Count your blessings

Hello, and welcome to 2020.

It has been a year of mythical regard, what with society’s visions of flying cars and monorails (and Malaysia’s Wawasan 2020). But life is stranger than fiction, and the power of nature is on full display in these times.

Everywhere I have seen blessings, where others have only seen curses. Stay at home—do more! Social distancing—more space! No social gatherings—global gatherings! Truly the magic of the internet has made the world smaller and have allowed us from far away to communicate with each other.

I have finally been able to put in work on my magnum opus that I began exactly ten (10!) years ago (by the lunar year 😁🌝), a compilation of my learnings and innovations on Haunt Event planning, with their related stories. Indeed, Rome was not built in a day and I could not hope to complete it by any artificial deadline. I’ve learnt so many new things that I felt obsolete one day and enlightened the next. I am thankful for everything that has occurred to me.

For many things, it is extremely uncertain what will happen. But I believe that if we are genuine, sensible and practical, the important things in life will return. We can already see some semblance of normalcy (which I hope is sustainable), but let’s pray for better fortunes and prioritise the productive.

“The gift of choice, [is] the gift that’s given to you that nobody can take away from you. You have unlimited choices. If you make the wrong choice you can try to correct it with another choice and make it right. Your life is the most precious gift you’ll ever have. And it’s the only one you have. You’ll come into this world alone. You will leave alone. Who you meet in between, is the challenge of how you deal with your life. Remember, no matter how bad something is in your life, it has a time limit. But also remember, no matter how good [something is] in your life, that too has a time limit.” 

—Kathy Buckley

Unfinished Business

Nearly 4 days later, what I didn't do continues to haunt me. There is always next year, I say, but the wait is torturous—and even then, what I didn't do continues to haunt me.

I always take great pride in planning everything to the last detail, and having a list of things to accomplish. So when something I absolutely look forward to, make great preparations for—no, *extraordinary* preparations for—does not get achieved, firstly, I have myself to blame, and then I can point the finger at other things.

Nobody will understand, because no one has even tried. It is too easily dismissed; it is deep. What on the surface seems superficial, to me has become my sustenance. You know how after some time one looks forward to the same little pursuits, the highlights of every year? That's how it has become for me. And the worst part is, it is never guaranteed and the people are *never* constant. It's like your hometown; over the years, everything changes around you, and although you change as well, you are only hanging on to fragile memories which no one will care about.

I tell myself, it takes time—everything will pass, eventually. But the reality remains. The sliver of comfort I can take in this is that well, some things have already been decided for the future. But there is that bitter taste in the mouth: what did I come for—work? Why did I linger? Why didn't I get there faster? Why did I sleep in the day? Useless, it was. Why waste half the day? It's not the first time I've sacrificed for this, anyway. For them—anything! As the last legitimate event, why not pull out all the stops and then laugh about it afterwards? Too many things went wrong, too few things went well.

You could say, "Concentrate not on what didn't happen, but on what did." I tried. It backfired. Some things *did* go exactly to plan. But what *didn't* happen was so huge and so basic that it stares at me in the face every time I don't see my face. Because it is a personal choice, a personal plan, not fulfilling it gnaws at you slowly from the inside.

I now depend on a new but wholly antisocial event to uplift me. I hope it goes some way to mending the open wounds that remain. It is completely different by nature, so I don't expect closure at all. But if I plan my day, and take a step back and sense what is important, I may be able to heal some things. But nothing will compare to a hundred and thirty people over a fire by the sea.

In the meantime, what I didn't do will continue to haunt me.

 

What if NightWalk…?

This post was begun on June 22, 2011 at 10:11PM and I only decided to post it today, after a dawning revelation.

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"........the NightWalk is cancelled!"

–ICT FOC 05/06, May 17, 2005 at 2.50AM, after Battle Royale finished.

And so begins a question of What If... "What if NightWalk was not cancelled? What if it piqued my interest early on? What if I had time to document and know everything about the school before I took part in FOC 06/07? What if—?"

After more than 10 NightWalks, looking back on this, it is a shame—an extreme shame, that I didn't go through it in a virgin FOC setting, when I was completely unfamiliar with the geography of Singapore Polytechnic. Once you become familiar with the twists and turns, the idiosyncrasies of the location, the fear of the unknown lessens. Therefore the best time to experience a NightWalk is when you don't know the place well, which means: when you are a freshie!

But it just goes to show how the ICT Club FOC Organising Committee placed great importance on the campers' welfare. They'd rather us sleep properly than be tired. Then again, NightWalk shouldn't have been placed after Battle Royal. We freshies were dead tired ("A NightWalk? At 2.50am?!") and daylight was fast approaching. I wonder what the NightWalk committee felt then, when the momentous decision was made to cancel NightWalk. Everyone must have been disappointed. Nevertheless, what's passed is past. We have since learned from our mistakes, and now DMIT Club never puts two major night activities in the same night for FOC.

Today, SP is a different place. The school management is more privy to the great interest in NightWalk. But they are taking it in a negative way. Sometimes the rules are relaxed, and NightWalk goes on as usual. But the main sentiment is one of disapproval. I don't know whether it is because of students' carelessness, or conservative thinking amongst the management.

