we nearly got tickets for the national day parade this year, but for massive miscommunication. we had lobang this year! from one of my mom's contacts in moe, but somehow i got the message across that i didn't want any tickets, so she said no thanks while i was happily telling poach and xinyi that we could go this year. it rained very heavily on national day too, and we thought perhaps the parade might be delayed or cancelled, and no one thought to turn on the tv. by the time su-lin got here and informed us that the parade was on (she watched it on tvmobile, dear tvmobile!) we were just in time to see president nathan arrive, and we'd missed all the good bits, at least the bits i like, like the airplane formations (which i saw the other evening at ballet under the stars, they were practising and flew over fort canning hill) and the parachuting and your pap mps streaming in in their ri uniforms, the pre-parade bits essentially. actually that's all i enjoy about ndp. the mass displays i don't enjoy, the commentary is usually painfully bad, and the national day songs get more and more vapid. (they are! this year's sun yanzi song is not likeable! my favourites are still the ones we sang in primary school, old favourites like count on me, singapore, and we are singapore. addy loves that one, she says that all the new ones are pathetic because they're about how we're all so happy and life is good and we love each other, whereas that one is outright gloating: "yes, there was a time...BUT...shucks to everyone, hahah! we did it!"

i've never been to ndp before. i watch it on tv most years, but i've never felt the compulsion to go. i think this is because of going to too many trackmeets since rgs days and then visibly burning to cinders in the stands and then finding it madness to get out of kallang afterwards. i fancy i would get a better view on tv anyway. also, on tv you get periodic views of your friendly ministers waving lightsticks and singing. but last year, a lot of my friends, the psc scholars, went, and told me it was great fun, so i did think that perhaps i would go this year. but just like watching the world cup, it's never the mass display that i like, i just like all the preliminaries, like the arrival of the pm and president, i like the firing of the guns, the troop inspection and military contingents marching past. (von says that the parades get more and more militaristic every year and that one day we'll be invaded by indonesia during national day while the best units are doing monkey tricks twirling rifles about on the field. someone (i think it was jared) explained to me before why this couldn't happen but the idea is kind of amusing anyway.)

i think it was either von or su-lin said that watching ndp can be very painful, becos sometimes you don't know whether to feel pride or shame. i think su-lin said she loves watching ndp because it shows how stupid singaporeans can be. and i think i feel instinctively defensive about people saying things like that. it's true that some thing that go on at ndp make you cringe, i hate the commentary for instance, or really embarrassingly bad ideas, like the mountain-climbing bit this year. but i do like national day because it is kitschy. von says tt's a heartlander reaction, but i really really feel moved when the pledge is said at the end of the parade, and this year when jacintha sang the majulah i felt a little teary. since kenneth had to go through preparations for one ndp i've learnt to feel for the people who are there working for it. not the performers, even though they've to work very hard too, but all the soldiers who are on duty. last year, or the year before, i think we were at addy's watching the parade, and everyone (including me) was making the usual snide remarks and kenneth got a little angry, because he felt that it's easy for people (especially us i guess) to mock the parts we think are bad and not think of how much sweat and blood went into it. and i try to think of that when i'm about to shoot my mouth off. i think when we were watching mammon inc (it's on a second run now, new and improved) that's quite clear. there are so many things singaporeans do that we're embarrassed by, but i don't like people to do the ah we're so sophisticated and singapore/eans is/are so provincial/suffocating/stupid/etc either, because that's unfair and i think ultimately untrue and that being this rootless world citizen is not really my idea of the ideal existence either. how many of us can still speak dialects? somehow that seems more significant than speaking french or spanish, actually.

i think fittingly enough we watched the jack neo movie, i not stupid, after the parade. su-lin is the only one who didn't enjoy it much, i think. she thought the script was very bad. but i loved it. i thought it was a sharp and funny movie that was very very sporean and that brought up so many issues that were quite sensitive and important, and this must be true because we each felt defensive about something: foreign talent, not speaking chinese/dialects, reliance on maids, how we deal with less intelligent kids. i think that maybe we react differently to this movie especially because we're all ri-rgs kids who never had trouble in school and can either afford to say aiyah, academic excellence not that important lah, or something, or have never you know, got 51 for maths in primary 5. when i saw this in the cinema two months back it made me feel as if i wanted to teach weak kids in em3 and not smart kids, although i also know that that's just because of the emotional rush watching the movie and i'm just being chong dong. i heard that prof tommy koh cried when he watched the movie!