It's Saturday evening and the show has started.
At this time of year, for 6 weeks, I get a free aerial show every Saturday. It starts with the choppers: 3 chinooks fly over the basin about 400 meters from my flat. One is dragging a huge Singapore flag. About 2 minutes later, 5 fighter jets fly over the National Stadium, right by my condo. The whole building buzzes to the roar of engines. It's thrilling. I love that sound. I don't love it when it's not expected. Then it scares the shit out of me. But when it arrives at 7:03pm on a Saturday evening, it's great.
The next part of the show is rather annoying. They start cannon shots from across the basin. There's 19 of them. The crack of the cannon fire is deafening. I don't know what the significance of 19 is but I'm sure that's the number because they've been doing these practices almost every "summer" (it's always summer) since I moved into this condo 6 years ago.
The whole thing is for the National Day "Parade" on Aug 9th. It's not so much of a parade as a show because the whole thing takes place in the stadium.
The upside is that I have a prime seat for the fireworks display on that night plus the two dress rehearsals in the weeks before (actually because of limited seating capacity at the stadium, they do two full runs of the show before the actual day so more people can see it).
The downside is that everyone on the island tries to park on my street every August 9th and it can take up to 2 hours to travel the 2 kilometres from the beginning of Tanjong Rhu to my flat. So on National Day I have to choose to either camp in or camp out.
This year it will be out as a friend of mine, who just got her citizenship, will be throwing a BBQ party on the other side of town.
Well the canons have stopped and I'm left with the noise of one lone helicopter hovering over the basin. It will be there for the next hour or so. I arrives at 5pm, disturbes the late afternoon until the flag and jets show when it disappears for a bit then returns. I suspect it's just watching the national stadium from above to ensure that all the formations are done correctly... but who knows. I like to think I'm an NDP expert but that part is a mystery.
It just so happens, Singapore was born the same year I was. This fortuitous event means I tend to get all sorts of discounts this time of year.
Labels: singapore
I just thought I'd share a few pictures of the show mother nature has been providing me lately.
It rained most of the week with mornings looking either like this:
Or like this:
I suppose if I had nothing better to do at 7:30 in the morning I could have waited around for some lightening to dramatize the shots... As it stands, I've always got something better to do at that time: sleep.
The rain was mildly exciting at first. But after a few days of it I became somewhat vexed. Traffic in the morning is like sludge when you can't see more than 10 meters in front of you. And it messes up your schedule because everyone now has an excuse for being late.
People tend to be tardy in Singapore anyway - the whole rubber time thing is part of the culture. The government bangs on about being courteous and timely. But despite the enthusiastic poster campaign, most people think showing up 15 minutes late is totally acceptable. The rain is a convenient excuse to stretch that further... as if it was some kind of rare phenomenon and not a common experience of life in the tropics.
Well back to the plot.
Today all mother nature's foul mood was forgiven. My view is normally pretty good. Today it was fabulous. The skyline, usually a plain concrete grey on sky blue, was superimposed on a backdrop of glorious white mountainous clouds.
It was breathtaking.
Labels: personal, singapore
I’m feeling grumpy. I just through a wobbly over the e-mail because my job is to stop people from being stupid and they’re being unusually stupid today. Plus I had to have one of those “difficult” conversations with someone on an HR thingy and I hate that.
I am also sore – but it’s a good sore. It’s DOMS - delayed onset muscle soreness. In other words, I went to the gym yesterday and had a good hard workout on the weights. When it comes to weight training, I’m a true believer in no pain no gain. I only do it once a week (1 set per body part to muscle failure) because my body needs that long to recover between workouts. If I have a good workout, 18-36 hours later I’m feeling it.
I also go 2-3 times a week for cardio training. These are 20 minute high intensity interval sessions. It’s kind of a heart blaster. Plus it releases a bunch of happy brain chemicals which is nice as I’m pretty viceless here.
