"that moral is gonna costs you $2.99, m'am."

I was sent Sir Jonathan Sacks' article 'Morals: the one thing markets don't make' by my former economics lecturer the other day and found it, if not fascinating and novel, very very good sense. Sir Jonathan Sacks happens to be the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, and has written several works on ethics in the today's world.

His pointed out the tendency of capitalism to put a price on everything, and forget about value. His used the inflation and burst of the housing bubble as an example. People forgot that houses were meant to be shelters and refuges, and decided to transform them into trading cards, until prices became hard-to-reach and those who wanted a home realised they needed to get in the game too. This doesn't mean that we should kill capitalism and have the government built uniform huts across the country however. Markets are necessary and will probably be for a good length of time. But, they need morals. And morals are not created by markets, but by tradition, customs, religion, schools, and people with a lot of good sense.

I shan't divert this little summary to talk about what morals are based on, and whether truth is absolute or relative, and how decide who are the 'people with a lot of good sense' etc. That's another quandary all by itself. However, it did make me start thinking about what to do with the next 3 months.

After finishing the final undergraduate examination of my life last Monday, I am now faced with 3 months of unprogrammed time until I fly to the States and start my PhD in August. As I swept the floor at home and tried to figure out whose hair was falling out the most rapidly in my family, the bugging sensation that I should be earning money suddenly crept up on me again! Money, it seems, easily becomes the driving force for all activity. It is like the approving nod of the divine, pronouncing an activity Worthy To Be Done. Unpaid activities must be value-less. It is felt then, that if one has 4 intact limbs and a functional mind, one should be capitalizing on one's income-generating capacity. Aaron and I sometimes argue that this is purely a Singaporean mentality which has placed a disproportionate amount of emphasis on productivity. I don't know, I think it's a pretty prevalent phenomena in most developed countries though. True, it seems that gap years are a LOT more acceptable overseas. Then again, people who have chosen a gap life tend to be termed 'bums', 'poor dears', or at best 'artists'.

I wonder if this is why mothers stuck at home with young children, feel like they're not really 'contributing to society'. I am absolutely not judging couples where both parents need to work to provide a decent standard of living. To the contrary, it shows that the unbalanced position of monetary rewards (only rewarding services and products which can be consumed , instead of all activities of value) in combination with a sole reliance on such rewards to direct action, is dangerous. Since no one's paying them to do it, why do it? For a long time, there was no price on being environmentally unfriendly either, so we left our carbon footprints all over the place until Mother Nature started screaming at us to wipe our feet on the rug before coming in.

An English college student set out on a walk to India about a year ago, inspired by Gandhi and a stay in a village where money did not exist said, "As long as society remains capitalist we will never have a true sense of community, and environmental destruction will continue unabated. Economic growth is completely dependent on us destroying our environment."

That's why, I guess, governments are supposed to intervene and put values on such activities with intangible benefit (and penalities on those with intangible harm). But caught in a globalised world where products and services can easily be traded, but not environmental protection or social security, they too are in a bind as to how much of a reward they can give to a moral conscience.

If only we could find a way to mass produce some goodness.

QFT.

My friend recently posted a witty note on my facebook wall the other day, to which a mutual friend commented 'QFT'. Now, if I were one of those gamers who sat at the laptop all the day killing warlords, levelling up, and pwning noobs, or perhaps, if I were just a generation younger, then maybe I would have understood what 'QFT' means.

To note of course, I understand this friend's use of an acronym. Why byte off more than you need to chew? Hence, like every conscientious web-user, I googled 'internet acronyms' and found my little three-lettered friend amongst many other equally perplexing terms.

Now, some terms were easy, like LOL, GTG and BTW. Even my favourite sandwich, the BLT, had made it to the list. Others though, seemed much more extensive and elaborate. Depending on your preferred bodily functions for example, you could upgrade your simple ROFL to Rolling On The Floor Laughing and Barfing All Over the Place (ROFLABAOTP), or to Rolling On the Floor Laughing Blowing Snot All Over The Place (ROFLBSAOTP).

Some were very vulgar, but the use of an acronym could let you express your anger, without necessarily letting on to the recipient that you were angry. For example, if particularly annoyed at a dense fellow web member, you could say 'RTFM', which could mean either Read The Fine Manual, or Read The Fucking Manual.

Never figured out what to say to a grieving friend? Why not try to express your deep lack of social graces with MHBFY (My Heart Bleeds For You)? Also, guys, watch out if your girlfriend describes you on her private blog - which you hacked into of course - as a S2BX (Soon To Be Ex). Before long, she'll be instant messaging you with just a word - SLATFATF (So Long And Thanks For All The Fish).

