Popagandhi / 654 posts / 5,845 comments / feed / comments feed / flickr feed
Frankly Surprised I Still Get To Date
I have a habit of losing people in the midst of saying something, since I say the sort of things that just.. well, make me wish I never said them the moment I do. Especially if I’m dating them. Things that make me ashamed that I’m such an utter dork. Things that make my friend [...]
Resurrection
I have been many things in this lifetime, but many years ago – I was a runner, first and foremost. The pursuit of physical excellence, the breaking of records, of personal bests, the defeat of arch-rivals; all those memories had been happily filed away into long-term storage when I “retired”. Yet the act of running [...]
Untranslatable
There is a Hokkien term that I’ve found to be most handy in describing my current disposition, yet for which I can find no alternative in any other language. It is the word nua. In English, words which come close include terms such as “sloth”, “bum”, “idler”, “slacker”, and certainly “lazy”, but I’ve found them to [...]
One More Thing
There was going to be a fund-raising concert in aid of Action for Aids, and in hopes of raising awareness and “transforming mindsets”. Affect05 seemed to have risen quickly as a reaction to those unfortunate comments (see here and here). Since I am writing about this in the past tense, I’m sure you can guess [...]
That Tongue Thing
Top Singaporean bloggers follow in Xiaxue’s footsteps, following her famed t-shirt endorsement deal. (edit: Ok, so I changed my mind about the picture.) Xiaxue: Mr Miyagi: Mr Brown: I jump on the bandwagon: Popagandhi doing the tongue thing, but in the dark. Updated: Ok, ok I give in. Can’t really see my tongue but it’s not my fault if I’ve got a [...]
Redemption
I saw it in her eyes the day I left her. I was cold, I was brutal – but about as cold and brutal as the one before had been to me. It’s been described to me as akin to removing a plaster from a wound: you know it’s going to hurt like hell, so [...]
Synonym – GAY:HIV
written after I stopped being upset The AIDS issue largely remains a taboo in (Un)Surprising Singapore, along with other no-go zones: pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and these other decadent imports via “high prevalence societies”. It took the “coming out” of a man named Paddy Chew before little Singapore was able to put a human face to a [...]
Collected Fragments
Naming Conventions My family has a real problem with gender. No, really – they do. My mother, for example, can’t quite tell the difference between her son and her daughter. And that’s saying something, because (1) I do not, in any way, look like a boy (well, I’m sure I could if I tried, but the [...]
Tension
for Z such as the boy of six flinging himself between his abusive father and his mum, daring him in a manner older than his six years, to get to him first before getting to her, struck by the boldness of his offspring, the father reconsiders his options, opting for “Option C”, that is dangling [...]
Release
like the foreign worker who, having spent six days of every week, fifty one weeks of every year, building for a country that is not his, listening to languages that are not his, but whose greatest pleasure comes from talking every Sunday in his native tongue for hours to any relative and friend in Dhaka [...]