Achievements of Sunday/Monday

1. Improved my Sudoku game level from "moderate" to "intricate" on Sudoku Joy.

2. Did a ton of ironing. (I like ironing. Like cooking, it frees the mind while keeping the hands busy, the latter also preventing you from being distracted by any other task.)

3. Had the best yusheng of this Chinese New Year season at Roland's Restaurant.

4. Giggled over the inherent silliness of terms such as "netizen" and "edutainment".

5. Sorted and filed a bunch of business receipts for the last month. Now my wallet can snap shut again. (Also: I need to stop taking so many cabs.)

6. Merged a bunch of duplicate Foursquare venues for Spinelli Coffee outlets in Singapore --- because sometimes the persnickety spirit moves me.

Charging into the Year of the Dragon

Busy busy busy. New on POSKOD.SG recently: a slew of lyrical essays on such assorted subjects as Singlish, letter writing and cats (by my old friend Wahj). Go read.

Also, last week I delivered a paper at an academic conference for the first time in my life. The paper: "Troublesome Women as Project and Paradigm". The event: "Gender & Sexuality | Performance & Representation in Asia", a mini-conference organised by NUS and NTU. My partner in crime and co-author: Adeline Koh (rooting for us all the way from the US, where she's based and from which she joined us for the panel session via Skype --- oh the wonders of technology).

Also, today I taught a three-hour journalism workshop to a group of 17- and 18-year-old students. Fun, but I always forget how much teaching wipes me out. I'm surprised I know how to find my way home after it's over.

Also, my cousin Nardac is visiting from Paris for Chinese New Year for the first time in a crazy number of years. Much eating is involved, natch.

Also, I should blog more. Can one make resolutions for the Chinese New Year?

A debut, of sorts

Illustration by Norman Teh for POSKOD.SG, all rights reserved
I've written my first piece for POSKOD.SG, "Consider the Kopitiam". No, I did not review any food or drink stalls for this story.

An excerpt:

The coffeeshops I remember well are the ones where there were always some regulars at their usual tables, slouched over a tepid cup of coffee or well-iced glass of beer, yet the place felt like anyone could walk in to buy a meal or a drink and they wouldn’t feel unwelcome. At the coffeeshop, you can sit in fan-cooled respite from the heat, and watch Singapore go by on the street or the world go by on the 50-inch widescreen TV set. You can kibbitz with complete strangers about how Singapore or the world is changing all too quickly, yet rest assured that if you shout kopi siew dai ping at the drink stall assistant, he or she (even if non-Chinese) will faithfully bring you the exact concoction of coffee, condensed milk and ice that your encoded order requests.

Read the full essay here.

Many thanks to Kennie, Jeremy, melanderings and the POSKOD.SG editorial team for their extensive comments on earlier drafts, and to my history/researcher contacts who pointed me to useful historical and sociological work on hawkers and coffeeshops. Daniel Goh, ampulets and mr brown also offered helpful background info on some of the mysterious inner workings of our delightful kopitiams.

Finally, a bonus for my blog readers: a sentence that was excised from the final version of the essay because it didn't quite fit. I'm including it here because I think it suits my blog better:

At the basic level, it’s reassuring to know that wherever I live in Singapore, there’ll almost always be a kopitiam close at hand, where eventually the stallholders will remember that I prefer my noodle dishes without chilli, my chicken rice heaped with chilli sauce, and my kopi as black as they can make it.

Comments welcome. Just don't ask me where to find the "best" kopi-O kosong in Singapore.

Gliding into the new year

It's my last working day of the year, which seems like a good time to mention what I'll be doing next year.

In 2012, I have undertaken to:

• Write my first novel.
• Be the editor of POSKOD.SG, a fantastic and relatively young online publication about Singapore culture.
• Pull together the last bits of the manuscript for Troublesome Women, a book on gender and sexuality in Singapore and Malaysia.
• Think up some cool new ideas for various museum consultancy projects, and perhaps research and write them too.
• Pick up other freelance writing and editing assignments, as my bank account requires and my schedule permits.

This excludes various other plans on the personal front, such as blog more and learn to roast a turkey, so despite what I said after Christmas, it's shaping up to be a busy, busy year.

Christmas, surprisingly

And lo, on the night of the 25th of December 2011, I found myself cheering on a dear old friend as she entertained her nephews by concocting fake snow in her parents' living room in monsoonal Singapore. Of all the things I could've dreamed of us doing when we first met as doe-eyed 17-year-olds, blending Hamleys' Magical Snow and some tap water in a red plastic basin was not it.

It's been a hectic Christmas, and I blame my sleepiness on the copious amounts of wine I've drunk and the annual supernumerary consumption of tryptophan. Fortunately, all the turkey I sampled this year, even of the supermarket variety, has been tender and suitably moist. May every year be like this.

I can't believe that in a week, it'll be 2012. I know where December went: the friends' wedding, followed by catching up on work before Christmas hit. I just wish it hadn't gone by that quickly. December ought to be savoured, one tropical thunderstorm at a time, not lost in a frenzy of meetings and headdesking at local political gaffes, i.e. when Singapore's transport industry and public drainage system screwed up and tried not to look as if they were screwing up --- though they neatly took the heat off the land management authority's attempts to carve up the historical Bukit Brown cemetery.

I hope 2012 will be different. I need to catch my breath, and I get the feeling I'm not the only one.

Typing slowly

I'm currently using an iPhone 3G as an interim phone, which runs on an earlier version of iOS, which means that:

• There's no multitasking between apps.
• There's no orientation lock on the screen.
• Everything runs a little slower.

So I find myself typing more slowly, because if I thumb away at my usual speed, the phone can't respond pick up the touchscreen signals fast enough and my text would emerge as grossly misspelled or, worse, gibberish.

I don't feel quite like a dinosaur yet, more like someone who's gone for a leisurely drive in a horse-drawn carriage while everyone other person in town is whizzing past in their trendy new motorcars.

Dry

I had a pocket of time unexpectedly open up tonight, so I sat down with my laptop and no other distractions, and tried to work my way through a few scattered thoughts that I've promised to turn into an essay.

I've been at it for over three hours now. I have a couple of pages of notes and two faltering opening paragraphs. But it all adds up to nothing, really, because I don't seem to have anything to say that isn't banal, and obstinately whacking at the keyboard doesn't seem to be helping with the creative process.

I keep saying "seem to" because I'm not sure what (if anything) is going on inside my brain.

I'm calling it quits for tonight. Bleah.