I’m not trying to build the world’s best body – I just don’t have the genes for it. Plus that would require some pretty austere dieting which I couldn’t bear. People might think that body builders can eat anything they want. Actually those guys are probably more careful than most. You can’t get a six pack with more than 8% body fat... and for that you have to really watch what you eat.
No my goal is to (a) have enough muscle mass so I can eat like a human being without my ass swelling up to the size of my sofa and (b) ensure I maintain muscle mass and bone mass as I age so I don’t turn into some decrepit old shriveled thing by the time I’m 60. I have genes on both sides of the family to go either way with scenario (a) having threatened me most this life. I’m now about 10lbs from where I’d like to be which is probably how most women would describe themselves.
As there’s not a lot to do in Singapore besides eating, it’s rather torturous to have my kind of metabolism but what can you do? I should mention I’m kind of a diet fitness guru... well at least in my own mind and to a very small circle of friends. I wrote a fairly detailed
e-book on weight loss last year which I’m convinced will one day be discovered and hailed as the next Atkins... OK maybe not, but I’m pretty confident I have THE formula by which anyone can get fit... but it requires a kind of insane dedication that few have.
I was once quite fat. Now I’m relatively fit. I slipped a bit and am currently not quite as svelte as I was about a year ago. But the point is that I have a healthy routine and feel pretty good which seems to be rare around here. Everyone seems to eat crap, never workout, get sick all the time and are either fat fat or thin fat in that soft doughy kind of way.
Just for the record, I'm not a body fascist. I just think people should take care of themselves better. I'll take a healthy "fit fat" body (like
Oprah) over a sickly skinny one (
Lara Flynn Boyle) any day.
Anyway all this positive talk about healthy things has left me less grumpy. Perhaps next time I’m about to do a wobbly I should drop and do 10 pushups before reacting.
Labels: rants
According to Einstein, matter in the universe is a constant. Therefore, shouldn't clutter be a constant? It is, after all, a major source of matter.
Matter can of course be commuted into energy according the all great formula E = mc
2. Extrapolated, this implies that as my clutter builds up, my energy levels decrease.
In fact, the total energy in the universe should decrease but of course being at the center of the universe I am likely to feel it more than others. That or maybe it's a local phenomenon and each person is creating an energy vacuum in the middle of their orbiting junk.
So, I regularly find myself trying to purge my home and office of the mountains of things that have built up. How do I accumulate so much that becomes so useless? Is this the last stage of a consumer digestion process? I consume, consume, consume and then finding myself bloated go for a dump.
Because I moved house last month I've had something of a detox in that department. Old gadgets, VCDs, books, clothes... I've given away, auctioned away and thrown away a fair amount of crap. Yet I remain feeling bloated.
I've always felt weighed down by my possessions. Still I continue to accumulate. I hate the fat but still eat.
I think I'm unusually possessed by the idea that I need to zenify my life and get rid of all the clutter that's hanging on to me like an anchor. The anchor is pulling me down. I can feel it hooked into my chest. It's heavy... tugging, tugging, tugging... Why does this disturb me so?
The anchor analogy has been screaming from my subconscious for years. I always assumed that it was just an eloquent way to express the cumbrous feeling that this clutter has on me. I figured the anchor was the symbol and the clutter was the problem. It just occurred to me I've got it backwards.
If I could cut anchor, I could sail free. The anchor ties me to a regular life, a regular paycheck... The day in day out dreariness of going to work in a job which, although vaguely interesting just doesn't capture my imagination or put me in the flow.
I spend a part of every day thinking about how I can liquidate, rationalize and rid myself of unnecessary things. It's all just a symbol for the reality of wanting to cut anchor. I don't need to move at the speed of light to turn this matter into energy. Any speed will do as long as I'm actually moving.
Why can't I cut loose?
Labels: personal
There's an urban myth that illegal Mexican immigrants were being found frozen in the middle of the Southern California desert. How could anyone freeze in the heat? Answer: they were hiding in the wheel wells of jumbo jets, freezing to death and then falling out on a landing approach.
