Mid-year report

When I woke up this morning to see sunlight slanting off the blinds of my bedroom window, I was the happiest I'd been all week. All week I'd been plagued by interrupted sleep: like clockwork, around 5 a.m., I'd wake up for no explicable reason, and instead of drifting back into peaceful slumber as usual, I would lie sleepless and restless for an hour or more, till dawn crept up and the first buses and traffic of the day became audible, then I would finally snatch another hour or two of sleep before having to properly get up for the day. Several days of this left me cranky and listless and unable to do anything creative; I have no idea how parents of young children deal with this for years on end, and once again take my hat off to all my family and friends who have kids.

After a few nights of these 5 a.m. stirrings, several of my friends were beginning to think that something otherworldly might be going on, but I truly never felt anything except wide awake, alert and eventually irritated with being awake. Also, except for the summer solstice on Monday, I can't think of anything else that might've thrown the week off whack.

So I was relieved this morning to find that I had, indeed, completed a full night's sleep, and I'm hoping for another undisturbed one tonight. It was also fortuitous because I had to help a close friend with a little unexpected home emergency today. I'm sure I could've helped her with inadequate sleep, but since it involved a fair bit of driving, it's just as well my brain wasn't zombieified by poor sleep.


I'm pretty sure this isn't related to my sleep issues, but also in the last week or so, I've run into people who either didn't know me before this year and know my blog as a place of sporadic updates, or who've known me since the early days of blogging (circa the early 2000s) and remember its furious, frequent and – for some, at least – entertaining entries. The latter group asks why I don't write much anymore, which is something I've been struggling with here, off and on (ergo the sporadic updates), for the last couple of years.

The short answer is: no time and headspace. A more expanded answer is that I haven't figured out a rhythm of regular updates that works, creatively and logistically. Also, I've realised that with the increasing volume of feckless behaviour one encounters in the news and on the internets these days, my immediate response tends to plateau as rage-filled argy-bargy, and I often lack the patience or composure to rationally unravel or reveal the fecklessness as such. Mostly I just want to thwap people on the back of their heads and yell, "Seriously?!"

(Yes, I watch Grey's Anatomy.)


Other things people often say to me, if I haven't seen them in a while:

• "Hey, you're back in Singapore!" (Yes, I've been back since December.) 
• "What are you working on now?" (Revamp of the Memories at Old Ford Factory museum for the National Archives of Singapore; later this year, some editing for the Singapore Biennale; some miscellaneous writing and editing in between all that.) 
• "How's your novel going?" (Haven't had the time to work on it since my paid work [see previous answer] took off in March; I'll probably come back to it towards the end of year; yes, I really, really want to write it, but I also need to pay my mortgage and my bills.)

I find it difficult to work on a novel when I can't set aside a big block of time for it. That said, these few months, I've been beavering away on some essays and short stories. The first to go to print was the essay, "The sounds of nature", for the Straits Times. I'll update again when the others appear.

Yes! I'll update again when they appear. That's one way to blog a little more frequently.

Just talking about wanting to blog more makes me feel old-school and distant from the Snapchat generation.