Anyway, I was trying to learn all the acronyms I could so that I could maybe reach WWW enlightenment and be reincarnated as a silicon chip, but try as I might, the throbbing pain in my temples removed all hope of being part of a Intel wafer. So I guess I'll just stick to real words for now until the Oxford and Webster decide that MLAs (Multiple Letter Acronyms) are to be part of my basic vocab.

QFT, y'all.

Colour pencils can do so much!

Chanced upon this Malaysian artist in France today - I love what she does! The closest I ever got to being an artist was attending a drawing class at Bedok community centre, and copying the tortoise drawn by the teacher on the blackboard onto my own drawing pad. Sigh. If you look at her blog, you realise that she lives in a lazy white French cottage, with soft yellow light peeping through the windows, freshly-picked flowers in a vase, and cat baskets on the floor. The only time Singapore experiences soft yellow light is when the haze from Indonesia's forest fires comes to suffocate our little island.

Here's some of hers, undoubtedly from a flourishingly creative spirit, while I struggle with memorising government schemes in the Singapore's Budget 2009 for my exam tomorrow:

The girl with the white hair.

When she was younger, she used to sweep her wiry white hair into a soft bun, strips and strands falling gently around the nape of her neck. She would wrap herself in a purplish green crochetted blanket, and fasten it at her side with a silver brooch. Occasionally, on warmer days, she would slip on her yellow sandals before stepping out the front door, but on colder days, she would go with bare feet. Bare feet was more, winter-like, she thought.

She had the sort of look that didn't really turn heads, but when she smiled, some people would guess that she was an Eastern European version of Audrey Hepburn. Large eyes, sharp nose, but not quite proportioned the same way as the celebrity. More of a quirky twist to her lips, with the bridge of her nose slightly crooked. The stunning part of her of course, was just her demeanor. Very very there, but not quite. It made the people around her puzzled and in awe, all at the same time. She would say "Good morning!" cheerily on sunny days, and "Terrible weather today, isn't it, did Laurie get to school alright this morning?" on the gloomy ones, very warm and friendly, but at the same time not quite, for that was all she really ever said. It was like she was constantly perched on the door frame of their lives, unaware that people who perched on door frames should enter. And of course, it never quite occured to them to invite her either, because, well, she seemed so happy there.

There were some things about her which seemed comfortingly normal though. Like how her fingernails were bitten, and some days she would have a worried look in her eyes. On those days, she might just walk by with a transparent frown on her face in a bubble of her own (a multicoloured, soapy-like sort of bubble nonetheless), and they would think, oh good, she does have problems after all.

In reality though, some of those days, she just liked to walk by with a worried look because then she could pretend to be a busy person, one of those professionals with so many things on their mind, and a blackberry to remind them of it too. She could carry her little pouch with blue flower prints, and imagine instead that she was really lugging a huge briefcase full of lawyer's notes, deciding how to defend her client who well, yes, did steal that piece of bread, but there were, what-do-you-call-thems, right, mitigating circumstances. And she would strut through the streets, visualising the pushcarts on the sidewalks to be the jury; Strut down the extraordinarily long length of her imaginary courtroom to the edge of the village.

Mostly by the time she reached there, she was either too hungry to keep up appearances, or just bored with being worried. Being worried was rather tiresome, she often concluded, and anyhow there was no one to see her be worried anymore and wonder why she was. Looking pretty on the other hand, that was a rather effective way to live life, because prettiness added something special to life the way soft blankets got under your fingertips and made you lift it up and feel it against your cheek, and just want to keep on caressing them till they went threadbare.

She would think thoughtfully about such meaningful subjects as she chomped on her self-made sandwiches. Most days were chicken-tomato-mayonaise wrap days, unless she felt rather down, and would make herself butter-strawberry jam toast instead. She was a firm believer in mood-based food preparation. Then when she was done, she would dust the crumbs off her lap and stand up, and pretend that there was a huge waterfall above her head, close her eyes facing the sky, and breath deeply, imagining the water to splash down on her forehead, chin, shoulders, knees, feet, squelching in between her toes, dripping from her hair, making her shawl heavy and wet, sticking against her body and weighing her down. And then it would be time to go home.

She would stroll through a quiet alley, feeling the graffiti on the walls and wonder what the people who drew it thought. She would stop thinking sometimes, and just be, stroll, skip, wander, meander, chase, escape, shuffle. She liked jumping in the puddles of granite, and step over the patches of blue grass, which alternated with green. Green. Blue. Green. Blue. One step for each colour, or two steps for both.

