• When I Was Young

    Published on April 21, 2016

    I'm seated now by the side of an old vending machine in Jakarta airport, with power sockets so dirty and old I had to think twice about plugging my cables in. Yet in all of Terminal 1, one of the oldest airport terminals in a country not known for modern aviation facilities, there was only this one socket free. Confined to my fate of temporarily sharing power with a giant Teh Botol (not Coke!) machine with no seat within range of my Macbook charger, I am, obviously, on the floor yet again.

    Sitting on floors: a practice cultivated in many countries across the world. Sometimes involuntary, most of the time because my inner hippie wants me to. The difference between now and then — I am now at the kind of age where you would, if you did not know me, expect some kind of manners from me. Wear proper clothes, wear proper shoes. Sit on proper surfaces. I imagined I would too! That one day, I would finally learn how to be proper. How wrong I was on that, and many other fronts! I am happy to still-sitting-on-dirty-floors. No — I am overjoyed. Overjoyed to be still a chapalang, anyhow and anyhowly chapalang person.

    So much has happened since the last real post of any substance here. Mid, early 2014 perhaps. I started a company. It still lives. I have teams, collaborators, all across my different endeavours. The foundation I started in 2012 is still alive, too. I am relieved and grateful for all of the opportunities thrown my way, all of the paths revealed and then some.

    Why did I not write? I did not write, because life overwhelmed me and kept me away and sometimes light-headed. I did not write, because I forgot how to. It isn't like riding a bicycle — it's more of riding a unicycle where you know eventually you'll find your balance but only after falling flat on your face anyway, no matter how many times you've ridden one. In my pursuit of achievements, exceptional or otherwise, prizes, awards, Silicon Valley-style work yourself to the bone for some big undefined payoff (emotional or otherwise); I lost myself in the race. I lost myself, too, in the unclear idea of what it meant to be an adult.

    An adult, I was told, lived in a proper house with a proper bed with a proper pillow (for all of the neck pains you're bound to have). I have neck pains, indeed, but realise I can do without all of the rest. I haven't sat on dirty airport floors for years. I haven't gone somewhere with nothing in my bag other than the clothes currently on me, in years. I haven't gone somewhere without a plan, without a place to stay, without any idea of what i was going to do. I don't know how else to live, and forcing myself into being the opposite of those things brought me further and further away from who I really was.

    Maybe this year, after learning to like myself again, I'll finally get my groove back again. I'm proud to be an anyhowly person. I'm proud to extreme and spontaneous. I will no longer knead the image of who I truly am into the uninspiring ideas of what some people had wanted me to become. I don't want to achieve things for the sake of doing that — I want to learn to be alive, again. Let's see how we go on this journey, I'm excited but also shit-scared about it.

    But as I once believed (when I was much younger) — if it doesn't scare me like hell, it probably isn't worth doing.

  • Is the Self-Hosted Blog Dead?

    Published on March 24, 2016

    Fuck Medium. Seriously.

    I have had enough of their terrible user interface, narrow writing experience, and the empty platitudes of ‘recs' and comments from people looking to improve their lives by reading inspiring content from people they don't care about. Worst of all? I hate people whining about Millennials more than Millennials themselves.

    I started this site precisely so that I could tinker around under the hood, and that's what I've missed — tinkering. Writing. Slapping together bits of random code you find on the internet (now forking random folks' code on Github) and hoping it would work. I know a lot more about code and development processes now, but I still gain a huge amount of happiness from tinkering with things I don't know.

    My archives are in a mess. I stopped writing here some time circa 2010. I don't know why. Life took over. I got lazy. I got fed up trying to do everything at once.

    It might take some time to gather the things I posted on different parts of the web. But it should be worth it 🙂

  • Tan Boon Chye

    Published on February 20, 2016

    When I came home (to Singapore) a couple of days ago, I instructed the taxi driver to go to the Caltex station at East Coast. Most cabbies know this place, but he didn't. He's 74 years old, so he only knew this spot as "Tan Boon Chye & Co" (brain GPS never update firmware). Tan Boon Chye & Co was the 3rd Caltex station in Singapore, and that was its original name — in 1961.

    Growing up in Singapore and spending most of my childhood (and teen-hood) around grandparents who spoke mostly Teochew (and more Malay than Mandarin, really), I'd always felt intimately connected to their brain GPS. If I was to tell them where I had spent all my time (and money — they can't believe anything costs more than 50 cents in Singapore), I'd have to cross-reference the 1940s street directory that exists only in our minds, among the people of a certain stripe.

