This is the part of the page where you can find out about the page owner. Unlike in some pages, this does not come in the form of a journal in a weird colour scheme which comments about life in general and/or things the person wants to talk/bitch about. At parts, I descend into ranting. This is because this page has been added to since late 1999, and sometimes I just lump sentences on shoddily, but one day I will clean up the sentence structure and make the prose flow better.
About Gabriel - A List
Monikers: kimberly, Agagooga
Eccentric whims
that've improbably come to fruition: Scanning
the 1999 and 2000 RGS yearbooks, semi-successful
anti-purple uniform campaign
Ingenious ideas: Hiding my handphone in a bag of Ruffles during a School
of Military Medicine inspection
Weapon of Choice: Water bottle (with attached sling) in Primary School, Umbrella
and Obedience Collar in Secondary School
NB: You will not find much introspective stuff here, probably because of my nature (<-- Nebulous statement), laziness and this page's hodge-podge nature. More insights into my screwed up personality and character on my blog if you deign to read it.
Introduction
My name is Gabriel. Gabriel Seah Shuqi, or, if you prefer, Seah Shuqi Gabriel. Or as I was known in Nanyang Primary School, which suppressed dialect and English names, Xie Shuqi. Born in 1983, like Tim The Great and YC, L and a whole host of others whose websites I do not kindly host on my page, I do not live in America, also like the aforementioned two which makes us part of the minority on the web. I live in Singapore, a hot and wet place that according to my sister, is fit only for cockroaches. One of my few (okay, just the most irritating) thing about it is the indenture, which I am currently serving, which all male citizens are forced to undergo, binding them with an indelible tie to the military state for the rest of their lives. It goes by the initials NS, which stand for National Slavery. In Secondary 4 (1999), I was sufficiently inspired to choose it as a composition topic. If you are bored enough, you can go peruse it here. The day before I was enslaved, I wrote a new one, which can be read here.
My Family
Let's see. Why would you want to read about this? I'll just extract the most saucy parts.
My sister and brother-in-law seem to have undergone some form of mental degeneration. It must have been the E. Coli in the toilet bowl. They have taken animism to the next level, making soft toys (one of which was stolen from me) talk, and contrive conflict among the other soft toys. With their reduced intellect, they are forced to use acronyms to communicate, thereby fitting in with Singapore's propensity for acronyms. Even the simplest two word phrases get reduced to acronyms, eg BB (Blue Bear [who was bought in 1986], whom she made VEGETARIAN!!!), BRB ( Brown [Ribboned] Bear). Recently, the cats downstairs have gotten the acronym treatment (how demeaning). OC - Orange Cat, BOC - Big Orange Cat (!!!), EBC - Evil Black Cat, KL - Kueh Lapis, SWC - Suspicious White Cat and LBK - Little Black Kitten are just some of their more nauseating monikers. Of course, these cats are fed catfood ("cf" - !!!) by the two aforementioned misguided (rather, evil) souls, who traipse around Singapore looking for cats to feed, ignoring homeless people sleeping on benches. The female culprit even carries catfood in her handbag. Efforts to stop this madness have gotten me the appellation TEM - The Evil Master. I refuse to say any more about this subject. My sister likes to accuse me of racism while herself being insensitive to *some people's* dietary preferences.
Worse, her getting of my brother in law, who comes from a rather traditional Chinese family, to eat beef by smuggling it into his food was, in my opinion, rather akin to getting a Muslim to eat pork. I could not research the reasons why some Chinese do not eat beef - it might be sacred or impure, but surely getting someone to eat something his religion forbids is rather malicious? Anyhow, he is a fervent eater of beef nowdays.
My sister also likes to ridicule, even insult, traditional Chinese religions. She belittles their practices, gets my brother in law not to practise them and calls them "Devil worship". Now, if anyone even intimated that the modern major monotheistic religions were ridiculous or untrue, she'd be one of the first to shout, "racist!" (though that term really is not suitable. Perhaps "faithist" or "religionist"?). Even innocuous remarks can be interpreted as racist by here, for example, my Secondary 1 Chinese Teacher's comment that non-Halal meat tastes better than Halal meat because the blood is properly drained. These double standards are really infuriating, as even if one does not believe in a certain religion, one should not insult or demean it.
The whole of my immediate family have a short fingernail fetish which they try and impose on me, and like most people my age, I am afflicted by the vicious cycle of room tidiness - room seems messy to the powers-that-be, I "cannot" find things, room gets "cleaned up" and "organised", more things cannot be found, room is proudly declaimed as "messy".
Slavery
From 13th December 2001 to 12th June 2004, I was as a slave in the Singapore Armed Forces, which is the curse of my gender in this nation.