And then she would finally get home, she would un-fasten the brooch. The blanket would fall to the floor, and she would curl up and think what a tiring day! as if it had never happened before, and she would think again, I won't do it again, cos once you've done it once, it's like popping bubble wrap, and it's not special anymore. But with the breeze coming through the window, and an indifference to the hardness of the ground she lay on, she would fall asleep long before the thought was finished, curls of white hair splayed on the dark wooden floor beneath her head, like a starburst in the night.

I, the virtuoso pipetter.

This evening I switched the telly on in the hope of watching a brainless action flick with lots of car chases, with ripped dudes and cool babes who uttered lines to each other like, "I live my life a quarter mile at a time", with an indifferent, hard gaze, the type of gaze I have when I, too, wear when I don't want to do the dishes at home.

To my misfortune, as the telly flickered to life, I realised that I had instead stumbled upon a wholesome, inspiring, sensible programme. It featured Singaporeans who had made it on the global performing arts scene, garnering awards and international attention, winning competitions despite being below the age category, and most likely doing all this at a very young age of minus two.

My heart was stirred with awe and hope for a better future for the first few seconds, until my ego kicked in, and jealousy reared its green and grotesque head. 'Why not me?', I thought, 'Why not?' I mean, other than the fact that I had always had a problem trying to get a vibrato out of the violin without trembling my entire arm, and other than the fact that my thigh circumference was comparable to the waists of the other girls in my dance classes, I knew that I had potential. I just chose not to use it, that's all.

And so here I am, with a life of scientific research ahead of me. (I would like to point out that microinjection requires just as much hand-eye-leg-finger-foot-mouth coordination as any professional Chinese acrobatic act.) If I had my way, I would be standing on stage with a pipette set up in front of me. In the background, November by Max Richter would be playing. Calmly, I would use my Buchner funnel to pour hydrochloric acid into my pipette. Then, I would delicately place a few drops of phenolphthalein into my beaker of sodium chloride. At this point, some of the more vulnerable ladies in the audience might be clutching their husband's hands in suspense and giving little gasps. After giving a meaningful gaze to the audience, I would slide the beaker ever so smoothly under the pipette, like a seasoned professional. Not a drop of hydrochloric acid would fall. The ladies start sniffing into their hankerchiefs, as their husbands shush them to 'focus on a once-in-a-lifetime performance'. Unperturbed, I would skillfully release the latch on the pipette with utter control. The violins increase in intensity, as the level on the pipette descends smoothly down. Then all of a sudden I would release my grasp, and the falling level would come to a complete halt. I look up at the audience. They shiver in anticipation. I place a finger to my lips and smile a knowing smile. Then I turn back to my pipette, and with one swift, controlled movement, I release a last drop of hydrochloric back into the beaker. It seems like an eternity as the drop falls....and the phenolphthalein turns colourless.

At this point, the audience cannot bear it any longer. Those who aren't on the ground bawling their eyes out, are on their feet, stamping and shouting for an encore. The next day, the press releases a front-page article on my performance, calling it "a transformative, compelling commentary on our times, prophetic and yet, calming". My agent calls me to tell me that I am wanted in Amsterdam, Zurich, Tokyo, Sydney and Beijing, and that I'm setting off a new wave of "artisan-scientists", who claim their C. elegans manipulation/immunofluorescence technique is the next big thing, but no one wants to see them cos pipetting is the real old-school. I shy away from the limelight however, giving credit to my great forefathers like Galileo whose science took them away from popular opinion. I then forever live my life curing AIDS and cancer, but reject all interviews, to the dismay of my agents and humanity, who can forevermore only study the one video recording of my performance, in the hope of illuminating their minds.

Oh, our dreams.

It's the Shiny Times!

I really thought that I was being brilliantly creative when I thought of the address plugspud.blogspot.com. It seems that in my confined world of engineers and scientists, being able to think of a rhyming, tongue-twisting blog address might count towards being (a)ingeneous, (b)hilarious, or at least (c)you know, kinda interesting.

And so I signed up for the name 'plugspud', confident that no one else in The World Wide Web would have thought of it.

Eagerly, I typed it in. Confidently, I clicked 'check availability'. Realistically, I guess I don't even make (c).

And so life goes on, and my blog (ooo. I like the sound of that. MY blog.) shall be called The Shiny Times, in anticipation of an era of more blind bravado and disappointment, and yet an enduring determination to try, and try again.