My Life is (not that) Cool

On a whim, and because I know I'm not that good at keeping up links/appearances/contacts/friendships/acquaintances/anything at all/in general, I decided to click on Rambo Tan's blog.

Now reading Rambo Tan's blog always brings a smile to my face. Not merely because I actually know the author of the blog personally, but also because to me, and to me only, the author seems a kindred spirit (we were school mates, and walk-out-of-exams-early'mates) to the tune of this-is-one-version-of-how-my-life-would-have-turned-out.

Rambo Tan's in Singapore, living a life that I would have/and have had led, were I in Singapore. It's a sometimes happy life. A single, unfettered by most of the family, away from domestic chores but otherwise needing to fix-things-for-oneself life.

It's only been a year and a half, but looking back, that life seems so far away. Granted it was spent with loved ones, and there were friends, family, mates to hang out with at hand, but it seems now a life that I almost cannot imagine myself spending.

And the difference. Oh boy, the difference.

Singapore-Self looks upon England-Self now with some lack of understanding.

Singapore-Self wonders about:

• Personal crises - what to wear when you're hanging out in Orchard Road and Holland Village, what my mother will think if I stay in a permanent state of almost-married, moving out before I'm officially wed, my family's health or lack thereof
• Food - where the best char kway teow can be found (Commonwealth, I maintain), how much prices of ordinary pleasures (the teh-C kar dai) is rising, the costs of tomatoes in Cold Storage, whether most people eat in food courts or fancy restaurants
• Society and Culture - What my mother thinks my aunts will say when they meet me for the first and only time in the year, whether people really dislike the government despite living in creature comforts and wouldn't vote otherwise anyway, if independent women really attract fewer Singaporean men
• Self-Sufficiency - paying for a part-time, once-a-week maid, purchasing more than I can consume, affording platinum credit cards, doggy classes, the dog groomer clips my dog's nails because I'm afraid to do them myself

England-Self is consumed by:

• World crises - global warming, energy conservation, income inequity and gay marriages
• Food - the difference between organic and free range, whether chickens are bred with hormonal additives, buying local to reduce carbon footprints (see point above), approving of the office cafeteria switching to free range due to popular demand, cooking local cuisine with foreign ingredients
• Society and Culture - the difference between the English, the Europeans and the Americans, learning to live in a high context society that is so conscious about the personal situations of everything and everyone around them, amusement at the stark similarities between English and Asian cultures, working with the Germans, working with Germans who aren't very German
• Self-Sufficiency - doing my own cleaning, cooking, ironing, changing the lightbulbs, doing the laundry, walking the dog, dremelling the dog's nails because it costs 15 quid to get someone else to do them and they'd clip them anyhow and won't do such a good job

I understand now why people want to leave, and why people want to stay in Singapore. In my mind, there are no stayers or quitters, only those who favour the waters in different ponds.

Viewed from the other side of the river, Singapore-Self would perceive England-Self as silly, unnecessary, backward, unsophisticated and manual, while England-Self would view Singapore-Self as silly, self-absorbed, spoiled and small-minded.

Someone said to me the other day that it was remarkable that I had found myself, found my voice, in a place, in a culture that was difficult to understand, difficult to adapt to. Past the initial cynicism of whether that remark was true, I wondered if the purpose of coming here was indeed to find myself, or indeed, if in coming here, I had lost myself and hence needed finding myself again.

In any case, I hadn't left Singapore without a sense of self, as folklore would have had it, neither had I lost that sense of self in a foreign place, as myth would have said.

I see it now that there are merely two selves, like two sides of a coin, multiple facets of a personality that broadens and deepens with experience and exposure to different places and different cultures.

The Teochew girl side of me draws on an analogy - of a fish that takes on the flavour of the water they grow up in. This fish preferred the flavour of the waters of another pond, and swam in it.

And I have to say, I like the flavours of channel fish.

April is the busiest month of the year

Budget Wallpaper 2008,
originally uploaded by metaphoric.

People develop traditions to bring continuity and purpose to their lives.

I've just decided that every year in the busiest month of the year, I'll get myself something special to focus my mind and keep myself going through a hard time.

This year, April's the busiest month of the year, and by my reckoning it will be until I change jobs. The inaugural theme will be the seasons, so my treat is one of my favourite photos of all time.

