Down and Hold It There

When the lean, sprightly Physical Training Instructor bellowed for us to go into push-up position, I felt the indignity of failure creep up my arms.

It emerged from somewhere deep in the ground, cutting into my palms and winding up my trembling veins. An exercise normally used as a punishment for trainees in the armed forces, I had not assumed the position in years. I wondered if my sense of helplessness was because I shouldn't have been made to do it, or because I couldn't.

As I hung my head waiting for the first count, I saw between my awkward legs rows upon rows of sloppily dressed men, no longer soldiers but the fathers of children and the managers of employees. In their low-hung heads and raised asses, I playfully imagined a tacit, unspoken shame: the shame of being deemed too unfit to defend the nation in times of war, despite everything else they had achieved in life.

Good Ol' Fashioned White Supremacy

There's nothing a little beer can't fix. So even if no-one else felt the strangeness of being the only Chinese male in a room of four Chinese girls and their Caucasian boyfriends; even if no-one else was a little overwhelmed by their Caucasian-ness and annoyed by their repeated flouting of the non-smoking rule; even if no-one realised my karaoke songs were being queued forever because everyone was inserting songs ahead of those I'd chosen; I was soon one with them in inebriation, hamming it up with air guitar and bad rock star impersonations.

And who am I to talk, really, when the only music I like, the only music I've ever listened to, and the only music I can be arsed to sing is made by people with surnames like Anderson and Butler?

A Stranger on the Train

There are girls who are cute. There are girls who are pretty. There are girls who, with some self-convincing, can appear cute or pretty. These girls inspire protective, macho shit tendencies in guys.

But every once in a while, there is a girl so goddamn beautiful that all she makes you feel is weakness. I saw one such girl on the train to work today. I kept stealing glances at her, every faculty in me quivering; trying desperately to memorise her face, her aura and her manner in the minutes I had. I did this because I knew I would forget them--and maybe even the fact that I saw her--by the end of the day.

Hours later, some of it remains. I could easily mention what it is, but in many ways, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think, therefore, that it is sufficient to record that I experienced it like an arrow, rather than defile it by reducing it to misunderstandable, incomplete words.