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Those of you in the know, we’re okay now. The past 2 weeks has been an important lesson in dealing with marital issues and a pregnant wife, and I have gotten advice from every marker of the spectrum from friends and family alike. I got everything from “You guys need to talk.” to “You better stop talking for a while.” to “Did you find out why she’s pissed?” to “Why do you stupidly persist in asking why she’s angry?”. Took me 2 weeks to recover from all that confusion.

But I do want to thank those people who cared enough to ask, and tried their best to help out. At the end of the day, the problems a couple face in the course of their marital bliss may be issues only they can really handle, but a listening ear doesn’t hurt.

I’m hoping to start blogging full-swing again, as soon as I can find the right things to say.

I met up with a friend last night who’s leaving Singapore in 11 days to pursue a long-time dream: to perfect the art of rhythmically banging a set of nicely lacquered wooden cylinders bound with tightly wound skins using a pair of sticks in the most complex manner possible. Once in a while he also involves metal plates in the process. And yes, there are educational certifications for this kind of thing.

I would never have thought he’d be able to transcend into jazz drumming. When I first met him, he was an overzealous punk drummer who couldn’t keep time (though to his benefit, he was usually only off a split second). That being said, we had a lot of fun in our day, and still do. We were close enough friends for my mother to think at one point we were bisexual lovers, and I still sometimes wonder if I should have cleared that up properly with my mother.

Today, he’s grown into a fine, dread-locked young man who unfortunately will not be filling the void of talented local drummers here, and only because he’s flying to New York.

The reason why it’s important for me to mention him today is because, as with most friends that go overseas either to study, work or find a girlfriend, I don’t really know if I’ll ever see him again. The thing I find increasingly fascinating about Singapore is that it somewhat reflects that old Hotel California cliche: when you start thinking for yourself, you realise you’ve checked in, but you’ll always want to leave (cue guitar solo).

I had the same feeling when my wife (before she was my wife) left for Canada. It helped that I had gotten over my fear of computers and ICQ was in its prime during that period, but when someone in your life, whether it be someone close or just a mere acquaintance, decides to partake in a semi-permanent life in a land far, far away (herein defined as anything that takes more than 4 hours to get to by plane), there’s always a niggling feeling in you that they might actually not think of coming home at all, ever.

It’s almost like someone is dying, except you’ll probably still get to talk on MSN Messenger once in a while after the person goes.

My wife also mentioned last night that going overseas for an extended period of time can really change a person. She says when one makes that step into the big world and starts to discover what it is really like, one of two things can happen; you either get into the swing of things and assimilate into a new lifestyle that is required of your environment, or you get culture shock and lock yourself up in your room. Either way, you become cynical, jaded, and lose that childlike innocence that everybody likes about you. I’m not sure if that’s gonna happen to this guy, but these days, I’m not sure about a lot of things. I’m cynical that way.

That being said, he is already making changes to his persona in preparation for the Big Apple. He’s got dental work done, and contact lenses; after all, jazz drummers from New York don’t wear braces, and all that flaying around with sticks and metal plates means spectacles are also out of the question. He’s never thought of using, much less buying, a laptop, and last night he asked for advice on buying a Mac, which he somewhat regretted after remembering what I wrote about the topic of advice. And in the days of the little drummer boy and me in school, I’d almost always pay for his lunch because he was mostly broke. Last night he paid for dinner.

I never like admitting I fear change, but I do feel another chapter of my life being relegated into the already-read pages of a book I won’t get a chance to read again.

There is probably a chance we’ll meet again. He still owes me a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Omnibus I lent him in school, not to mention a bunch of CDs I’ve long since forgotten about.

And I want to believe we’ll meet again.

With reference to Parts I and II

Lydia (or more endearingly Bobo in some circles, though she has since renounced the nickname) was, and still is, more than a friend to my wife. They had met in a polytechnic orientation camp; Lydia was a freshie, and my wife was one of the group leaders. In a rouse to get closer to the freshies, my wife had masqueraded as one of them and sat next to Lydia, who immediately hit it off with her and became fast friends, before my wife was ratted out by a clueless lecturer who asked her why she wasn’t in class.