In terms of carelessness, noise is an issue. Screams at night draw calls from residents to the police hotline, which in turn alarm the school management. Conservativeness dictates that all activities must end by 11pm, and resume at 7am the next day. Even a NightWalk. Which is rather ridiculous to me. The most recent ruling recommends that all camps be held outside school, including Orientation Camps. Honestly I don't know how an Orientation Camp is to be held without the Campus in attendance.

There is also renewal and relentless renovation. Previously forested areas with a foreboding presence are cleared to make way for some newfangled study corner. Old buildings are bulldozed without mercy. With sparse commemoration. I still haven't got over the loss of our dear MLT2 and Childcare Centre, and probably never will. (Abit sad.) But to the builders' credit, a sinister path has been cut through the hill where the old Childcare Centre once stood.

Due to the presence of 3 (!) construction sites in SP now, the FOC of 13/14 shall have its sleeping quarters at Terror Sea campsite in Sembawang. I had once asked before, why not try a NightWalk in the campsite? We could do with a refreshing challenge. But once you do it outside school, they will never know a NightWalk is possible in SP. Therefore I stand resolute in the idea of continuing to do FOC NightWalks, specifically, in school. Campsite NightWalks can wait till ICE camps etc, where campers are mostly students already savvy with the school terrain (where a NightWalk would be on familiar, comforting territory) and wish to have a different experience in an unfamiliar location.

"Hold steadfast to our tradition of NightWalk in SP, whether outdoors with ample effort to ensure darkness and isolation, or in conjoined classrooms with tons of partitions."

Rest assured that the tradition will continue.

 

Ruminations: The paper vs the computer

Last time, I used to, in the dead of night, write a few sentences in my Black Book, whether about the day's events or major chronicles I had planned for. Now, nights are spent surfing the Internet, endlessly, sacrificing sleep and rest. What has become of me? Where has my creative self gone? The one that is lured by the immediacy of the written word, the printed page? And now a computer distracts?

Frequently I find myself thinking that I should stop reading and start writing already, or get on with life and whatever needs to be done. This has happened much too often. Recently I pinpointed Facebook and its endless nature as a threat to my focus, and reduced the act of reading every status update there was till the point where I last stopped, which wastes a lot of time. So, one time-waster laid to rest.

What about the others? Twitter is still manageable. Blogs, not so. Of course, the fact that I'm writing now bodes well for my efforts at reducing distractions. I only need to take it further and focus entirely on my intended tasks.

To the NightWalk manual! And the FOC Chronicles!

But first, to sleep.

NightWalk: How did I get into it?

Everything has to have a beginning, doesn't it? I didn't step into SP with the desire to scare people. (That would be a tragedy.) As an interested Games Personnel in MIT FOC 06/07, I tagged along during NightWalk XX (Xploration and Xperience, as we called it) and participated in the planning recces in the dead of night with my seniors and peers: Chalk, Yap Meng, Jun Hao, Teck Chau, Joshua etc. I had no interest in them other than the excitement of exploring the school at night. Often we would end at 1 or 2 in the morning!

Even though I helped in making props for NightWalk 06/07, and made a few breakthroughs, my interest in NightWalk wasn't really there. I did find out that my prop-making methods used a LOT of masking tape, though. (It was the main ingredient. To this day Joshua, my senior PropMaster, still reminds me of my voracious appetite for masking tape.) As a scarer, my interest was only in perfecting my assigned scare point. MIT FOC NightWalk 06/07 was largely considered to be a success, I am pleased to say.

A serious interest in NightWalk stirred within me somewhere in the middle of 2006, well after FOC 06/07 in April. It began as a series of scare ideas in a notebook I used to keep track of school assignments and the like; a leisure activity. My brain was constantly thinking of ways to scare people: I couldn't walk anywhere in school without chancing upon a perfect place for a scare point. They were always simple ideas: a figure appearing, a sudden sound.

The scares were visualised in vivid detail. Having been intimately involved in theater and the arts since young, my methods for bringing a scare point to life were decidedly dramatic, and I strove to recreate what I imagined in a NightWalk setting, in real time. Thus all my ideas were rather elaborate, requiring a whole team of props people in the background operating the different effects in a single scare. Not very practical in a NightWalk setting, where manpower and ease of setup is paramount, I confess. But the main Idea always was: make the Scare seem Real. Something that will make you go: "Was that...?"

Black light theatre helped a lot. It involves doing something against a black background, such that a puppeteer wearing black can control a prop ghost without being seen. It was easy to see how it could be applied in terms of NightWalk scares, where darkness is a given.

The natural progression was to think of the Route itself and how to improve it. The best parts of SP could be strung together to form a route that is scary as well as easy to demarcate. I asked for advice from my friends and seniors who had organised NightWalks before, whether in SP or secondary school camps, and they helpfully offered their tips and knowledge. I proposed a split route to take advantage of all the hotspots in SP, and to this end, in February 2007 I set off on a photography expedition on my own, where I took pictures of this proposed route.

