on paintballs and writing

hola!

i've just had the most amazing weekend!

the week ended with rather successful interviews on friday (second interviews come monday! yay!) after a most pleasant friend dropped by to visit and the weekend started with yet another successful interview on saturday - followed by lotr (yes, lord of them rings) games run by this dungeon master (DM) who delivers awesome sound effects and imagery who, incidentally, packs a flying punch on the xbox as well.

the bunch of us played through to the wee hours of sunday morning and hit the sack, only to gather again at noon today (sunday) to bloom each others' asses with paintballs.



WOOOOOOO YEAH paintball wars!


it's a sexy game i tell you! sexy because it's dangerous and the urban men you thought only capable of making kills on the computer screen can ALSO paint yer pretty corpse orange yellow purple and black with them paintball guns.


suddenly these 'slow-moving singapolean males' become war machines - an aspect i only heard tales about (mostly involving the words 'army' and 'camp' which, in essence, mean the same thing: hell). what an eye-opener!


...you can say that my perception of local guys upped several notches.



and ye gods, the paintballs hurt! each hit you get will earn you a bruise on top of a welt that you'll only feel 3 seconds after you're hit. i know, i got hit once or twice... but that's because i'm a coward and kept faaar faaaaaar away from the front line. i would've been cheerfully pelted with paintballs by the opposing team if i dared venture as close as my male counterparts did... but then i would've served a bigger share of bruised body parts to the other side if i had dared, too. :/

one of us had the misfortune to get bloody THWACKED right under the arm within three meters' range - he got a bruise the size of my fist that's purple on the outside and bright pink on the inside, which he took -hong kong accent- like a MAN. hats off to that one!


what happened on the field there looked like some reality show ..and i'm sure you people would have noticed that in every reality show there will be the occasional maniac.. and today in my team there happened to be two.

maniac no.1 turned up in bermudas and singlets knowing full well what kinda damage those paintballs can deal -- oddly enough though, he's not that badly injured, if at all. he's also the one spraying the field with ammo like there's no tomorrow. heh. maybe that's why he managed to get away with little damage: people were too busy ducking behind barriers to shoot at him.

maniac no.2 stood up from behind protective barriers, walked - beat this, WALKED - in the middle of the battle and pointed his gun, terminator style, at our enemies and put serious dents in their defences. heck everyone else on our side were huddling behind obstacles to avoid projectiles and he was the only one walking around outting enemies like they wouldn't find him. brave man, that. bloody accurate, too, if i may add, but maniac all the same. oh incidentally, this is the one who had served that the-size-of-my-fist bruise. scary.

maniac no.3 is the one i mentioned earlier, The One With The Funky Bruise, also known as Victim of Maniac No.2. though to be fair he DID do copious amounts of damage to our team, leading the attacks, literally shooting our exposed asses and continuously putting us out of play. heh. -respect-


the rain and the puddles and mud only served to make things more interesting - for me at least - it's REAL WAR. wah so cool. got gun got protective gear and got enemies got comrades got bloody weather. i feel like a MAAAAN. -flex miniscule muscles- no wonder guys like to talk about their army days!

to use a cliche, we had a smashing good time at this game: the exhilaration was awesome and the adrenalin exciting ..but as most good things go, the paintball war ended all too soon (the two hours flew by i tell you) and after promising each other that we'd do this again soon, we headed back to base (DM's home).


on the way back, after we're done recounting who shot who else - here is where the writing part comes in - someone mentioned how it is being working in the er, media (?). he's a writer and though he works shit hours he's absolutely happy. someone else picked up where he left off and brought up the issue of people writing for the sake of writing and sometimes being provocative just for the sake of being so.

words like 'trying too hard' and prominent names in the writing industry popped up as he said that it's more important to write to provoke meaningful thought than to write just to be provocative. an example raised was a local writer's likening singapore's casino situation to the outhouse without any given reason.


and i jump on the band wagon only now in the spirit of esprit de l'escalier!


if you were to call someone a name, you have to have a reason for it.

you might call someone micheal because he/she molests lil kids, or you might call someone moron because he/she made the mistake of calling himself 'average' in front of the girl he was wooing. but there are reasons given, see?

sometimes the reason's apparent, but most times it just isn't all that clear and it's always best to explain where you're coming from. besides, people tend to arrive at the same destinations but the routes they take might be vastly different.

and that's what makes a writer unique. it's 'the route' that makes things interesting and gives you your 'style'.


take the hit thriller series CSI for example.

in each episode the script consisted of one or more victims and there is the need to find that killer (the reason/objective of the law enforcers) but what made it so exciting were the methods used to kill the victim, the means employed to conceal the killer's identity and the clues the cops pick up to draw them closer to the murderer ('the route'). sometimes the killer's reason for the murder is an unexpected dash of mint on the usual pawsta. (don't pick bones with me on the choice of spice/herb here, i'm no cook and you know what i mean)

it won't excite you much if CSI showed only dead bodies and people snapping pictures of the crime scene only to show you looks of relief and lines that go 'well, all in a day' two minutes later, would it? it's like calling two plain slices of bread a sandwich: no bite.

you don't make claims about a person or an organisation without supporting them. nothing much happens if it's good, unless it's something you sold and it fell short of whatever you promised it would be. then you get sued.

..if it's bad it's called slander. and you get sued.


...which later led me to wonder: what do you people think of my emails? are you indulging me because you happen to know me and that i say the weirdest things that keeps you amused? i know i won't get sued for airing my views but what - how - does it impact upon you, the reader?

to quote someone in the car loosely: it feels good to know that your work is out there, with your name on it; and that people reading it either love it or hate it.

aye, it's true. whether the boss loves it is another issue altogether.


but is it enough, really? is it enough for me? my readership's definitely lower than the main local paper, i've no 'boss' to speak of.

should i be worried that my emails tend to drop into cyberworld, into your emailboxes like pebbles thrown into deep deep wells, with the occasional pleasant 'plip' when it pitches into the water, or should i be content that my pebbles are filling that well in bit by bit without seeing splash nor hearing sound?


mm. here's the result of two minutes of pondering:
whatever it is, i suppose i'm of the same mind as that friend. i want my words read, i want my thoughts known.

and yes, it does feel obscurely good that someone's reading my musings and possibly cursing the amount of time i have at the same time wishing they could find it in themselves to write about things as such as well. heck do it better than i'm doing it, even.



-grin- maybe.

it does feel good to know that you are receiving my emails. it's the hope that i am giving you something to think about, smile at, mentally chew on later makes me carry on writing.

and here's hoping you like my pieces. :)