Lydia’s mother had always regarded my wife as her own daughter, and had told her that “Fate brought the two of you together, and nothing can ever tear you apart. You are as good as a daughter to me, and I know you will take care of my daughter like she was your own sister as well.”

I first met Lydia 6 years back when I was just starting to date my wife and heard a friend of hers needed help with her actual day wedding photography. Being a fresh boyfriend only too ready to impress, I only too readily agreed to assist her in helping out a friend I hardly knew.

Lydia’s wedding day was to eventually cause a 5-year-old bad impression on me.

After the wedding, I sent some videos of Lydia’s happy day to a guy I knew who did post production work to compile into a DVD for Lydia. I remembered pulling a few big favours to ensure Lydia got the DVD done properly, but what I forgot was to get the DVD done promptly. I received a call from Lydia about a week or two after, which was when the whole trouble started.

I was first struck by the odd tone of voice Lydia used to ask me if the DVD was ready. It was not, and I was then summarily reprimanded over the phone for taking too long for so simple a task. I listened to her rants, thinking to myself, “What the hell…? I thought I was doing you a favour!” My conversation with Lydia only lasted a couple of minutes, after which I reached a point where the only thing I could do was pass the phone to my wife before I said something really bad and things really got out of hand.

For the next five years, I tried to avoid meeting with her as much as I could, which was not entirely difficult, for she had married a Dutch citizen, and was moving to Amsterdam before the year was out. When we did meet, I was less than polite, and often my wife would just decide not to bring me along to any get-togethers of any sort that involved her presence.

And thus the story went, unresolved differences collecting dust on a shelf for five years without a second thought. Until Sunday night two weeks ago.

**********

Lydia had returned from Amsterdam a couple of months earlier, among other reasons, to be with her her mother, who was due for neurosurgery earlier this month to remove a tumour in her brain. She called my wife a while after she had somewhat settled down, and heard of our plans for the wedding. Eventually she was able to put aside the more pressing affair of her mother’s condition to agree to be one of my wife’s sisters for the wedding.

In the course of the discussions with Lydia on Sunday night’s “brothers and sisters” meeting, my wife had asked Lydia, “You’re here for your mother, you should be concentrating on staying with her instead of messaing around with us.” To which Lydia replied, “Your wedding is only one day. For the things you did for me for my wedding, this is the least that I could do.”

Lydia had, in fact, volunteered to do our actual day photography, upon hearing of our troubles getting our other friend to commit to the job and his non-appearance at the gathering that night.

After 5 years, when I first saw Lydia again on Sunday night, the bite of that telephone conversation was still raw in my mind. I had not expected anything more than the fun and games a sister would have on the hapless groom the morning when he would have to try to fetch the bride out of her parents’ domain. When my wife told me about her volunteering her services, I wondered if I was wrong about her.

And then Michelle came up with her proposal. Michelle’s idea was to get Lydia to supplement the professional photographer’s work with the cameras we had, and the fact that she was such a close friend would mean the quality of her photos would by no means be any less than the most heartfelt work a photographer of any calibre could offer to a friend. I lost all notion of my grudge against her when I saw her eagerness and readiness to help out a friend without a second thought.

Later, as I was sharing a smoke with her in my balcony, I told her one of the main reasons why it took so long for me to consent to Michelle’s suggestion to hire a photographer was because of her. I told her my grievances against her the last 5 years and how that suddenly went down the balcony drain that very moment, retelling the story of what had happened that fateful phone call five years ago, how I had thought of her at the time all the way till that moment, and asked for her forgiveness.

The flower of Amsterdam and the Ah Huay of my wife’s social life gave me an endearingly blank stare. She hd absolutely no idea what the hell I was talking about.