During my Obedience School phase of training (otherwise known as Basic Military Training or BMT), I was in Gryphon Company, a wonderful, relatively slack place with caring instructors, even if they did knock us down for no reason sometimes, a 2i/c who was my idea of what a model officer would be and a most delightful OC, though with an often erratic PC who treats recruits according to his mood. I POPed on March 28th 2002.
After that, I was posted to the School of Military Medicine, one of the most relaxed camps in the SAF (which is why we had a horrible camp and got the worst food, presumably). I got poked by needles weekly during Infusion lessons. Since my reaction to injections fell into two categories, one being crying and the other screaming, you can imagine I didn't look forward to IV days. Later, I didn't cry anymore but IV still sucks.
I spent the last 2 years in the 42nd Battalion Singapore Armoured Regiment as a Combat Medic. Contrary to what some said, life in a "Regiment" wasn't really that Regimental - it beat BMT and SMM, though most other places where you weren't a trainee treated their men better. At things became worse once the CO changed and the new mono-intake came in. Perhaps an event representative of the zeitgeist of the 6th Mono-intake - someone got charged for sleeping (2 weeks SOL).
My former School(s)
Before I was enslaved, I was in Raffles Junior College (which helps train students' reflexes by means of loose write-tops in Lecture Theatres which fall easily). The School (College... bah) has a purple uniform which is extremely helpful should students be caught in a gunfight / fencing match, or if the school should catch fire. (Read: Coarser than a gunnysack, fireproof and waterproof). This purple uniform irked me so much that, even under coercion by my form teacher, I never wore it, not really, but instead wore it over the old (normal) uniform for the first 2 days that we had to start wearing our RJ uniforms, and promptly pulled it off after assembly. Desiring to spread the gospel of normal clothing, I even had an anti-purple uniform campaign, which was one of the many things leading to my infamy...
Previously, I was also in Raffles Institution, brother school to Raffles Guys School.
Read the full length of my life In Raffles Schools (the file size of About Me needed trimming).
Previously, I came from Nanyang Primary School, a school which offers wholesome classic Chinese education to imbibe young people with wholesome values and morals, and also make them effectively billingual, to better prepare them for their future as the country's future masters. In their own words, the school mission is to produce morally upright pupils, who achieve excellence, develop a well-rounded personality and build a harmonious school. It seems to have succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Just look at Timothy. (It must be noted that the school inspires a strong sense of loyalty. I have seen people 6 years gone who still return) It is affiliated with the School With The Most Indecent Uniform In Singapore Bar One (not to be confused with School With The Most Indecent Uniform In Singapore Bar None), where watch faces cannot be bigger than a 20 cent coin.
Read the full NYPS rant (the file size of About Me needed trimming).
My Interests
Unlike many people, I actually like history. No, not the history we study in school. That is mostly Singaporean, Malayan and South-East Asian history. I tend more towards classical and medieval history, with a decidedly Euro-centric bent. Of course, those studying British history in Britain probably feel the opposite way. Mythology is fun too. Once, I gave my friend a lecture on the development of Christianity and was asked : "How do you remember all of this?" I suppose I have a passion for this sort of stuff.
I also am fond of gamebooks, as can be seen in my Gamebook page. I have quite a respectable collection. I actually tried to make a Lone Wolf guidebook in Primary School with David, though that never went anywhere.
To spite the Chinese community, I often translate Chinese into English and vice versa, making the translations sound ludicrous, both intentionally and unintentionally. I also love(d) to write all manner of weird stuff in my Chinese compositions - once in writing a letter about an errant bus driver, I complained that he'd knocked down a pig which was on the road (I got the idea from a text in the Sec 1 Chinese textbook in which pigs escaped from a truck and ran into the police station). Another time, in a picture composition, with a picture of a woman in a wheelchair holding another wheelchair, I spun a tale of this girl whose family's main apartment's catching fire led to a whole series of clamities, in which her father jumped off the balcony in despair, her mother ran out of the house one day and her body was found chopped in 5 parts floating in the Singapore river, her grandfather got eaten by a lion while on safari, her dog was kicked to death by some boy and other family members suffered assorted accidents, including an incident where the room she was warded in was sprayed with bullets and everyone was hit. In the end, she became a cripple and was reduced to selling wheelchairs. Asked to write a descriptive composition about an MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) station, I looked at the back of my dictionary which had pictures of bugs and their names in Chinese and related how they could be seen if the cleaner did not clean the place. Unfortunately, I included the silkworm in my narrative.
To parody the moralistic compositions (the one where the boy breaks a vase and tells the truth to his mother and gets forgiven and is not punished for 'being honest'), I wrote one where he got a sound thrashing for breaking the vase (which is what is 99 times more likely to happen) To top it off, my AO Chinese exam composition was a tale about the protagonist regretting as his lust for durians led him to persuade his friend to accompany him to a house beside a lake with a durian tree, and a durian fell on his friend's head while he was freezing in shock from being discovered by the house's owner. I dislike Chinese, partly due to the influence of my communist Primary School, but also due to the language itself. I am now free from Chinese FOREVER!!!