    If I went to the jazz club at SouthBridge (way back when there was a jazz club), I'd have to tell them I was in 大坡大马路 in Teochew, dua pou dua beh lou (or tua po tua beh lou depending on your romanization preference, or if you said it with a Hokkien inflection). If I had to change money for my travels, I'd have gone to "ang teng" reminiscent of the red lights that once lit up Collyer Quay from Johnston's lighthouse. My fave — instead of going to Cecil Street to work in the CBD, I've have gone to the "opium company", where opium dens once stood instead of buttoned up, stuffy suits. Because corporate life is a different kind of opiate of the masses. Years after the passing of the two people I'd spent so much time with, existing in a different language and setting, I find myself grasping at anything that lets me learn a little bit more about the lives of people I loved but did not know fully. In part because I never had the language of their lives in full — I could order food, talk to them, talk to old people, even give speeches in this language they bestowed on me, but I could never have had the tools to create legends for their maps, their history, their worlds filled with poverty, civil war and world war.

    I'm learning as much of their language as I can. Instead of being merely conversational, wet market level conversant, I've started to learn how to write it, read it, romanize it, and exist in this other plane of my life I've always inhabited but never occupied.

    The taxi driver took me to Tan Boon Chye. From the way he pronounced the Tan, the same one that is present in my own name (pretty much like a surprised sound effect), I switched to it for the rest of the ride.

    "Where did you return from?"

    I don't say Jakarta, as in 雅加达 (ya jia da).

    I say I've just returned from 巴斜, pah sia, and he knew it. I wonder what destinations my grand dad saw at the port. 巴斜 (Jakarta), 金塔 (ghim tahp, Phnom Penh), or 坤甸 (khun diang, Pontianak)? Yet somehow he ended up here, the land of red lights and big horse carriage roads and small ones, so that when I go off into the world I feel I'm merely following the same sense of adventure (and need) from more than 80 years ago.

  • Paths

    Published on Invalid DateTime

    12 years ago this time I was deciding where I should go, what I should study, at university. I was also four months away from deciding I would try to be happy in spite of my newfound queerness.

    11 years ago this time I was in Kolkata, volunteering with an organization, not knowing I would go on to do that in the future. I was awful at painting walls, and not much better now.

    10 to 8 years ago this time on the road learning Southeast Asia out of backpacks I still carried, before my back went bad.

    7 years ago this time I got back to Dubai from Istanbul to find beetles had infested everything that I owned in the world. It was the first time I learned you could be truly alone in the world.

    6 years ago on the Syria/Turkey border with no money and no clothes. Auto-rickshaws. My first businesses. An annoyingly debilitating illness. Recovery.

    Three years ago I was back in Singapore feeling lost and forlorn when I left someone and a city that had spanned half a decade. Two years ago my life of endless pitching had just begun.

    Today, 30 and in Indonesia on the cusp of everything. Bring it on!

  • The Cult of Busy

    Published on Invalid DateTime

    I do quite a few things. Run a startup. Run two non-profits. Mentor queer kids. Spend a lot of time with my family, partner and our dog. Play video games. Paint the house. Cook for friends. Take my dog on long walks. Even, gasp, sleep!

    A lifetime ago on my first entrepreneurial rodeo, I did not know many of the things that I know now.

    I know now, that:

    • Sleep is the most important, ‘sleep for the weak, no sleep till I’m dead’ is just pointless and unhealthy bravado – because I got so close to the edge
    • Health is important. Many of my peers have now had a few attempts at entrepreneurship, and many of us have worked ourselves to the bone and back
    • Focus is everything, and time management is better. There’s no value to working insane long hours when you’re not focused. I have better awareness of my attention span and focus patterns now (short bursts, varied, always have to be doing something insanely fun or difficult, preferably both)
    • Neglecting friends and family isn’t ideal, they’re worth a lot more than most business. You also get better at navigating friendships vs acquaintances
    • Saying no is okay
    • Saying yes to things that matter is also
    • Getting something done imperfectly is better than waiting for perfection
    • Being busy is a state of mind

    Some people are perpetually busy. Maybe some people really are genuinely busy. I try to be un-busy, which is not the same as being unproductive. Even if I’m really busy, I want to never say I am. I will always have time to chat with a suicidal friend who calls me at 4am. I will always have time for anyone. I will always have time for my dad, mum, girlfriend, siblings, nieces. I want to always have the head space to be actively learning new things, instead of blocking anything being of a mistakenly diagnosed case of busy.

    There’s a difference between being consciously un-busy and being frivolous. I suspect I might have some kind of attention deficiency disorder, so I need to be juggling three things at a time. I did not know that before – so felt unproductive, sad, and bored most of my life when shoved into the do-one-thing religion, which never fit. I also got very, very ill when I was busy, in a previous life.

    Now I do lots of things, but I am not busy. I am occupied, but I’ll always have time for sleep, health, and happiness.

    I am awful at calendaring, so I’ve hired a PA to help me do that. Calendaring makes me busy and sad, so I need to outsource that.

    Today, there are a ton of things I’d like to do. There are always things to do. But I would rather focus on the meaningfulness of the things I have to do, rather than on the having to do in and of its own.

    My to-do list might be massive, but I want to never close off my heart.

    If I have to be insanely busy, which is a state I am getting to very rapidly, I want to be purposefully occupied, not and never too busy for anyone.

© Copyright 2025