So five years ago, I didn’t think I deserved getting scolded from someone I barely knew for doing her a favour without asking for anything in return. This night, I didn’t think I deserved her return of the same favour. And then in a moment of rare honesty between two almost complete strangers that could have turned into a Hallmark moment of forgiveness and grace, she tells me she didn’t even know I was pissed with her all this time. Hmm.

Obviously we’re all okay now. I’m still recovering from the soreness of my slapping myself in the forehead for realising how stupid I was the last 5 years.

Welcome to Part 2, the sombre side of things. For those of you who just joined us, you might want to take a look at Part 1, though it isn’t entirely necessary.

The experience of a wedding is not for the faint-hearted. Fun as my wedding celebrations process was, the amount of planning in the areas of logistics, organisation, planning and finance is enough to make a grown man cry and his wife-to-be scream. Did it happen to us? Hoo yeah. But that’s where your friends come in. If you’re not the very social type and don’t have people around you that you can properly trust and that isn’t family, your wedding planning is gonna be a damn lonely affair. My wife and I are fortunate enough to have a small group of our own personal heroes that made the things we hoped could happen, happen.

That being said, I would encourage any couple who is legalising their union to please hold a wedding. Hold a big, expensive one, with a lot of stuff in it, all them bells ‘n’ whistles. Do it in a good restaurant with good food and responsible managers. And invite a minimum of 200 people. And get as many friends involved as possible. And think up the wackiest possible things to do to entertain your guests.

It might end up being fun, or it may not. But whichever way it goes, and no matter how many words I put into this blog to explain my experience and how it affects me, you just got to do it to yourself, because it’s going to be a fucking wake-up call.

**********

It was our wedding planning that redefined (or “undefined”) my thinking of what friendship means. Right up to this point, I thought the people I call friends, the people I don’t call friends, and the people I stopped calling friends, was pretty well-defined in my spectrum. Looking at what our friends had done for me to make this wedding happen made me see my social circle in an entirely different light. The friends we had with us that night were friends that give without a second thought. The friends my wife and I were that night were friends in need. And the ones I blamed for not being there for me the night the wedding planner attacked were more in need of friends than I was in need of them.

It is not easy to come to this point, where one stops laying blame and starts empathising. I can only say, now that I’ve seen a friend in need from my own experience, that laying blame is the stuff that breaks relationships, tears families apart, creates crimes, starts wars. So, don’t.

**********

The wedding dinner itself also proved an eye-opener for me. We had only wanted to provide some form of entertainment to an otherwise frivolous, somewhat inane event that involved two people that most of the event’s attendees didn’t even know. We wanted to do a show, to keep people involved as an audience, and to keep us involved as a couple, to our family, our family’s family, and everyone’s friends. What we didn’t anticipate was their response to us, and more importantly, their response to each other, when something as tiny as a skip during a march-in, or as simple as a rickshaw, could get people talking… to each other.

I personally know of relatives and relatives once, twice, three times a-removed, who have never spoken to us or each other for years and years (be it for loss of contact, grudges, family feuds or court cases), who, by some miracle, came together into one small little restaurant of 26 tables to witness the union of a couple, only to find themselves in a reunion of relationships. People who came to our wedding curious, expectant, trepid, bored even, ended up laughing, dancing, cheering, clapping, completely immersing themselves in the moment… all because our invitation card stated rather subtly, “Dress Code: 1930′s Shanghai Glamour”, and my wife’s sister decided on a whim to include a rickshaw she could rent from a props warehouse in the People’s Association.

Proof that making your wedding different can make a difference to people’s lives, even if it’s just for a little while.

**********

The biggest wake-up call of all, was the dinner bill. Not something I didn’t expect, but it really doesn’t hit you until your restaurant manager actually gives you that check with a smile.

