a chance to do too much exploring. My first week and a half have been very busy, my boss and my bosses boss, who is also my boss —it’s complicated—, anyway, they just left yesterday. So, tonight I had my first chance to really explore. Did not do much —the guys at the office decided to have a pool tournament so I did not leave till fairly late. So not much exploring tonight, had dinner on the street in Chinatown with two of my co-workers but did not have time to do not much else. Tomorrow I am planning to go out with my camera so I will try to post some pics.

My first impression? I will quote D███ from work here:

Singapore is like Asia by Walt Disney; it’s clean and sterile, and made for visitors. It’s Asia lite, there is so much western influence that it would be easy to never really be ‘in Asia’ in spirit. You could live and breathe big western city and never encounter Asia, mind you, you’d have to work at it but you could do it.

It’s going to be fun finding all the little nooks and crannies where the real Singapore hides, and then there is all the foreign lands so close by. This should be fun.

Speaking of pics, I finally linked my photos from the main page. I still want to work on the code for the pages (stolen from Thilo [ thilorusche.com ] and then heavily screwed up for my page.) I have some more pics to go through and post, from hiking with J███████ at Great Falls and from my Grandfathers house in Alabama. I’ll get around to posting them someday. I need to go through the Japan pics again now that I have got the hang of using GIMP to edit them. Some of them are over saturated with color and look bad. One day I’ll fix it…. now it’s bed time on this side of the world.

…and I don’t know when I’ll be back again. No really, I don’t know. In just a little while S██████ will pick me up and take me to the airport and I will be on my way to Singapore. I have a return ticket but I don’t know if I will be coming back next month or next year or ever. It’s a bit scarry and a very exciting. Moving on or postponing life? I don’t know yet. I’ll let you all know as soon as I know.

My grandfather is one of the people who should have been in DC for the dedication of the World War II memorial. He is part of the ‘Greatest Generation.’ He spent 50 months in Europe during and after the war. Helping to defeat the Axis powers and rebuild the infrastructure of the continent. When he returned home he applied for the G.I. bill to finish his studies which the government had interrupted to ship him off to war. He was denied because they said they had no record of his service. So he finished on his own money while my grandmother worked. Then the government did find the record of his service—in time to recall him and send him to Korea to fight.

It is sad that my grandfather fought for his country in two wars and now cannot remember that he just told me that story. Last week I went to Alabama to see him and he told me about the governments selective memory numerous times in the span of a conversation that lasted only a few hours. It was the same with other stories.

I am not as close to my grandfather as I would like to be. I have not seen him in six years and since that time he has had open heart surgery and a stroke that robbed him of his fine motor control on his left side—his dominant side. I grew up too far away to be as close as I would have liked.

My grandfather is the person I most admired as a student. He was the engineer that made me interested in engineering. And it is sad to see he is starting to fade. He never seemed old when I was growing up. Bald, yes but not old. He walked five miles a day and was mentally sharp. Now it makes me really sad that I do not know him better and that I don’t have a chance to get to know him better.
I guess it’s just a reminder of mortality. This whole incident makes me very depressed on some level. Not the kind of overriding depression where you can’t do anything but I find myself thinking a lot about things like growing old, not knowing my grandparents better because we lived so far apart and how well my kids might one day know my family. It just keeps popping up.

The idea of extended family is foreign to me. I’ve known families where the grandparents, aunts and uncles of my friends where virtually a part of everyday life. While to me my grandparents where people I saw every other year or on special occasions. I am reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake right now and I can identify with the main characters since of being lost on encounters with his own family. Every few years his family would pack up and fly to India to see countless relatives that he had not seen or heard from since the last trip.

I’ve never met half my cousins. Aunt’s and Uncles? Seen them two, three or maybe five times in my life. I wonder if this could be part of the reason I don’t form large social groups well? I don’t know, just stuff that has been going through my head while driving 40 hours to and from Alabama. That’s a lot of time to think.