As far as I can remember I've always had bad things happen to my everytime I board a flight, bizzare as it seems. Take for example my first momentous trip out of Singapore to LA for the Siggraph convention in 1999. As our plane was descending to LAX I started making out ( it was a window seat ) pinpricks of red, flashing lights all over the runways and no, they weren't guidelights but the entire LA fire department waiting to douse out our plane which incidentally had a leak on its wing and was just waiting to explode into tiny little bits, myself a part of that. Great.



The 2nd time was on a photography job to Brunei with my boss in 2004, 10 minutes after the plane took off my ears started hurting really badly and I was fully expecting blood to come pouing out any second, genuinely fearing for my life. I later found out the excruciating episode was due to the plane ascending too quickly ( due to the short flight time the plane ascends faster than long flights ) and the change in air pressure wrecking havoc on my ears. Now the return flight wasn't too comfy either.

Finally, during my first trip back to Singapore from Japan last year, I yes, lost my wallet at customs 10 minutes before last call. I was tripping, almost turned into a raving madman just waiting to get arrested by airport security and had to settle for home minus my wallet, with all my important documents inside. Just minutes before take off this angelic, beautiful Japanese airport attendent raced down the aisle and handed me my precious. Darn. Should've gotten her number.

So, what's going to happen on today's flight back to Singapore ?

*UPDATED 24TH FEBUARY* Either the gods or someone must have cursed me to suffer a life time of inescapable, horrible fates everytime I board flights because it has happened again : I missed a perfectly good opportunity to meet this beautiful japanese lady Kiyomi ( now living in LA but was in Tokyo to stay with my ex-sharemates Takeshi and Kojima ), heck, she probably even arrived at their house right about the time I was boarding my plane back to Singapore. See here for a photo of Kiyomi ( the girl applying makeup for Kojima ): http://www.lionbus.undo.jp/

They always say if something's not broken, don't fix it, but heck, I really felt like a change. (picture for blog header). To usher in the new year, a breath of fresh air, the works. I just hope it still runs in parallel to the "halcyon realms" theme. Tell me what you guys think. Shot on a beautiful evening near the train tracks near my house.

Watching Reality Bites (1994) for the first time in its entirety brings back very fond memories of my early secondary days where the nostalgic soundtrack featuring Lisa Loeb's "Stay" was one of the first CD's I ever owned, and this was still way back in the early 1990's where the now mesozoic cassette tapes were been slowly but surely supplanted by CDs, a fate they themselves seemed doomed to reiterate in the wake of digital music.



That aside, Reality Bites is an extremely important film in recent cinematic history not only because its serves as an irreplacable memory bookmark in an early chapter of my life ( the transition from bespectacled, nerdy primary school kid to bespectacled, nerdy secondary school kid ), but more importantly because its the emblematic teen-angsty, quasi-intelligent, 90s era defining film, just as what the Matrix Trilogy had done for the new millenium years. This once again demonstrates the power of the cinema and its ability to change worlds and shape lives, deliberate or not. Now the debate of whether Bites was a good or bad film requires another article altogether, but undisputedly, it had one heck of a bloody good soundtrack, bar Sharona or none.