I am so never going to squeeze my own orange juice again, ever.

Four oranges, 15 minutes and a goodly muscle strain later, all I got to show for my hard work was this:

I shudder to think how people lived before the era of supermarkets and automatic juicers.

Okay, so I’m backward for still using a manual juicer.

I think I shall just buy my orange juice off the shelves from now on.

The powers-that-be must think that I’m not tanned enough.

Actually, tanned is an understatement.

Hot on the heels of this heat-stroke-inducing four-day-shoot for a short film…

…comes this shoot that effectively burnt the entire cast and crew to a delicious crisp.

It was so hot yesterday the top of our heads got melted away. Now, I’m waiting for my brains to grow back. Which means that, today, I’m a blonde. (With the wrong hair colour.)

So you’ll pardon me if I start cracking corny jokes.

A man walks into a bar…

Ouch.

Now, all jokes aside, my mission today is to regale you with beautifully shot photographs taken on the Changi Beach Club boardwalk. We were there to shoot a TV commercial for (yes!) Changi Beach Club.

You must ignore the blurry, dull quality of the photos because the shots were taken with my crap phone camera.

But you must at the same time marvel at the beauty of the shots. Credit goes to my friend, Vamp, who was part of the crew, and who got loaded with the unpleasant task of taking pictures for me with my crap phone camera.

We weren’t even posing for her. She got all these while we were in motion, acting for the video camera.

Unfortunately for you, my curious reader, I didn’t give Vamp the phone while we were shooting the pool scene. So you won’t get to see me in a swimsuit until the commercial airs on TV.

That will give you the incentive to watch TV 24/7 to try and catch a glimpse of my bikini clad self (just so you can point and laugh), won’t it?

But I did take one picture at the pool.

You know this one was taken by me instead of by Stef because it’s a thoughtless shot captured randomly with nary a thought for photographic aesthetry. (I just made that last word up because it sounds kind of right in this circumstance. Don’t try it at home, kids.)

And a self-portrait.

Anyway, we caught the morning to noon sun at the pool. My scenes mostly had me lying on the lounge chair and getting baked alive.

Literally, mind you. You could fry an egg off the heat, I swear.

We then caught the noon to early afternoon sun at the beach. By that time, my brains were so addled that I forgot to take pictures.

After a whole day of being fried at various locations of the club, the sun went down.

That was when the crew decided to fry us with filming lights.

Yes, we were all burnt toast by the time they were finished with us.

But that’s okay because, for the sake of my art (and TV exposure and a fat cheque), I will happily endure the harshest conditions.

It was a great shoot, anyway. The crew was friendly and funny, the club hosts were very welcoming and the food was soooo good.

Nevertheless, I’m going to stay indoors until I grow some new brain cells and a new set of skin.

My blog is starting to get wordy, so it’s time for some blurry pictures taken by my handy i-mode phone.

This is MIA Bar at UE Square Shopping Mall. The MIA is short for Made In Ansfield, not Missing In Action, as most people tend to think at first.

But never mind the bar, because the more important thing is that I was there for a shoot.

It’s a Chinese New Year Carlsberg commercial that will be aired on TV and in cinemas (in both languages) during the coming CNY period.

See the Christmas snowflakes in the picture and how they’re kind of pinned up towards the ceiling so that the camera won’t catch them? Haha.

Adrian Pang is the lead actor and I play one of his ex-classmates, at the bar, having a few drinks together. I have a couple of lines and some screen time but I think I’m going to cringe when I see myself.

I look weird. As usual.

These two pics aren’t so bad, that’s why they’re here. The rest are career damning so I’m burning them.

It’s the makeup. The brown eyeshadow below my eyes makes me look like an insomniac. Which I am, truth be told, but the point is not to make me look like an insomniac. The point is to make me look glam, isn’t it?

Well, at least I think the hair is kind of cute.

But the problem is that the cute flyaways went limp after a while so I ended up looking like an insomniac who just woke up.

I didn’t get a pic of Adrian Pang because he was inside the bar the whole time and it was too dark inside to take pictures with my flashless phone. So I got a picture with another co-actor, instead.

Simon is from Denmark and he’s cool because he can speak Chinese. Kind of, at least. He just started learning at NUS, where he’s doing an exchange program.

He was supposed to say a Chinese phrase in the commercial and he can actually say it really well, sounding very Chinese. But the script called for him to do it with a typical ang moh accent, so he had to pretend he couldn’t speak Chinese well. Hah.

I wish I could do a bah kua commercial so I get to eat free bah kua during the shoot. Free beer is nice… but only for people who drink beer.

The Carlsberg tasted quite good, actually, but I have low beer tolerance. The first five sips or so are usually nice but after that, it will start to taste sour and then taking anymore will just gross me out. Come to think of it, wine is that way for me, too.

I prefer bah kua.

So, I’m going to start sending out psychic rays of subliminal suggestion to all the bah kua people in Singapore to cast me in their bah kua commerical.

Zzzzzzngggg…..

Okay, start planning to watch some movies during CNY so you can catch this commercial!

I was in a cab on the way home.

Suddenly, I was snapped out of my day-dreamy thoughts by a commotion in front of me.

It was on a busy road, at a cross junction beside Sim Lim Tower. A man had stopped his car right in the middle of busy traffic near the traffic light. He was quarreling with an old taxi driver parked to his right.

I didn’t see how the quarrel started, but the man had his arm out his window and was aggressively jabbing at the air towards the taxi driver, all the while yelling something I couldn’t hear. The taxi uncle wasn’t doing anything much except trying to argue back or something, but he looked more shocked than aggressive.