In my entire life, I have never had to pay so much money upfront on a single event, until last Sunday. It hit me that the days of my youth, where my supply of spending money seemed constant and never-ending, where things I couldn’t pay for I could still bank on the next month, came to a head with this one celebration. Faced with a 5-digit bill to pay, no wallet (left it in my hotel room), and a bunch of people impatiently waiting for me to attend to their sabotage session involving that infamous “5-course wine, chillied peanuts and a raw egg in a cup”, my immediate thought was one my parents, all my sisters and my own wife had tried to tell me all my years of knowing them: “Don’t anyhow spend anymore.”

Many would think the angpow money would take care of most, if not all, of it. Some might even think they could profit from it, but it still doesn’t take away the fact that you just contributed a big fat fucking wad of money into the F&B industry. It doesn’t take away the fact that in a society such as Singapore, in an economy as inflated as we are today, in a nation where a car costs about twice as much to own because the government takes half of what you pay for it, as a middle-income earner in an island full of middle-income earners, you probably can’t afford the inital expenses of your own wedding and have to ask your family to help.

Thanks to my wedding, I am now as thrifty as an old lady in a one-room flat who keeps everything she can lay her hands on because “they all cost money”. More importantly, thanks to my wedding, “family” has taken top spot in my spending priorities; “gadgets” and “guitars” has been relegated to an obscure corner of Lim Chu Kang.

I am really gonna miss being a kid.

We had a meeting of the groomsmen and bridesmaids (we shall call them collectively brothers and sisters as they should be termed in most Asian societies) last night. I was expecting it to be a gathering of friends like any get-together we would hold. It turned out to be a life-changing event that showed me not only the kind of people we were calling friends, but what kind of person I turned out to be.

I have to write this carefully, as the situation last night demands delicate care in the use of words for its description.

The people who attended yesterday’s gathering of souls have all had some kind of history with my wife and I, one way or another.

Eddie (you see him in the comments section every once in a while making jokes about my genitals), who left the party before the meaty part of the night began, is a childhood friend who happened to meet my wife years later as students in the same design class.

Michelle (another comments regular) is my wife’s classmate from polytechnic, and was also waiting tables with me at my sister’s very Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge-ish, quite defunct EMOH cafe in my late teen years.

And then there’s Lydia, another school friend of both Eddie and my wife, whom I had become acquainted with when my wife and I were asked to help out in her actual-day wedding photography.

Terence is a secondary school friend I recently came back into contact with through Eddie, and is currently (together with his wife and infant son) charting out a new friendship with my wife and I as the new parental guidance expert to our upcoming family nucleus and resident beer buddy.

Finally there’s my unofficial best man Mark and her best girl Zee. Our relationship with Mark is shit-complicated, and will probably deserve a blog post of its own, while Zee is the girl who doesn’t mind all that complication and takes all the shit we collectively dish out with a smile and a beer.

For the most part, fate had brought all of us together. It was even evident in the beginning of the gathering, when, after my wife, Mark and I picked Zee up from her aunt’s place, Mark insisted he needed to get some food for the party and we went to the neighbourhood night bazaar before heading back to our place. Eddie’s phone was dead for some reason and he couldn’t be contacted at all, so imagine my surprise when we were walking on our way to the night bazaar and Eddie walked right past my wife’s line of sight looking like a lost puppy with a small paper bag of his contribution to the pot-luck event. A few minutes later, my wife, on a whim, called Lydia and found out she was just in the the immediate vicinity as well, and 15 minutes later, all 6 of us were wishing my wife drove a bigger car.

To top that off, when we all reached the apartment, Michelle and Ken had just arrived and were wondering why no one was answering the door. After letting everyone in and trying my best to get everyone comfy, I headed back out and caught Terence driving in just in time with drinks and 2 packets of ice, wife and kid in tow. You could not get timing more accurate than last night if you were choreographing the National Day Parade.

Through the night, Michelle had been scarily forthcoming throughout the night, which was to be expected to some extent, seeing as she worked as a wedding planner in one of Singapore’s more prominent agencies. Her invaluable experience in the matter of wedding affairs proved extremely enlightening to all of us in the course of our discussions, though at some points it got my wife and I thinking, what did we get ourselves into? What is she going to do to us if we forget something? Is she going to knife me if I get it wrong on the wedding day? And exactly how much did she have to drink so far?