Sad to say, the proposed route never did gain any following, due to lack of manpower. But the pictures were useful somewhat.

The biggest event was the loss of the notorious MLT2 and Childcare Centre, in late April 2007. I regret not conquering my fears (yes, I was fearful of the MLT2 area, with all its stories!) and not taking photos of the MLT2 and Childcare Centre, which were part of my proposed route. I only took pictures of them from far away. I daresay if someone was there to accompany me, I would have ventured into those areas. And explored them to death. (Pardon the pun.)

Those ideas expanded until I decided to gather all my thoughts and put them together, and this I did. The rest, as they say, is history. My NightWalk Folder grew and grew until today it holds records of nearly everything about NightWalk since FOC 07/08 (and a bit of FOC 06/07). DMIT NightWalk Event 2010 forced me to think of everything else in a NightWalk, from traffic control to route setup, and this I did in collaboration with my juniors at the time. (It didn't go smoothly, I'm afraid.)

To date, I've participated in close to 10 NightWalks, inside and outside DMIT. All those NightWalks and recces I've taken part in have really deepened my knowledge of the school. There may be some things I don't know, but I'll leave it to my juniors to further their knowledge of the school on their own. I'll only facilitate them and offer help where requested.

However long my involvement in NightWalk has been, I dislike to bog down my juniors with my ideas on what a NightWalk is supposed to be. So now, I'm in the process of collecting my discoveries into a Manual, and then leaving it to them to reinvent and innovate the NightWalk. Some rules have to stay, like noise control and clandestinity. Others? They decide.

You should never forget something just because you must. I will never deny my involvement in NightWalk. It has been a hallmark of my time in SP, and I hope others will receive insight from what I've discovered.

Thanks to Yong Xian for this photo. My Signature Scare; the Sadako-Goes-Towards-You. Perfected in FOC 06/07; original location W4/W5 Emergency Corridor. (Here it is located behind W13.) Never fails to scare the living daylights out of campers, especially as the first scare point in the NightWalk. =D

Retrospectives

When I began writing my Black Book Vol. 1 in 2003, little did I know that I was actually beginning my own blog. My style of writing the Book was very much a blogging style, commenting and criticising whatever was happening in my life at the time. At that time blogs had not become popular, but I envisioned that one day these very writings will be placed on the Internet, for everyone to read (wah, like some prophecy like that). Well that's what a blog is, isn't it? A place for your rants and wants. The big difference was that my Black Book was a real book which I wrote in using a pen. No one would know what I wrote if I did not give it to them to read. If it was online all you had to do was type out the address and voila! You would be able to see whatever the person put online.

Well, I'll put up my writings since 2003 online in due time, electronifying my Black Book, if you could put it that way. It would be interesting to see how one's writing changes over the years.

There were a lot of poems and rhymes written in that period too, from 2003 to 2004. Those would be uploaded in due time, but let's take it slow, shall we?

We have much to do, and less time to do it in...

A lot of things have happened since the last post, dated August 11th. At home, at work and at play. In domestic affairs I am much the same; I still live in Johor, have my own room etc. but my brother tends to sleep in the living room more (I think it is windier there). And we have to do the housework now (that IS something!)

In work I have had a complete shift from shift work (pardon the pun) to a five-day week. Well at least I can sleep better now. And at play--hmm, that is indeed something: my NightWalk event is going on at a fair pace, and I hope we make it in time.

Planning for the event began in June. The latest grand meeting was at the end of November, where a lot of big decisions were made and announced and commitments reaffirmed. I thank those people who admitted they couldn't commit and announced their departure from the planning team. At least they made it known in good time. And now things are really beginning to get going.

Does anyone have a portable sewing machine?

Recent Developments

I'm looking for the soundtrack to The Lost World Jurassic Park. That movie. Hope it doesn't become too difficult. Usually things that I search for are hard to find. And I only find that out when I actually begin searching. Terribly frustrating, isn't it?

A case in point is my 26-inch saw (refer to Dec 20, 2006 and Jan 22, 2007 for the full story). And a more recent item was a toy I saw in my childhood called the Big Big Loader (which I will elaborate upon in subsequent posts). You never know how hard it is to find something until you search for it.

Had been reminiscing recently about my Tekong experience. Thought of posting it, but these things are better said than written. My experience in HTA now is also not worth recording, I feel. Some things are better recorded immediately, like holidays and such, and some are better in retrospect.

Lots of things hanging in the balance. The Black Book (vérsion écrite), I mean. I don't know why, ever since MIT FOC 05/06, I became subjective, and endeavored to record long events like camps in their entirety, which required tens of pages or more. Writer's block would halt production, and the Book would be closed to new stuff till the current one was finished. That was the fate of the second book.

And because of that, my whole poly life went unrecorded (except for camps). Somemore got a lot of things to write. Now mostly forgotten. A bit sad. I've since begun new Books to fill this gap. One day I'll try to remember all the singular things that happened in 3 years of poly.

I rarely end posts at such a low note.