Cars around started horning like crazy because the two cars were blocking everyone. From the looks of it, the taxi driver probably did something to inconvenience or piss off the yelling man.

So the yelling man, in turn, pissed off and inconvenienced all the other drivers around him by stopping in the middle of nowhere to yell and air-jab at a taxi driver.

That’s nice. I like how justice is meted out in the world.

On a kind of similar vein, I also ran into a stupid moral dilemma today.

On my way home earlier, I stopped by the provision shop near my place to get some lunch. I bought three items and was undercharged.

At first, I was a little confused by the price stated on the cash register because it looked kinda cheap. But I have never been good at mental calculation and I sometimes can’t even figure out I’ve been overcharged, much less undercharged. Also, I seldom look at prices when I buy things (bad habit) so I never know how much things cost exactly. So, I didn’t pursue the thought and paid for my purchase.

While walking home, I mulled over it again and it was then that I noticed there was a receipt in the bag. I pulled it out and realised that I hadn’t been charged for my chocolate bar.

“Yay!” was my first thought, “I got a free chocolate bar!”

My second thought was of guilt. Of getting something I didn’t deserve and people suffering for it. I contemplated walking back and paying the balance.

If it had been at a supermarket, I would have done it right away because I know cashiers have to pay for shortages and they don’t earn much as it is. But that was a small provision shop with the owners manning it themselves, so would it hurt them so much to give me a free chocolate bar? Besides, is it my problem that he forgot to key an item in?

So, while I was trying to justify my greed, I arrived home and decided that it was too far to walk back again. But I think maybe I should return the money the next time I go back.

Not that the money is of any consequence to either myself or the provision store owner — it’s only one stupid chooclate bar that costs $1.30. But I like fairness and honesty in the world.

Just because I have been lied to and cheated before, it doesn’t mean I can be justified in doing the same.

Oh, I’m all for vengeance. Even though I believe that revenge is destructive to both parties involved, with no tangible benefits to either, it’s hard to deny the human need to feel vindicated.

But that means I should only take revenge on people who have abused me first. Other people do not deserve to be collateral damage.

The irony is that, I think, it always comes back in a circle. Today, you create collateral damage. Tomorrow, you become someone else’s collateral damage. It’s a neverending cycle.

At the end of the day, the world can never be safe and pleasant.

But don’t think I’m all noble and everything. I’m still tempted to keep my $1.30!

=P

The shitty thing about auditions is that you always fail the ones you really want to pass, and you pass the ones you don’t really care about failing.

At least that’s what happens to me.

Some time ago, I went to four auditions in three days. My confidence was high and I thought I might even get all of them. I really wanted to get at least two of them. I thought I performed well, I looked the part, and there was no reason for them not to choose me.

But within the very same week, three of them contacted me and told me that I wasn’t chosen. Another one called to say the project was cancelled so no one was chosen.

That was a really sucky week.

Usually, “failures” are not notified. Only the selected one is notified. Which is good because I’m allowed to be optimistic and hope for the best until, one day, I just naturally forget about it. That way, the pain of failure is manageable.

I don’t know what’s up with that week, why all of them simultaneously thought that I needed to be informed of my failure right away.

It’s awful to get a call or e-mail telling you that you weren’t selected. It’s like a slap in the face. All your hopes are dashed instantly, leaving an emptiness inside you that you’re not quite sure how to fill. I guess it’s kind of like when you get dumped — you lose your appetite, you go into a daze and you don’t really want to do anything other than sit in a corner and stare because you don’t know what else you can do.

It’s more awful when the same thing happens one after another within a short time.

I prefer no news to bad news. Other people might think different, but that’s them.

And then, there are times when I go for auditions, not really wanting to get the job because I think the role isn’t really me or I don’t like the role, or some other reason. (I go for these auditions anyway because I still need to feed myself and can’t afford to be selective of jobs.)

And then those jobs I get.

There are also auditions I think I performed really badly at. I want the audition tapes to be destroyed forever because I was horrible.

Those jobs I get.

There was this audition I almost didn’t attend because, when I read the casting script, I felt I couldn’t get a good handle on the character, so I didn’t think I could do it well enough to get selected. And I didn’t feel like wasting my time going after a lost cause.

But I went anyway because they had already scheduled a slot for me and it’s really bad form not to turn up when people expect you to turn up.

I did try my best to learn the lines and come up with the best performance I could, but I still thought I sucked, especially during the improv segment, which you can’t prepare for.

Well, I was seriously puzzled when I received the call telling me I got the job. After that, the director told me I was really impressive at the audition and I was able to give him all the interpretations he wanted.

It’s really weird but, as much as praise is a wonderful thing, it’s a hard pill to swallow when you believe that you don’t deserve it.

Life is stupid, nein?

I’m always trying to explain to people what the audition routine is like.

Think about your day job. Think about the interview you had to go through to get the job.

Now, imagine that, after the interview, you get the job, but you can only work for three days. After that, if you want to work some more, you have to watch out for more interview opportunities to try again.

Also, factor in the time and transport costs for every interview you attend.

A prolific Hollywood player said that an 80% fail rate is the norm. That means that, on average, you’ll have to attend 10 interviews to get two jobs.

If you’re lucky, a successful interview will nab you a bigger job which will allow you to work a week or more, or even a few months. Most of the time, each successful interview earns you only a day or two of work.

Sometimes, you don’t work for months.

How would you like to live that way?

You may call me a glutton for punishment for choosing this path. Go ahead.

But I can’t choose differently because I prefer the joy of those precious few days of work to the blah comfort of job security.

The constant hurt of rejection is something I choose to put up with.

But it’s not a big deal in the long run because hurt can be healed and forgotten, while happy memories last forever.