3:44:21 PM Laremy: hey
3:44:26 PM Laremy: wanted to ask you
3:44:31 PM Laremy: what is the ***[redacted: number of days]*** call-up for?
3:44:36 PM Melvin: lol
3:44:38 PM Melvin: ***[redacted: military activity]***
3:44:40 PM Laremy: oh
3:44:43 PM Laremy: i must go too?
3:44:58 PM Melvin: yah
3:44:59 PM Laremy: oh
3:45:07 PM Laremy: so even the ***[redacted: sub-unit]*** does ***[redacted: military activity]*** ?
3:45:13 PM Laremy: i thought we should be doing ***[redacted: more appropriate military activity IMHO]***
3:45:18 PM Melvin: yah so they say
3:45:32 PM Melvin: if nothing is done for us i will express disappointment
3:45:37 PM Laremy: how?
3:45:43 PM Laremy: shake your head and tsk very loudly ah?
3:45:44 PM Laremy: hahaha
3:45:52 PM Melvin: hahaha perhaps

Why? For context:

1. I think most people should know by now that I have a keen interest in issues that deal with the Singapore military and with National Service.
2. I’ve also been reading David Boey’s blog quite a bit.
3. Mr Wang’s latest post provided the impetus to write about something close to my heart.

So I was once a PIONEER writer too.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it didn’t happen during a posting while I was serving my NSF. I managed to score an internship with PIONEER under the Singapore Civil Service Internship Programme in the ‘summer’ of 2006.

According to Edgar Lee, one of the Senior Editors then, the choice was between myself and another girl. We weren’t shortlisted; we were just two kukubirds who were interested (or silly) enough to apply for that position.

Well, I thought I got it because I sounded earnest enough during the telephone interview. Actually, I got the gig because the other girl didn’t pick up her phone.

Oh, well.

The internship was one of the best things to ever happen in my life. I had just finished my second year of University, and was somewhere between being willing to write well and being able to write well.

I thought I was destined for academic mediocrity, but the stint at PIONEER was the turning point.

Being forced to write coherently – and consistently – helped me to see what I was doing wrong before, and provided me with more self-awareness when it came to improvement.

You can check out a list of the articles I wrote here. There is a distinct immaturity in each article but I improved at a very rapid pace.

To illustrate: this is the first article I wrote, this is an article from the second month of my internship, and this is the last article I wrote. See the difference?

Anyway, unlike many other people, I haven’t cancelled my PIONEER subscription.

I still read the magazine every month with a fervour: ripping open the plastic sheet that PIONEER comes wrapped in; devouring the publication from page to page.

Is it because I am a military nut? No. I follow what the SAF does  “out of a desire to ensure the system is accountable for the lives of Singaporeans who step forward to serve in uniform”.

That is my only motivation, and PIONEER provides me with one of the few links that I have to a military system that has much room for improvement.

In fact, PIONEER magazine itself provides the most apt example of the change that needs to happen.

The publication is a symbol of how the Singapore Armed Forces wants to portray itself – a glossy, polished, professional entity.

But silences speak the loudest words, and the features that are missing from PIONEER are the very same ills that plague the SAF.

For example, there are no critical commentaries from learned individuals that analyse and evaluate military policy. Neither is there a forum page for soldiers and citizens to air their views.

In spite of this, I will continue to subscribe to PIONEER.

I believe the day will come when more citizen/soldier involvement and engagement takes place. PIONEER, like Singapore and the SAF, has evolved slowly, but surely over the last few decades.

This evolution isn’t going to stop – unless something happens to derail progress, of course.

Change will happen, and I look forward to being able to thumb through an issue of PIONEER and feeling like it’s worth more than the forty cents per issue I’m paying now.

or caught the film yet:

I watched it last weekend and actually managed to finish reading the book in camp during periods of lull – while waiting for my turn at the firing range or for CAT 1s (inclement weather for the civilians) to clear.

I can’t stop thinking about the action and the plot during the small moments I have to myself. It’s a beautiful book and it’s a beautiful story, and I’m glad to have had the chance of experiencing both because I’ve learnt a bit more about love and life.

