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.