“The universe loves irony.” 

Did you know that gunpowder was accidentally invented in a process by alchemists to discover the elixir of life that would bestow immortality? 

Human connection is anchored in specificity. 　

I sometimes wonder if disapproval is rooted in envy.

Immunity; of war and of waste 

It’s a wonder how much humans can adapt to a particular situation or emotional state. The first time something tragic or painful or intense happens, it’s catastrophic. You don’t know how you will ever be able to get over it. You don’t truly grasp how to cope or what to do with yourself. You don’t understand how life can be like that. 

But then you go on. Life goes on. You laugh, because something (else) is funny, and you realise that you can get through this after all. Things will return to normal, or perhaps your new state of mind will become your new normalcy. People and things happen. Or they do not happen. You hope, you dream, you fear, you worry, but you go on. You don’t necessarily move on from your catastrophic event, it just becomes a part of you that you carry around. 

Battling cancer becomes a way of life. A friend’s death feeds on you until it grows to be a part of you. Life changes, but it doesn’t. 

It’s amazing, how much we are able to adapt, because we need to survive. This is a good thing, because we can ride it out, but it’s terrible, because we forget again and again the world faces its first catastrophe everyday. In the papers today tales of war and of waste, but you turn right over to the TV page. 

My point at the beginning of this post was actually a rather personal one: sometimes I forget we are a family battling illness. But days like today it all comes flooding back like a sucker punch that hits right home. (When my dad was first diagnosed with cancer, it didn’t yet occur to me that he might die.)

I don’t think it’s a weakness that I would like to believe in the good in people. I believe in conviction as opposed to indifference. The thing I hate the most is that I’m complicit in a system I abhor. 　

"Looking at a built-to-scale version of a newly modeled city, it’s easy to wonder about the Real and hard to tell what’s what, really. The iconic skyline is no accident. Later, from the plane, shiny selfsame skyscrapers appear in Hong Kong, New York. There, where there was once the lawless walled city of Kowloon in Hong Kong, and the green of the New World in Dutch sailors’ eyes. There too, in time, palimpsest blueprints and hollow wooden models eventually settled into substance and took on their own authenticity. For now, Singapore is an hourglass city — either the glass runs empty or the sands are still shifting." — Ava Kofman, on Singapore (Yale Daily News)

Hurling our despair at the universe. 

I’m doing a Social Psych of New Media course, and have been scouring the Internet for interesting news articles about the phenomenon of social media and how it influences our behaviour. I found this article about the writer using Twitter as a coping mechanism through her late husband’s cancer. It’s beautifully written, and painful to read. 

Going with this article for an assignment seems like a natural choice to me because I’m also part of a family that is fighting cancer. There are days I wish I could do this: hurl my despair at the universe, even when it ends up being one of the millions of banal details floating in the interweb. 

It seems that we live in an age where nothing is private any more, and even the most intimate details about someone can be manufactured. But what is more real: the person we are as we go about our real lives, or the person we can be as we are shielded by the veil of a computer screen? 

The pain on the Internet is palpable, and every cry is a cry for help. 

Of gold engravings 

April is not just the cruellest month but the season of paying respects to our ancestors in Chinese tradition. Sometimes I feel so submerged in a cosmopolitan environment that my Chineseness is no longer salient in my mind. Yesterday was not one of those days.

My family and I go to my grandparents’ grave site every year to honour them. The Chinese offer food, drinks, joss sticks, burn spirit money and even paper manifestations of houses, cars and laptops to their family. It is the belief that we spend our afterlife in the underworld as ghosts/spirits, and there are still human needs there. It’s interesting, because our concept of death has always been informed by our perception of life. At the site, I saw someone burning a paper version of a Louis Vuitton bag. Do the souls of our ancestors really have the urge for materialism? Will their fellow souls be impressed by their sporting a shiny new bag? 

My mother turned to me and she said, “Just get me a laptop the next time.” 

The idea that one cannot live and even die without a laptop is hilarious and fascinating. In truth, rituals are more for the living than for the dead. 

Thank you, darling. Singapore is just a really complex and interesting place. Like most Asian places, a lot of things have to be read between the lines. These are just my personal thoughts. (: I do love Singapore for all it is though. 

Anyway, even though you’re going to college, you should have time to come for a vacation right!!!!!!! We’re so close, yet so farrrrrr. 

Tiny red dot. 

I have so much on my mind these days - so many ideas, so much worries and so much to say - that I end up saying nothing at all. College education is a bullet train, and getting off in the middle would waste more time and cause more injury than hanging on. We’re so close to being financially and emotionally responsible for ourselves that it’s exciting and terrifying in equal measure. In a world that prizes speed so much, it’s hard to just find yourself sitting back down and thinking. It’s as if every time you try to slow down you get a head rush.

This is so especially in Singapore. Every time I think about how much it costs to live in this city, I want to puke. Everything requires payment. Everything is structured in rules. Everybody is in this mindless marathon that sometimes I wonder if they feel like they’re a cog in a machine? And that is what Singapore is: it’s a smooth operating machine. We’re the air-conditioned nation. We’re a corporation, not a country.

The arm of the government (or should I say Government) is so extensive that I feel it everywhere. I see it in places we’re not supposed to see. I see it in the conditioned minds of citizens where we’re so used to working, and not thinking, that we are no longer our own person. 

I’ve been keeping tabs on the Yale-NUS debate, and it’s struck me how strange Singapore is. Something people don’t get about Singapore is that there is no decision made by the government that is not a pragmatic one. There are no ideals. There are no beliefs. The only conviction is one anchored in economic development. Perhaps we are shaped by our heritage, our profound fear sometime in history that we will starve to death without Malaysia, but this pragmatic mindset is definitely not something of the past. The decision to rope Yale in for a liberal arts college in Singapore is not because the education ministry truly believes in the ideals of a liberal arts education. We are embracing liberal arts because this is the direction the wind is blowing in. 

We are not innovative enough, we’re told. We are not productive enough. We need creativity as a nation to survive, to do well in a new kind of economy that doesn’t rely on cogs in a machine anymore. 

I love Singapore to bits. I love my home. I love what the government has done with the country in an overall assessment. We are not without problems, of course, and the conditioning of the government has altered our people somewhat. But I still love Singapore and I will defend my country and all of its nuances and quirks fiercely. 

But I HATE this pragmatic mindset taken to its extreme. I HATE IT. I HATE IT.

This is because I believe in believing. I believe there are certain things that are right and certain things that are wrong, certain things that are good and certain things that are bad. Liberal arts should be pursued for its sake, for the ideals of critical thinking and higher learning. Democracy. Freedom. Equality. These are big words, but ideals are to be striven for. They shouldn’t be pursued at all cost, of course, but there are certain things that are absolute. Certain things are not contingent upon their economic value.

So, I wish that we, as a nation, could mature to embrace a post-materialistic mindset.