Then, in between discussing the actual day’s schedule, the silly things we’re thinking of doing, and whether there was any more beer in the fridge, the subject of the actual-day photography had come up. While we have asked another friend some time beforehand about helping us with the photo-taking, dealing with said friend has turned out to be a chain of frustrations and disappointments, a bit of which was vented in my previous Friendly Fire post. It turned out that getting a photographer was more of a problem than my wife and I had anticipated, but it wasn’t made so apparent as it was last night.

We had originally planned to use only 2 DSLRs throughout the event, with friends and family helping out with their own digital cameras and nothing more, and consolidating the whole night’s photography into one big day-long photo shoot. Lydia was kind enough to volunteer without hesitation to help us in the area as a returning of the favour we did her on her wedding day., and she seemed a good choice too, having some design background in her education. However, having described the atmosphere of the restaurant we were having our wedding dinner in as “cozy and romantic”, to say the least, Michelle’s very clever boyfriend Ken (who was largely just there for the food, both in preparing it and consuming it) noted, “Don’t you need a good flashgun if you’re going to do any photography in the restaurant?”

Ken, with that one sentence coming out of your otherwise very quiet mouth, whatever transpired after that is now all on you, man.

A sudden mood of drunken thoughtfulness coupled with scarily adamant eyes-on-the-ceiling seriousness (forgive me, it is the only way I know how to describe it) washed over Michelle’s face as she sat contemplating what her boyfriend had said. And then suddenly she sat up in her chair and slurred with a strangely firm tone of voice, “Can I request something? Can the bride-to-be and groom-to-be leave the room? I need to talk to the rest of us about… something.”

We left the table, shuffled in the study and closed the door. As Michelle discussed what was undoubtedly a sinister plan to knife us while we weren’t looking, I asked my wife, “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

My wife very calmly said, “Well, Michelle is an authority in the matter of weddings. She is a wedding planner at the end of the day.”

“She’s taking this wedding thing a bit too seriously though. Are you scared of her?”

“Yes. But that’s the Michelle I know, and I expected nothing less, because she will give her all to her friends when they need her.”

“How much has she had to drink?”

Our little dialogue was interrupted when Michelle called out to tell us we could come out now. My wife rejoined the table, but I detoured into the master bedroom toilet to seek solace on my ivory throne as times like these demand, regain my composure, and, uh, do other things.

When I finally re-emerged, the table quietened down. I was expecting something bad. In my experience of people quietening down when I joined in, it usually meant I was in a shitload of trouble and anyone who instigated conversation with me would be implicated in my crime.

Michelle began by saying, “I have a proposal.”

For a moment I thought she was going to ask Ken to marry her.

But she continued, “The reason why I asked you to leave the table was because after what Ken said about the flashgun, it got me to thinking that you guys are really going to need a pro photographer. Based on my experience in hiring friends, there will always be complications because friends don’t necessarily know what are the more important pictures that have to be taken that day.” She spoke briefly of a previous wedding day where a hired male friend was taking photographs of interesting women instead of the happy couple of the day (that story did not end well), and then continued, “So I talked with the rest of the guys here, and we have all agreed, as a wedding gift to you, we will help you hire a photographer for your wedding day.”

There was a long pause. my wife and I looked at the anticipating expressions of everyone around the table, expecting our response. We were both stunned; in a few minutes my wife would be touched to tears by the offer, but for the longest time I couldn’t find the words to say. Needless to say, I added to the tension on the table with my non-response, because I was not known to be one at a loss for words in any occasion other than when I was stuffing my mouth with food. As much as I was wondering what the hell Michelle was thinking when she requested time away from the hosts of the party to speak with the host’s guetss, now everyone was thinking what the hell I was thinking when I finally heard of the proposal.