Welcome to my wheel well.
It's
raining again. So I'm freezing my butt of in my office because the aircon cannot adjust for the fact there isn't sun streaming through the windows. It's like an English winter – gloomy and cold. Outside it's probably 82°F ... but that's about 4° below normal so indoors it's about 60°F. Everyone is in jackets and sweaters in the office and I'm considering bringing a space heater back with me from Canada when I go in two weeks. This is life in the modern tropics.
I still remember the first time I took a cab in Singapore about 12 years ago. I stepped out and immediately my glasses fogged up. That was mind blowing. My entire life, my experience of foggy glasses was when entering the house after coming in from the cold. Here you come in from the heat. When you go out, condensation sticks to every cool surface. As evidence of the barbaric conditions we're under with this lousy aircon, I even get condensation on my hands when I head home.
Anyway, before my fingers drop off from frostbite, I'm heading to the pantry for the 5th time today to run my hands under warm water. I even drank a hot chocolate today for crying out loud. I drank it with both hands cupped to the mug while shivering. I was in a Coffee Bean that was also freezing cold despite the fact their doors were wide open because it seems nobody on this island has a thermostat and everyone is destined to succumb to hypothermia if this rainy weather doesn't pass.
Labels: singapore
I thought we'd have to wait until October for the rain to wash away the smoke. But we've had unseasonably wet weather the last few days - a mini monsoon so to speak.
The monsoon just means the rainy season. It's very different from a typhoon which can blow away buildings and cause floods. It's the beginning of the typhoon season in Hong Kong. But here in Singapore the monsoon, which starts around October and runs to Jan, just means a bit more rain than usual… and some brilliant lightening storms.
For the last three nights I've been awoken by massive cracks of thunder. My flat looks out over the Kallang basin and it acts like a huge dish amplifying the sound. In the morning all is calm, but the water in the basin has been brown and muddied by the run off from the rain.
I love to watch nature's fury but she's been rather inconsiderate lately by scheduling her shows at 4am. Although I really have nothing else scheduled at that time, I'm not generally in the mood for entertainment before noon.
...
Lately I'm stuck in this "going nowhere" funk. I've been reading this blog and it's done my head in a bit.
I've been reading it from the beginning over the past week– so I've been following her life on fast forward. It's like reality TV. She (Anne - another Anne) starts off living in LA. She's staying with friends because her once amazing life kind of fell apart and finances aren't going great. She has a job at a very cool Barnes & Noble bookstore where everyone is rather switched on and loads of interesting people (from the famous to just plain weird) are coming in all the time. The pay sucks but it's fun. It's my secret dream job.
But time runs out at her temporary accommodation so she moves off to Baltimore and in with her mom and step dad... and ends up back at a B&N. Where the first B&N was in technicolor, this one is in dark shades of sepia and has all the charm of an Eraserhead movie. People are dull, fat, boring, ugly and stupid. They are uninspired and negative. They are barely alive. They are frightening because they are the walking dead. They've already given up on living and they don't even know it.
This goes on for ages and just at the point I figured I couldn't take it anymore ("just get out dammit!") she gets her shit together. First she gets her own place and then lands the kind of job she's better suited to: doing research for HBO. I'm glad I found her blog after she made that move because I couldn't stand hearing her tales of the suburban nightmare over a prolonged period of time. It just hits too close to home.
People here are not fat and ugly… They're skinny and covered in name brands both fake and real. They are image conscious. But they are certainly not inspired nor switched on. There are exceptions - but for the most part they are boring, self-centered and uncreative. I really don't know what they think makes a life.
What am I doing here? I'm living on Hello Kitty island. I'm making a pile of cash and hording it like dung beetle in the belief I'm going to make a break for it one of these days. But when? How much is enough? What security blanket do I need to just go for it? People with bank accounts like me don't usually fantasize about working in a Barnes & Noble in LA (or do they?). When am I going to get MY shit together?
Labels: personal
