My back is fine now. I finally have put some links up on here, but since I updated this and upgraded to blogger beta, I lost track of my tagboard and most of the old links I had, so if I linked you / was supposed to link you, my bad. I really haven’t had the time to sit here and write much anyway, not in the past few months, and things’ve been going so fast (oh no being vague again) as usual.

It’s a surprisingly warm Thursday night, if wet, and I’m right in the middle of my big projects for my classes. School this year has been hectic, for sure, but the classes have been a lot more intriguing than they were last year, due perhaps in part to the relatively smaller classes. As a result I’ve been a lot more active in classes this year, especially in discussions and stuff, as opposed to the quiet, behind-the-scenes stealthy kind of guy I was last year.

I’m not sure which one is me, to be honest, since I usually vacillate between being quieter than the average person… and being a lot more loud, in-your-face and uh, out there than most people are, though the latter is a lot rarer for me, and only comes out due to circumstance.

I will try to write here more, since I do not wish to lose my ability to write. Already I find myself misspelling stuff in my notes, and wondering how many S’s there are in “weaknesses” while I was doing a SWOT analysis just now was a wake-up call.

Anyway.

Today while on the subway to school I was attacked by a crazy homeless guy.

I was sitting in the carriage, reading the metro (Toronto free newspaper which is surprisingly good) when this tanned, ambiguously Asian and very, very unshaven man in his 30s or 40s walked in, whispering and mumbling unintelligible gibberish to himself, and sat on the seat facing me horizontally.

Aware of the man’s presence, disturbed but yet unwilling to move away from my seat and thus concede that I was in fact disturbed, I continued reading the metro and attempted to ignore the man. Unfortunately, as the train moved along its path, the man’s murmurings got louder, and they sounded increasingly agitated.

He then brushed my shoulder and murmured something to the effect of “Hey you talking to me? What you say to me?” To which I replied, as calm as I could, that I did not say anything, and I continued reading my paper.

This, however, seemed to agitate the man further, and it was not long after I turned away and began to read the metro again that his murmurings grew more and more loud, and angrier still. He then began to start shoving me and punching me on my shoulder, with increasing strength, several times – which I ignored, trying to keep a steely disposition all the while.

It was after a few shoves, however, that the man slammed his fist on the back of my seat hard enough so that the entire carriage had heard, and was staring at him and me. I turned to the man in shock, and he asked me the same question he had asked me before, with even more menace and anger than he had the last time, “Are you saying something to me?”

I once more said that I wasn’t, and, unable to ignore danger and a potential fistfight, I picked up my bag and walked to the nearest subway doors, where I stood waiting for the next station – Old Mill. When the train finally reached the Old Mill station, which has a subway platform overlooking the Humber River several dozen feet below, I got off – but couldn’t resist looking at the crazed man in the face, in an attempt to “read” him.

This, however, drove the man totally nuts and as the subway doors closed behind me, he stood up and started gesticulating wildly at me, while smashing his fists on the train’s window panels, while behind him, bewildered elderly women and their young grand children watched.

It took a lot of willpower to not show him the bird, or to bang on the window back and yell something at my assailant, but I somehow managed to turn around and just look at the beautiful flowing river below me, which I continued looking at until the train left the station.

I’ve seen my share of crazies, in Singapore and Toronto both, but this is the first time I have been… in such contact with one of them. Pris said that you don’t see this kinda thing in Singapore, to which I don’t exactly agree with. Within cities such as Toronto and Singapore lie such powerfully stark dualities; here we have Spadina, what one of my professors last year described “the dark underbelly of capitalism”, home – if you would call it that – to too many homeless people, beggars, crackheads and the like, and yet barely 15 minutes away lies businessey Bay Street, with trendy, chic Queen St even nearer.

Back in Singapore, you don’t have to stray too far from the beauty and cleanliness of the city to see its own darker side. The infamous lorongs of Geylang lie sandwiched between the lovely downtown’s Singapore’s eastern borders and the gorgeously scenic East Coast area. The duality in Singapore is, however, most stark on Orchard Road itself. Right in the heart of the city’s lively entertainment district, its immaculately clean Orchard Road stretch, with the majestic maroon twin Takashimaya towers at its core, we can see this. You barely have to walk five minutes from Orchard’s subway exit to reach Orchard Towers, a highrise den of prostitution and promiscuity, nestled amidst embassies, corporate office buildings, cinemas and the like. Need I even mention Desker? Joo Chiat?

London was the same. Vancouver even more so. And so, I feel, is Hong Kong.

Big cities attract the good – and the very worst, perhaps – that humanity has. For every sharply dressed go-getter in a Harry Rosen suit standing on Bay Street, there is a homeless man waking up from a daze on a street corner at noon, absently realizing that whatever money he had had been invested the night before in the empty bottle of cheap alcohol that lay behind him, and in the burned out ash remains of the spliff that stained the pavement not far from where he now lies. Yin and Yang, perhaps.

I have been pondering about this for too long; it’s already 0330 hrs and I’ve gotta be up in less than six hours. I haven’t slept well at all lately.

Good night.