yeen teck stops by for me after dropping geraldine off at work so that we can go to breakfast, though when he first said, as i hopped into the car, "where to for breakfast?" i was reminded of all the times he and addy came down to charlottesville to visit, and how we would get in the car and he would say, where to for dinner?" and i would say "bluebird" or "escafe" and off we would go. if you had come earlier we could have had a hainanese curry rice breakfast, i sigh. instead yeenteck drives us to yio chu kang, to a coffee shop at casuarina drive where he says you can find singapore's crispiest prata. (somehow, my outings with yeen teck invariably involve roti prata.) the prata was alright - i had one kosong one egg, yeen teck had two kosongs, and we shared a substantial dish of chicken curry with a drumstick in it - but on the whole, i think i liked the one i had up at bukit timah better though. prata ought to be crispy but not too flaky as this one was, and i think hougang ave 3 does a wonderful one. in any case, it's the first time i've seen yeen teck since springbreak in new york. he's finishing his second service term at the school of artillery and gave me a layman's explanation of his job (from what i can tell there is a lot of maths involved - "you never knew that all that f-maths would come back and smack you in the face" "happily, i haven't taken any f-maths for it to come back to hit me in the face") he is also having the easiest* time of all the officers we know - he appears to have had 7 long weekends in 9 weeks! and multiple nights out. and he was off or on leave all last week, i forget what the difference is, which is why he could ferry girlfriends to work at bukit gombak and come to hougang in search of breakfast companions and then go off to eunos to play billards with his friends and still manage to buy mussels and go back to braddell to cook a seafood dinner. yeen teck insists on paying for breakfast, saying that i'm now obliged to buy him breakfast another day. of course, say i, but if you are so free, why don't you come at 5.30 tomorrow morning before you book in so we can go for midnight curry? yeen teck has to book in at 7.30 at khatib camp, which is not so very far from hougang...but he poohpoohs the idea of coming over that early. another weekend, he says, and begins to tell me abt his future house, which involves a pool and coconut trees and fish and a vegetable garden (which his old folks will tend) and two maids and a lot of children. de gustibus, etc. me i want a small de stijl house with clean lines and i'd infinitely prefer ferns to vegetables and people always think that deplorable. i ask yeen teck to drop me off at any train station so that i can go to city hall to meet su-lin, but he says he can't put me off anywhere south of bishan so why not take the train from the east, where he is headed? that's how i ended up getting on a train at eunos. is it my imagination or is the east-west line slower than the nel? or perhaps i just don't like overhead trains...and to return, *isn't there a hokkien or malay army term for having an easy time? i'm sure i've heard it from kg and tjan at some point before. i think it has two syllables. i asked von and he said kiao kah? but i know it's not kiao kah or jiat zhua becos i knew those before the guys went in. it's not eng either, because eng is something like kiaokah also isn't it? and it's not zuo bor either. i think i've just plumbed the extent of my dialect vocabulary. the expression i want has to do with - well don't the army ppl say "siong" or something for v tough training? is there an antonym to that? i think the boys should write us a dictionary of army slang, i think it will be almost as amusing as a singlish dictionary. i think things like "champion!" is very funny. i learnt that one from kg. remember the colin goh list of 38 characteristics of singaporeans? (see numbers 10 and 11) somehow i actually miss hearing the guys talk about army...when yeen teck used expressions such as "booking in" and "nights out" i suddenly realised how long it's been since i've heard these terms and when they actually had some connection to my life. i wonder if singapore women feel that sort of connection all their lives: by the time their husbands and brothers stop reservist training their sons would be off to ns. there's a part of your mental schedule that is attuned to "book in" and "book out" and the domestic adjustments to be made...