The big kahuna article is over—it’s big, not that it’s on the movie—and I’ve just submitted it. There’s more to do in the wrapping up of the magazine, from the columns to the editing (the damned editing) and editing the editing, but the big one is over. Just in time to indulge in my greatest guilty pleasure of reading a multitude of random blogs, hopping from one to the next. M-mm.

I could either do that or start practicing several Chinese songs for a karaoke session planned on Friday. It seems nobody wants to hear English songs being done and redone (what’s wrong with The Carpenters, I want to know?) so I’ve added count’em-TWO songs to my repertoire of one safe Chinese song, to which the romanised lyrics I’ll be printing and flaunting as homework done with the thick-skinned audacity of a teacher’s pet.

My ultimo safe song is Kai Shi Dong Le, by Stephanie Sun, which I learnt to placate requests for a Chinese song back last year when I was singing at the M Hotel’s lounge during vacation break. The two new ones will be Fen Shou Kuai Le by Fish (?!) Leong and Ming Ming Bai Bai Wo De Xin, the latter being shamefully old (I’m talking ’80s), but it’s a tune I’m vaguely familiar with, having heard it back in the day of the Laser Disc and the Elder Sister Going Through a Phase, so if anything, I guess it’ll have some comic effect.

Still got to work on that Brisbane video. I realised that the more hype I create by talking about it, the harder the disappointment is going to fall upon your heads when I finally air it. But at least the nausea will be abated because it was filmed with a digicam, not my phone.

It’s a funny thing about those cliched “business trip” encounters when life deals you a big, fat Hollywood-type Chance Meeting and you find yourself on the plane back home, wistfully gazing out the oval window contemplating life and fate and all those other preoccupations so “in” these days. When I woke up this morning, still hazy from the late night chat that threatened to run on forever (me still standing in the hallway in Godawful, pinchy shoes), I got what I consider the most excellent note I might’ve ever received to date. It was written on the back of the hotel’s smallish bedside writing pad. It said, “Brisbane wouldn’t have been the same without you” right in the middle, surrounded by all (or most) of the stuff we’d been talking about for the two days.

Scribbled on the plane on 14th Jan. Last line added today.