Easter Rising

I just wanted to say, while I'm at it and blogging, that I am frankly aware that a number of readers on this blog read it just to know that I'm still alive, with that faintly quiet reassurance that the blogger isn't:

• A dog (mine, a Westie, to be specific)
• A significant other (but nobody specific)
• A neurotic necrotic
• A glitch in the stream of consciousness

No, jokes aside - I am well, and very much alive, and living - actually living (imagine that!).

It snowed on Easter Sunday.

I've always been warned, and this year was no exception, by the weather service and well meaning colleagues and radio broadcasters that it typically snows around Easter. Why it snows in spring here instead of winter is always going to elude me. But come Easter Sunday, after a sunshine filled dawn, a swirling, white powder began to fill the air, and danced in front of the window.

There was a strangely sweet sort of pleasure watching visibly white bits swirl in front of your eyes. I'm not quite sure what it is. This Easter was celebrated in strangely sweet, quiet sort of ways. I baked a carrot cake, I gave up Coke (the soft drink, not the other kind) for Lent, I walked the dog for an especially long time, I watched Grey's Anatomy.

And then I realised what this small, quiet joy is. It's the comfort that one gets when baking cookies on a sad day. It's the warmth of a kitten's cuddle on a cold day.

It is often said that on Easter, Christ's rising from the the dead is like the breaking of dawn after a long, dark night. It's often represented as the glorious, bright and resplendent ascension of the sun, choirs of angels optionally included.

I like to think instead that the breaking of dawn on Easter day is like any other dawn on any other day. A silent peace that creeps upon you, small and quiet, on a gentle breeze lightly kissing your cheek as you stir and open your eyes, semi-conscious of another day laid like dreams at your feet. Filled with promise, with hope.

No choirs of angels. No fifth symphony.

Love, like redemption, like grace, like promise, like hope, comes without a declaration, arrives without notice, departs without a by-your-leave.

How do we know today's the day among days? And that yesterday, things were different than they were tomorrow?

We mark the moments in our days, months, years, the hours that tick by. We keep our watch through hands that move in circles.

And I just can't get over the idea that one day, just one day, I'm going to wake up with everything around me different and yet the same, and in that instant that it happens, in that very moment, I'm not even going to know it.

Standby Buster

The next time I am back in Singapore, I think it would be brilliant to bring a couple of these. I've been recently obsessed about saving electricity/the environment/water/money/the world and these fit right into that ethos.

Standby Busters are remote controlled electrical sockets that you can plug into as a conduit between the mains (usually tucked behind a shelf and hard to reach) and the multiplug electrical board that powers everything in the house.

You now get to turn off the electricity at the mains with the touch of a radio controlled remote controller.

Lower Cost Arbitrages

I don't normally think about it in anything other than an economic sense, but spending some time in Shanghai is really making me feel the stark difference between a high cost market and a lower cost one.

In the first place, I exchanged a ridiculous amount of money before coming to Shanghai, which put into sharp relief what I had expected to spend in a week. But the prices here for food, accommodation and general shopping has just been absolutely ridiculous. It almost made me want to go crazy shopping. Almost.

• Good quality Chinese tea (tiekuanyin) for RMB 100 - £7
• All my snacks for RMB 39. That's about £2.70
• Good quality Chinese mushrooms for RMB 33. That's £2.30

It really takes some thinking about it to get a sense of perspective around what we get for our money anywhere in the world.

And that's not always easy when prices are rising, Shanghai is getting more expensive than Tokyo, and Singapore is probably slightly more expensive than Shanghai because of import limitations.

It didn't strike me fully until now that what we call a fair price is really subjective. We live in the places we live in, and take our purchasing power, after some time, for granted.

This probably helps explains why the fair trade movement is so much more apparent in first world countries which are high cost markets. Our ideas being in a high cost market of what a fair price is, is influenced to a high degree by our perceptions of what a £1 or a $1 can buy in our own countries and markets, not others.

Not that I'm against fair trade, mind. I fully support paying non-exploitative, fair market rates for the goods we buy. But I would also like to call to mind the use of the marketing campaigns like: "This man earns $1.50 per week for his coffee" and look at marketing campaigns for donations and grants in the same vein: "$1.50 per week from you... can help feed his family for a week".

I think I realize now the "multiplier" power our money can make in the markets that we buy in. While in the short run it makes me almost tempted not to bargain as hard as I otherwise would to, it puts into perspective that the small things we give up, can mean big things to people who receive them.

What stops them from actually receiving the full benefit, is a series of financial, logistic and socio-economic barriers that prevents us as consumers from buying the cheapest coffee in the world directly, and instead buying them from Starbucks or Tesco.

