Basket.

I would love to take an ice-pick to the skulls of the idiots who every day pitifully mismanage our public transport system, and have the temerity to charge us more every year for the incompetent jobs they are doing.

Don't you ever get sick of every single bus except yours coming twice or thrice, of vastly irregular waiting times and of the ever-increasing fares without consumate improvements where it matters?

Some time ago, my brother and I concluded that if a restaurant was set up and worked exactly the way our public transport system did, it would go something like this:

- No waiters about when you need them, but other tables seem to have no trouble getting served.
- After waiting a long while for one waiter, three come to you all at once.
- Charges for the meal are made automatically, but the machine will erratically charge you more fairly often, and you will have no choice but to pay. Requests for refunds will periodically end in red tape.
- Service is slow and irregular, but restaurant has free television showing reruns of Just For Laughs and obscure Japanese anime.
- Restaurant has duty schedule pinned up but it is not followed.
- Restaurant has robotic drones that will deliver your meals automatically, but these break down often. You are charged higher prices because of these drones. Restaurant boasts sonorously and often that it is first in the world with such gadgets.
- Restaurant contemplates annual price increases. Service standards are unchanged, portion sizes are unchanged, but hey, look at those awesome service robots and the free television blaring lame old reruns all day!

Would you go to a restaurant like that?

You wouldn't, but you do everyday.

I realise I am suffering from a serious dearth of June posts. Not that nothing's been happening, but I always either forget or can't be arsed to come here and post about it.

It's been a fair fortnight. Frustrating most of the time, of course, but as if that's anything new. We finally managed to put a class gathering together after an unforgiveable four months, with a quick follow-up less than a week later that involved bridge, mahjong, a communal dinner and realising that Neil Gaiman's ideas do far better on paper than on film.

I have to somehow make myself remember/be bothered to get that amazing digital camera I have collecting dust behind me up and working, so I can occupy myself by taking many photographs of myself and various acquaintances in sometimes compromising positions, after which I may or may not post them here.

That, after all, is the stuff memories are made of.

Another June 4, and I will for the third year running commemorate Tiananmen, even as there appears not much in the news about it this year. In commemorating it, I will also remember Project Work, which must surely stand as one of mankind's most infernal creations. I still wonder who got the bright idea - "Let us promote creativity by making students do a project that involves having to fill up 24687624981 forms if they so much as need to take a shit during PW lessons!"

And it is showing no signs of disappearing. Neither is Social Studies, despite rumours to the contrary. I'll resign myself to being on the other side of the looking glass soon enough.

As I might have mentioned before, the anniversaries come thick and fast this month. Just off the top of my head: June 5, 2004, Reagan died; June 6, 1944, the Normandy landings; June 18, 1815, Waterloo; June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa. It is a good month for history.

It also represents five more months to freedom and just over six to the day I can see my dear, precious pink identity card again.

Every page of the calendar is a step forward.