thanks to lihui, i’ve just spent 2 hours looking through quirky t shirt graphics on threadless.com, possibly placing strained retinas on a fast track to myopia hell.

hoohoo wouldn’t i love to wear this to one of those intellectually atas-sikit open reading sessions.

word play art! lemon-aid
dripping lemonade..
hurhur.. somehow no one thinks this is funny save for me.

it’s a communist party baby!! stalin, lenin, mao, marx and guy with cap (can’t recognize that guy in the back) partying like it’s 1917.

this screams david escher! or at least to me it does. BAH. the only t shirt design that i actually wanted to buy and wear, but it only comes in a print! disappointing.

optical illusion ala escher, no?

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t shirts graphics aside, i realise it’s literally impossible to accumulate good karma in singapore when we’re beseiged by ******* left, right and centre.

to illustrate.

this morning, mao mao and i went for a trail run at mac rit (alas, sans panda, whose iron stomach was having a temporary lapse from its usual self of being impervious to all sorts of flesh-eating bacteria) and despite it being 715am, the entire place was packed.

the running bug has hit singapore in a really big way, that much is obvious. which isn’t  much of an issue unless you happen to have a little pink vehicle to park.

for lack of a more suitable parking lot, mao mao started to park on a set of double yellow lines, just before they turned into double zigzag lines. the whole idea here was to shift vehicle onto double yellow lines fully and not touch the zigzags, to at least give some face and not screw over TP rules too much.

while mao mao was reversing pink vehicle into the space between lines and another parked car behind, this OTHER vehicle blatantly just came out from the side, cut right in and took the space that mao mao was *very* obviously in the process of reversing into.

let’s just say that if YOU are the driver of SGF 4471 _ (drats can’t recall the last letter) at mac rit this morning, then there is either something very wrong with your vision, also known in not-so-nice hokkien terminology as *pa jiao*, or you are simply devoid of the decency gene.

and mao mao, being the usual her, on a one-way express ticket to nirvana, refused my war-mongering stance and thus, we went on our run, with the ******** in his stolen parking space.

i’ve heard this rubbish theory that singaporeans are not gracious by nature because we have no time. actions like holding open a door for people or keeping the lift waiting for stragglers are precious milliseconds wasted on the ever-speeding clock of unstoppable economic achievement, also known as, the furious computer-monkeying behind a 1.5m square office cubicle.

i can accept that most of us may not be extra conscious to the effect of socially gracious behaviour, but it’s the intentional acts of meanness/rudeness/downright kiam pa-ness that get my gander up. we don’t all have to be nice all the time, but there’s no excuse for intentionally behaving badly, save the sad postulation i am forced to make, that alas, monkey, apes and gorillas we may have started out, but some of us have not evolved in tandem with the rest.

i have a brilliant idea.

i’m convinced that singaporeans respond better to negative, rather than positive reinforcement. so instead of the lameass courtesy lion cartoon, i propose that mcys or whichever ministry is responsible, start issuing these following group of people with a special little something.

1. litterbugs
2. mrt carriage road kill (aka the people who nuah and crash on the mrt floors)
3. leg kickers behind your cinema seat, that no amount of evil staring in the dark can alleviate (at instances such as this, i wish with all my heart that my one super power could be cyclops’ laser beam eyes)
4. spitters, urinators, poopers and other excretors of unwanted bodily emissions
5. car park lot stealers
6. parking idiots (the kind who block other ppl’s cars)
7. noise polluters who refuse to communicate below 500db in public
8. smokers who blow their ******** secondhand smoke in the faces of hapless, lung-loving, longetivity-seeking non-smokers
9. NFL player wannabes, the kind that practices the skill of shoulder-shoving that would put any NFL player to shame (makes me wonder why we aren’t a nation of rugby greats. just check out the action at the GSS/ katong laska stall/ bus stop queue)
10. the invisible men/women who *chope* their seats in public places (libraries, cafes) and then disappear (or maybe they’re actually around, but they’ve devolved to amoeba form that they can’t be seen)

so, instead of the permed-mane smiley lion, the courtesy police should issue abovementioned offenders of public decency with this:

imagine that. gorrilla stickers handed out to said offenders–“hello sir, did you just *kope* someone’s parking lot? well, here’s a sticker for you to add on to your car decals. have a nice day.”

once in a while. a visual cue may work wonders to remind ourselves that although we may be living in a “concrete jungle”, one need not take the metaphor too literally.