On the Vacuity of Clubbing.

Clubbing in Singapore is a sordid affair. While in theory (and on TV), we see people enjoying themselves as they dance all night to the groovy music, making friends, making out and living the life like they’re supposed to, in reality, it is nothing close, at least for me.

So I enter a club after paying cover charge of $38 dollars with my heart bleeding from the entry stab. I navigate through the club with my friends, bouncing to the Dum Dum Dum of the EDM simply because it’s something to do, not because I feel the music or anything like that. Cheap. We found a table that’s opened by our friend and we start to drink. Soon, someone will suggest we go to the dance floor and we’ll move through the thick, annoying crowd again just to get closer to the ear-deafening speakers and into a bigger crowd of autobots who raise one hand up and jump like idiots. At this point, I would often look at the crowd and marvel at their communal stupidity. Look how pathetic you people are, I would think, before moving into the back of the crowd and raising my hand up and jumping along idiotically, until I grow so sick of myself and my conformist tendencies that I would puke all over.

Halfway through the night, I will move to the smoking corner to take a puff. Interestingly, the smoking corner is perhaps the best place to have a conversation with someone as it is the only place in the club where you can hear yourself. I dream of finding a girl who happens to be as disinterested in clubbing as me, who is smoking and looking melancholically out at the Singapore river and wishing she was in Switzerland – but it never happens. The girls I see there are either drunk, or are complete sluts (or the worst kind: drunk sluts), and so I always smoke by myself quietly.

The rest of the night passes slowly. Either I get drunk and zone out for the rest of the night, or I spend my time checking instagram on my phone wishing someone I followed will post something life-changing. The point is, by around 1 to 2 am, I am bored to death. Can there be any activity in modern life that is more vacuous, I find myself repeating this question two hundred times. By the time I step out of the club, my soul would be emanating despair.

I have never walked out of a club happy, and I don’t think I ever will.

Let me talk to your manager. Me want hello kitty. ME WANT HELLO KITTY.

On the 26th of June, two very important things happened in the world. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional, therefore allowing gay married couples to enjoy the same federal benefits that opposite-sex couples enjoy. One up for progressiveness and inclusiveness. Meanwhile in Singapore, an event of no less historic significance had taken place in our tiny but humble country. At about 11pm on 26th of June, there were thousands of people queuing around Macdonald outlets all across the nation, waiting for the arrival of a limited edition “Singing Bone” Hello Kitty plushie. At around 6am the next morning, this happened. 

It is impossible not to be traumatized after watching the video.

First, who would have thought that grown up middle-aged Singaporean men would queue overnight for a Hello Kitty plush toy? Do they have no greater ambitions or nobler passions in their lives? But then again, I am no Hello Kitty fan – perhaps I simply don’t understand. I must imagine collecting the complete set of Hello Kitty plushies to be as meaningful to me as the Akiri Kurosawa DVD collection, or Alt-J’s new album. I must.

But even after taking that into account, it is still not easy to wrap my head around the situation: who would have thought that grown up middle-aged Singapore men would queue overnight for a Hello Kitty plushie, and upon not receiving it, complain about the system?  LOL. I mean, it must be the system at fault if I don’t get the Hello Kitty plushie right, I mean, what else could be the problem? Higher than expected demand? No that’s definitely not it, it’s definitely the system. It’s always the system.

And what really struck the average, Hello-Kitty-neutral people in Singapore, was that the Hello Kitty fans were not quite as what we had imagined them to be – you know, docile, tame, cute girls, girls in their early teens or pre-pubescent years. Instead, they are foul, vile and abominable adult bullies. From the video, it is apparent that there were three to four adult men crowding around a helpless middle-age female staff who was trying her best to receive the men’s brusque complaints without breaking down into sobs. What’s even more appalling is that towards the end, the person holding the video camera in fact incited the crowd to express their frustration at the poor middle-aged lady, and the benighted crowd actually clapped and cheered. Hello people? Isn’t Hello Kitty all about cuteness, docility, submissiveness and anti-speaking up? Didn’t they remove her mouth for a purpose? Did the crowd even think about the values that Hello Kitty would want them to espouse before engaging in such unbecoming behavior?

So sober up, Kitty fans, for if your mute goddess had actually found out about your actions, she would be chastising you silently. Especially Mr Korpon, whose bravery in speech failed to belie his true cowardice and fear of the police when he suggested that the staff should call “150 policemen to come queue for them and take two Korpon each and then they can eat their Macdonald’s breakfast”. There is a very sharp uncertainty in his faltering voice that exposes a uniquely Singaporean sensibility: we tend to focus all our attention on the superficial most of the time and when time comes for us to express something that’s close to our hearts, we find ourselves lacking in vernacular and falling into the sea of trite expressions.

Looking on the bright side, however, there has been specks of redeeming nobility in the actions of the few Singaporean men present. For instance, Mr System mentioned a really good point about the inherent inequality that exists in a system that promised four Hello Kitties but can only deliver two. Mr Cameraman also displayed virtuous magnanimity when he pointed out the heroic nature of his selfish deeds (“call all my friends to go home sleep so that I can buy for them”), before shooting his own magnanimity in the foot by threatening to call the media to “cook up all these things”. Mr Korpon even displayed logic unparalleled when he pulled out this conundrum (most likely from his arse): “You told us you don’t want us to sell, but how can you prove that you don’t sell yourself?”

Mr Korpon, I really doubt that the middle-aged Macdonald’s staff lady moonlights part-time to make ends meet.