It makes me really want to find a way to overcome these barriers, and to exploit this arbitrage in a non-profit situation.

On Why Plates are Round

I probably have blogged this before, but honestly, as the years wear on, grow and extend, the single sole achievement of my life in terms of intellectual thinking has been, is, and probably will still be to have figured out why plates are round.

It's sad but true. And to be brutally and coldly honest, it probably is the one piece of truly independent thinking that I have ever done. Independent in the sense that it wasn't a thought that anyone else has ever thought of before - at least that I had come across so far. It really probably is because nobody else was bored to such a degree to have thought of it, but still - I am proud of this.

So, why are plates round? Or bowls and dishes for that matter? Surely because sinks are rectangular, and tables are rectangular (some are round, but most are rectangular) and the cupboards that we keep our plates in are rectangular, it would only make sense to have square or rectangular plates that would fit everything else in our world that we have? Why do plates mostly occur in a round form?

Several sensible suggestions have been offered.

• The industrial - Round plates are easier to manufacture [Not sure I bought this one, surely it's easier nowadays to cut several square plates from one big sheet]
• The anthropological - Squares/shapes with straight lines are artificial shapes and do not occur naturally. Our forefathers who first shaped equipment had followed the shapes of nature. [This has some merit]
• The practical - It's much easier to fashion a reasonably round shape than a perfect square/rectangle with straight lines [What if you cut wood?]
• The relativist - Well, spoons are round, so why not plates? [That's because square spoons poke uncomfortably into your mouth when you eat...]
• The child - The better to drink soup straight from the edge, my dear... [Perhaps the sole reason why most plates are round is because of the general lack of manners all round...]

Interestingly, I note (and the shrewd would point out) that not all plates are round. Most plates are, but there exist, for fashion, design features, and in some cultures, rectangular plates. So whatever the reason, it must apply to validate why most plates are round, but also validate why some plates are acceptably rectangular.

The reason I thought of, *drum rolls and cymbals clang* is a scientific one.

Surface tension.

Surface tension, as Wikipedia tells me, is the property of a liquid to behave like an elastic sheet. More relevantly, it is surface tension that causes any liquid to adopt a spherical shape, because a sphere has the smallest possible surface area to volume ratio.

Well, well, I see the similarities. But what has this got to do with plates being round, you might ask.

Most plates are made to contain food that while not entirely liquid, may contain some liquids (gravy, sauces) or items that potentially spill over when picked up (rice, mashed potatoes). While it's not culturally sensitive to assume we all eat gravy, sauces, rice and mashed potatoes, some combination of round-plate cultures typically use plates to contain a wide variety of potentially spillable foods.

The round plate is the most mathematically efficient shape for containing spillable food, because surface tension ensures that the roundness tucks away any sharp edges that threaten to break the surface tension and cause a spill. Since any curvature also maximizes area, it is also the shape that can contain the most bits of tiny objects or liquids, and makes sense for a plate and, definitely also a bowl.

More proof, the Japanese have commonly used wooden flat rectangular "plates" made out of wood. It's used to serve sushi, which are served set in pieces on the plate. Sushi is a self-contained serving of food, and does not contain liquids or objects which may spill over when picked up.

Why are plates round? The short answer is, "So that we can heap more food on it." The scientific gastronomical answer.

Did our forefathers somehow know this before Eular, Lagrange, Young, Laplace, physics and hydrodynamics? Were we somehow born with an inner sense that allows us to live and learn about our environment outside of the 5 senses?

It always struck me how nobody really needs to consciously learn that Gravity exists. All we actually really learn in school is which scientist named it, and by what name it's known. But a baby that rolls over and falls out of bed knows gravity exists, surely and definitely.

By deep thought, accident or conscious design, the longest lasting structures that we have built and designed have its roots in scientific efficiency. It makes me wonder whether aesthetics, at its core, is Man's way of validating scientific soundness without extensive calculations. I wonder if we have evolved with a skill to assess the success of science that was essential to our survival as a species, because it is the most efficient way to exploit the intrinsic mathematics of the world around us. After all, there is no resisting the laws of nature.

Call it taste, call it aesthetics, call it that preference that babies have for symmetrical faces. I wonder if we are each born with that intrinsic ability to validate this scientific soundness without being a scientist. It would certainly explain why the greatest of mathematicians sense a beauty in their discoveries, and why we can link certain numbers to art.

Somehow, there is a strange sense of comfort that we're all born knowing what we need to know, whether we study it or not. There's a strange sense of faith in the idea that we do have everything we need, whether we know it or not.