babble

Haven't been doing much random and boliao rambling for a while, but since i actually spent a good part of today doing work (simply cos there's too much), i feel entitled to do this as the week draws to an end.

Especially with me sinking into what more or less constitutes a morning routine before work, and thus taking the same bus at the same time every weekday, i've been wondering if it's just me or is it that non-English speakers tend to be the noisy ones on buses. Or is it that there are just not many verbose English speakers who take buses (given socio-economic trends here, they would probably be more likely to be driving)? I've observed this countless times before, but now with me seeing the same people every day it has become that much more obvious to me. Particularly where aunties are concerned, the people who always end up disturbing my morning stoning-in-the-bus peace and quiet with their conversations that are scores of decibels too loud for 6-ish am in the morning invariably end up speaking in some Asian language, be it Mandarin, some other Chinese dialect, Malay, Tagalog, or whatever else. If they would keep their voice down, it wouldn't bother me so much. But they always seem to be blabbering at the top of their voices, at a volume level that i wish many of my English students would have when they have to do reading aloud. I'm not faulting them as much as i am myself for getting so easily annoyed, but i wonder nevertheless...

And i'm not proud to admit it, but i definitely cannot tahan the chinese (mandarin/other dialect) speakers the most, partly because they often are the loudest of the lot, but also cos of the language they speak being, old channel 8 shows aside, the bane of my childhood, with memories that still haunt me today.

But that being said, i realise that i really have a very low threshold for noise, be it chinese-related or otherwise. That's probably why i was super irritable over the F1 weekend, as the constant whirr of those darn f1 cars was simply excruciating, even though i got no nearer to the race site than my house. That was even though i resurrected my army earplugs for that very occasion. (Actually that's more to do with the timbre than the volume, i suppose, but it's noise pollution nevertheless.)

I couldn't even bear to be in the same house, let alone room, of a tv broadcasting the race, which is why i exempted myself from family dinner on sunday cos my father had explicitly stated his intention of catching the race on tv at my aunt's house. I can't for the life of me imagine why, since to me it's just a bunch of flat ugly cars that save for the on-air commentary are practically indifferentiable from one another zooming around a circuit for 61 rounds too many.. Anyways, think that next year i'll probably exile myself in some far-flung corner of the island come the race weekend so i can escape all the F1 (imho) nonsense.

And speaking of 'sports' i can do without, again i can't see the point behind this epl broadcast rights stuff that's been going on and that has sparked so many newspaper columns and writeups and what not. I of course, could not care any less for soccer, so how people can have a good five more set-top boxes that i do just for one sport is plain ridiculous in my book. As much as i enjoy watching tennis, i probably will never sign up to catch it on cable, unless they introduce some kinda pay-per-view system, as i see no point in paying so much just to catch way too much soccer plus token amounts of tennis save for when one of the four grand slams approaches.. Maybe now that starhub has lost the epl rights they will repackage things and allow for some form of soccer-free sports package, but come on, like that would ever happen.

Note to self: Book holiday tickets very soon. Oh, and decide where exactly you want to and can go while you're at it..