Misc. Stuff
Like Timothy, I also have a directory of WAV files on my computer. It is much larger than his however. This probably comes from my discomfort when seeing my internet connection idle. I usually set something to download at these times. Unlike many people, I am not fanatical about the quality of any sound files which I download. Most of them are rather low quality.
From the above, you might assume that I listen to Classical music a lot. Actually, this is not true. I like it, but don't buy the CDs - I'm lazy and have no means to listen to them. I do have a ridiculously long playlist, but Winamp is on but infrequently. I must be one of the 1/5 of people my age who don't have discmans and the 1/4 who don't have pagers (not that I'm complaining - not meant sarcastically ).
I used to be a non-denominational Christian, but after going for a Catholic Retreat in Sabah, I became agnostic. I was even inspired to write an essay about Scepticism and Christianity. The truth shall set you free.
I'm normally a gentle person, but my forms of self-defence were quite... exotic. I graduated from the thrown water bottle in Primary School, to the water bottle and a thrown umbrella in Secondary School. I invented this nifty, natty thing called the obedience collar in Upper Sec, which few have been unfortunate enough to experience.
As do most people, I do like computer games. Sadly, the games nowadays seem to be lacking. They are either Action, Real Time Strategy or Sports. Games nowadays seem to be directed at people with no brains and a 3D graphics card. People are too obsessed with graphics nowadays. Graphics are only really important for only a few genres, like First Person Shooters, Simulations and the like. As a blurb on a pirated CD put it: Tired of games containing powered up graphic-slide shows but NO GAME, NO STORY ? 3D games are worse. They look worse and take up more system resources and give me a headache (as per Quake-esque games)
In late 1998, I went with my choir to Prague. We enjoyed ourselves very much, even though we only got a Bronze in the competition, and I took a picture of stuffed rabbits in the Prague musuem (where photography was supposedly not allowed) just for Andrew "Bunny killer" Gan. The bus which brought us from Salzburg to Vienna had a built-in toilet! You can see some pictures of the trip here. In mid 1999, I went to Sydney to visit my cousin, and bought a bright green tail. A big dinosaur tail, which I hit my brother in law and sister with, wore to my RI Graduation Night, brought for 'show and tell' during J1 Chinese lessons and lent to Danny to wear in school in April'00. It was winter when I went to both of these places, and the climate was very nice and cool as compared to what we have here. At the end of 1999, I went on a trip with my choir again, this time to Hawaii. This was a very slack trip, as we had only 2 performances in 6 days.
Going on overseas trips is fun. Even more fun is the turbulence, which provides a welcome relief from the long dreary hours of level flying and which allow you to stretch your muscles in the cramped confines of the plane. The break in routine also stimulates brain cells killed by the not-exactly-good-but-better-than-last-time airline food. I've forsworn Singaporean guided tours forever since 1994 when I spent 5 minutes in the Smithsonian.
Political Correctness
is EVIL! So is sexism. Sexism directed against males, that is (there are
already enough 'feminists', so others can do the job for
me, though I do disapprove of misogyny too) "Chauvinists" are
often assumed to be male chauvinists. Bah.
Feminist = (sometimes) Female Chauvinist B**** (The best I could come up
with for a word diametrically opposed to 'pig'. There's no corresponding
term for
the male equivalent. Would "Masculinist" be an acceptable term for
the male feminist?
Timothy calls me the 1% man - because I can look at all aspects of a situation and find new possibilities which no one else can see. I prefer to call it lateral thinking, and it does work wonders. Grace speculates I employ the Socratic method of finding the truth, which is why I ask so many inane questions. To date, no one's poured hemlock into my food yet. I disapprove of enforced morality and enforced religion (a la radical Islam) because it defeats the point.
Hair standards for males in Singapore schools are ridiculous. If that's the case, then girls should be forced to grow long hair. Long, tieable hair. Read: I want to have long hair one day.
I was bored one day and generated my 'code'.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GO d->dx s++:++@ a--->a? C++(++++) U--- P! L- E? W++ N- o+ K- w+@
O- M-- V? PS++ PE+ Y+ PGP- t--(---) 5 X-(--) R+>R+++ tv- b+>b+++ DI+++++
D----
G e h! r% !z
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
As you can probably tell by now, I like to write 'farnie' stuff. I am eccentric in the main, and often subversive too (especially after I entered RJC).
Got to the bottom?
Presenting... How Girls Waste Time (compiled by me, with contributions from others) A blow in the face of sexism and political correctness.