I finally broke. “In my 30 years of life, this has never happened to me before. I would never have imagined my wife and I would have with us, a group of friends as giving as the ones seated at my table right now.”

And that was all I could say. The rest of the night, I remained stunned, confused, guilty, happy, sad, deeply appreciative and completely undeserving of the company we were keeping this night.

Stunned because I never knew I had friends this good.

Confused because I wondered where the hell they came from, and why the hell they came to my wife and I.

Guilty because I had preconceptions of my own guests and had only realised how wrong I am as a person to think people were going to knife me when all they wanted was to give me the best day of my life by giving me the best night of my life.

Happy because the people who were there for us last night, were there for us last night.

Sad because the people whom we thought would be there for us, weren’t.

Deeply appreciative because… oh, you get it.

And writing this, I realise the one situation where such a mish-mash of seemingly contradicting emotions will come together and give you, among other things, a thoroughly sleepless night.

Love.

To be continued…

My social life is nothing to brag about. In the history of my social life, there have been 4 kinds of people; friends (the people who actually do think of me once in a while), enemies (the people who will have nothing to do with me, or whom I will have nothing to do with), acquaintances (the people who couldn’t really care less), and family (the people that have no choice in the matter).

Also in the history of my social life, I have had to make quite a few tough decisions. We’ve all heard of breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, but has anyone ever broken up with a friend?

It’s a rare occurrence, but it does happen. I happen to see it on TV a lot, but in real life, most people just drift away, regardless of whether they are best friends or mere acquaintances (the latter seemingly more prone to drifting than the former, but all are just as susceptible).

I live by a set of principles presented to me at different points in my adult life, and thankfully, I am careful enough with who I call “friend” to not have to engage these principles often. But situations do arise nonetheless:-

1. A friend does not stand another friend up (in local terms, we call it “let go my aeroplane”, for some godforsaken reason). It shows one is being taken for granted, and a friendship like that will not hold up under fire. once, twice, three times, five times, I would go, “Right, OK.” But if, of all the 50-100 times that a date and time has been set for lunch meetings, friendly gatherings, or even sit-downs for coffee, if you can only make good a meeting twice in the course of a 3 1/2 year friendship, please don’t blame me for giving up on you.
2. A friend does not insult another friend (nor the people revolving around that friend, for that matter). This one, though, is quite subjective. I have laughed at people, and people have laughed at me, so surely I can take a lot of shit (I write a blog that’s enrolled in Humor-Blogs.com, for crying out loud). But here’s a tip for anyone reading this who’s a friend, courtesy of one ex-friend of mine that, earlier this year, broke this very rule (I could only take so much from that one, and I realised after our last meeting why I hadn’t called him for 2 whole years); don’t overdo the name-calling (pig-brain, jerk, stupid), and never, ever, joke about my decision to marry, much less make fun of my wife’s integrity in choosing me.
3. A friend does not use his personal problems as an excuse to vent, snap at, or ill-treat other friends. As much as I would like to think I am close friends with someone, and as much as I would like to think I understand someone, I cannot claim to completely know what that someone is going through despite my own experiences, and hence will not tolerate being treated like an emotional punching bag when something untoward happens to this someone else. I can be there for you to share your problems, dish out advice, offer what I can as a friend. But if I am met with disdain, impatience, or even anger for something I didn’t even do to you, evidently you don’t require me as a friend, and so I will offer what I can as a friend; an end to this friendship, because you couldn’t care less.

As difficult as it is for me to call friends friends, the friends that I’ve called friends made it easy (except, of course, for situations 1, 2 and 3 above). These are the people who know and love me for who I am, and don’t mind me for all the shit I bring along with me. Most importantly, I am their friend as well. They have my utmost gratitude for being there for me, my sincere apologies for the inconveniences I have caused them, and any body part they require that will not cause permanent damage to my health (a helping hand, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, etc.).

And in the future of my social circle, I hope to never create any more new principles against friendships. But some things, as with life and death and many many other things in between, are inevitable.