My weekly platter

Sigh. With my present schedule, I think blogging will be served as a weekly platter instead.

Friday:
In school:
It must be the cannot-contain-laughter day. A teacher, Mr Tan, came into my class to make a boy who misbehaved sing in front of my Eng class. The boy stood there for a while, contemplated before singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. His ghostly, hesitant falsetto sent the whole class giggling. I dared not laugh, as Mr Tan looked totally serious. But I couldn’t take it any more. I walked to the door and turned my face at an angle so that the kids could not see before bursting into silent laughter. Ay, talk about things that teachers have to resort to to put up a front.

During class that day, I made a boy read a few sentences because his group of monkeys simply refused to zip their mouths. I had been keeping a stern, straight face throughout the lesson because the class was extremely rowdy. He read the sentences with weird pronunciation. Pronunciation so funny that I laughed. I swear that I really tried hard not to laugh. I really did! But I failed.

I must have looked like a face contortionist at that moment. Do you know how it feels? It’s like trying to keep a straight face when someone tickles your foot. My kids caught me laughing. Imagine my embarrassment and how the kid might feel. His teacher laughing at his pronunciation. Worse, I think my bastion against their rowdy behaviour was totally torn down because of that. My façade was gone with that laughter. They saw through me.

At home:
I tried to continue choreographing my Charleston routine. I was at the halfway mark. That day, I managed to complete three-quarters of the routine. I love my routine so far. Heehee. I was hoping to complete it so that we could perform it for next year’s SEA Jam in late Feb. What’s that? It’s a lindy hop dance camp that gives you a mind-boggling experience by making you dance for three straight days. The teachers from overseas will make sure you boogie-woogie from head to toe.

This morning:
Realised that there were bomb blasts in Bali again. The terrorist act reminded me of the Iraq war two years back. George Bush declared war on Iraq because Iraq allegedly was a hotbed for terrorists and had weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

When I told my cousin that I was dead against the war, he said, “ Why? Iraq has WMD. The US was right to send troops in.” He was 20. I was mortified with his answer. From day one, I had believed that WMD and the terrorists was just an ostensible reason that veiled the truth behind the act of aggression.

In our conflict reporting class, we had a discussion about possible reasons why US wanted to attack Iraq. The reasons were everything but WMD and terrorists. Two years later, we were right. There were no WMD and what talk about terrorists? Zilch. And what talk about freeing the Iraq population from a dictator? Who is an outsider to decide the lives of millions? The lives of people Bush had never seen or heard. There was an article that mocked that Americans could not even pronounce “Iraq” properly (It was always “Eye-raq”), much less determine its destiny.

My cousin’s simple reply made me think. Was he just an empathetic young Singaporean, like many others or was it that our media had not been steadfast in covering the stories objectively? Of course, there could be many other reasons.

Some questions to ponder:
Have you ever given thought that the placements of news within a newspaper could very likely affect whether you read a piece of news? Was it at the left hand corner at the top? The right bottom corner?

And amidst the plethora of news, what gets printed on the papers? Undiscerning readers read what’s offered on the papers, unaware that there are other pieces of news out there that were not on the papers. Horrific thought. The media control how we think sub-consciously more than we are aware of. Yes? No?

Hmm, what’s my bottom line here?
If we don’t want to be “kept in the dark”, so to speak, we gotta read from many different sources. Not just our beloved The Straits Times.

And what are the motives behind terrorists attack? We can always dismiss them as pure fanaticism or Muslim extremism as always reported. But is there more to it? I don't condone such acts. But! What if, terrorists are just people who have no avenues to express their suffering, hence resorting to acts of aggression to get news coverage? After all, its a world where the rich and powerful rule while the weak falters into nothingness. I believe the world is grey. Who's right? Who's wrong? What's black? And what's white?