Sometimes, I wonder how I made it through 2.5 years of full-time National Service.

Just watched OTOT and I thought it was wonderful. Each of the four characters in Full Tank! remind me of someone I know from my NS days. Thank you for a good night.

~

…I guess people use the Army Daze thing because they have nothing to compare it to. If someone else wrote a play about transsexuals, the audience might compare it to Private Parts too.

That’s true. People are always looking for familiarity and something to relate to so they can make sense of the world. Hence the use of stereotypes, which we are both also guilty of using in our plays… Hehe

But as a friend of mine said, there is space in the hearts of most people here to accept another play about the NS experience. If people can’t open their hearts and minds enough to accept that OTOT is different, then they’re missing out on a lot.

NS is experienced by every person here (for every guy that enlists, his whole family and circle of friends go through it with him in their own way) – surely it deserves to be shared and celebrated in more ways and more plays than Army Daze!

P. S. If we’re getting this comparison now, think how terrible it must be for the next person who comes along and writes something about NS!

It’s one of the more ‘serious’ moments in the play, so don’t be fooled by the deadpan acting. Alternatively, check out some pictures of the cast warming up before rehearsal.

Brendon and Terry

Koey, Dwayne, Ghaz and Rodney

Qian Chou and Nelson

More pictures here.

It’s gonna be a great show everyone – I personally guarantee it. Make sure you’re able to say, “I watched Own Time Own Target and was blown away” i.e. buy your tickets now.

RATIONALE:

1. You can buy tickets knowing what the writing is like. It may not appeal to you or it may make you more interested in watching the play – I don’t know, because it could go either way. But at least have a read first so that you know what you’re buying.
2. Knowing what you’re buying is important for me, so I’d like to think it’d be important for my ‘customers’ too. I hope theatre productions can start to move in this direction, so if they do, you know who started the trend… LOL.
3. Act Two isn’t included so there is some element of suspense + no need for a ‘spoiler alert’.

Enjoy!

~

So. Part of the dirty little secret is that as part of OTOT publicity, we’ve been involved in e-mail and face-to-face interviews, pre-recorded radio broadcasts, etc. Now, one very interesting publicity activity/event of sorts which I’ve had to do is to answer two questions via e-mail for The Sunday Times.

My responses are going to be used in a Lifestyle section called ‘Bookends’, which contains information about books that a particular person is reading. I expect it’ll be published next Sunday, since I didn’t see it appear in yesterday’s copy of The Sunday Times.

Now, as we all may or may not know, Gilbert Koh a.k.a. Mr Wang of Mr Wang Says So fame launched his book of poetry last Fri. So, me being me, I decided to take a chance and ask the publishers if I could purchase a copy of Two Baby Hands before its launch, because the deadline for submitting my answers to the ‘Bookends’ column was way before the launch date. Suffice to say, the publishers said yes, and I became a proud owner of Two Baby Hands the week before last!

So this is the dirty little secret that I’ve had to keep for a week or so, because I thought it would’ve been rather immoral for me to gallumph around telling everyone about my purchase.

But what’s the big deal, you may ask, hypothetically, since only five persons are supposed to be reading this, and not all five of those persons may be of the question-asking genus. Some may not even be persons at all, but that is another story for another time.

Well, I’ve been reading Gilbert Koh since 2002/3 when I chanced upon “Chiang’s Heat Stroke” in an anthology called From Boys to Men: A Literary Anthology of National Service in Singapore. So it’s a big deal to me, because I’m a big fan of Singapore + Malaysian Literature, and Mr Wang Says So and Gilbert Koh and… Yeah. You get the idea. Also, I thought it was very good business sense on the part of Ethos Books so I wanted to share this with everyone, in case something similar crops up in your own life in the future.

So! I’ll be blogging about my answers and why I talked about those books some time next week (or the week after) regardless of whether the Bookends column is published or not (because the silence will give me something to talk about too). In the meantime, keep on supporting Singapore + Malaysian literature!