Popagandhi

Some time ago I read a tweet by a queer Singaporean asking why any queer Singaporean would move to San Francisco, citing the following shortcomings (not verbatim):

• San Francisco used to be a place where queer Singaporeans would move to, for safety reasons, but perhaps those safety reasons aren't that dire anymore
• San Francisco / the US is the heart of the hegemonic world order / imperialist system
• We probably like the white gaze
• San Francisco provides the opportunity to be a Joy Luck Club Asian queer

There was a time in my life where those thoughts resonated with me.

This topic has been on my mind since I moved here and, surprisingly, did not hate it as much as I imagined I would (I did not like San Francisco at all when I came as a tourist).

Unlike many other immigrants I've met here, who have left deteriorating and debilitating circumstances, my 'why I moved and how has it been' calculus is different. I did not move for material comfort. I am, daily, reminded of how I left home, away from material comfort, and my support systems, to be here. (Not to mention the tremendous amounts of social privilege I've left behind.)

Some time in 2012, I was pretty satisfied with my life as a queer Singaporean living in Singapore. I was in a high growth industry (tech), I got to date (a lot), I had many opportunities to create and carve out a life for myself as an upper middle class Chinese Singaporean gay woman who'd probably end up in a relationship with someone like me. In fact, when I went home recently we hung out with my ex (as queer women do), I took a photo of their home office in their absurdly beautiful Bukit Timah home and I captioned it in my phone as: "the life I would have had if I stayed home".

Every conversation when I was home revolved around, "when are you coming home?" because it seems unexpected, even among some types of minorities in Singapore, to entertain the idea of leaving the supposedly best place in the world (that we still all complain about anyway).

I found that my connection with Singapore was weakening. Other than family, I don't have anything to do there, or many people to spend time with. I have loads of acquaintances, of course, but many of my friends are.. elsewhere. (Not all of them to the hegemonic core, many of them to many parts of the world, including China, Vietnam, Indonesia.)

Still, every conversation (especially with my family) was around: so are you done yet with San Francisco? Isn't it absolutely terrible, that country? When are you coming back to this superior place? was the underlying question. If you're an always online Singapore leftist, your concerns with my city of choice probably has more to do with the above list of questions. If you're not a leftist, your concerns with my city of choice probably has to do with things like safety, medical bankruptcy, housing, why someone would realistically choose a higher cost of living and physical discomfort (as mentioned, Singapore is far more comfortable, materially, in nearly very way), and give up substantial amounts of socio-economic privilege.

Why people choose to leave home is deeply personal. Every situation is different. I moved here exactly three years ago with my wife and my dog when we suddenly had to make a huge life decision on the spot, when her work visa ran out and we decided to get married. We were lucky to have the option to come here, and to be able to thrive.

I learned quite quickly that I would have survived in Singapore (it's getting harder for queer people there), but I no longer felt like I could thrive. In spite of my immense privilege.

I felt like like the short-lived optimism I had for Singapore expanding queer rights was over. Even if 377A is repealed, I don't feel optimistic. I don't feel like I want to wait for incremental improvements. That's not to say that I don't want to do the work. I did, for a time. And if my circumstances were different, if I had decided to spend my life with another Singaporean person, if I was okay with surviving and not thriving, if I was able to shut up and be okay with the already tiny space around me in Singapore, eroding further and further; perhaps that would have been different.

I don't pretend this city, or this country, is perfect. Far from it. Unlike the home I grew up in though, it lets me say so: even if I am not a citizen. No country is perfect, so for now, we'll enjoy the wide open space of California, where, frankly, life is pretty good (if you can hack it). I feel immensely lucky to be able to grow as a person out here, far from home, while also having the ability to move back to my country, which has given me so much, yet currently exasperates me, whenever I need. I'm certainly cognizant of how this is a huge thing to have. So many of the other people who have moved to where I now am, no longer have a country at all. After three years in San Francisco, I feel like I've finally passed the moment of transience and 'uprootedness' that I've felt for so many years, and that maybe 'home' is always 'small cities surrounded by the sea, that punch above their weight'.

But there isn't a single day where I don't grieve what I left behind.

I used to love winter. Traveling to places in the winter, playing in the winter, winter sports, going out in the winter. Living in the northern hemisphere for the long term, however, has made me enjoy it less. I don't even live in somewhere with a significant winter scene. Northern California has relatively mild winters.

Maybe that's the problem. A clear demarcation between the seasons would be nice. Instead, this region's summer in September followed very quickly by fall and winter makes me quite miserable.

Light therapy. Vitamins. Anti-depressants. Exercise. Routine. Waking up earlier. I am doing them all!

Not particularly.

Run, quite fast, whenever you can, with a lot of Prince's music.

Probably not.

I spent the past weekend hiking. Some of it was on a dried out waterfall, such as this one.

For a long time now I have wanted to lead a wilder life than the one I had. Earlier in my youth, wild meant something else altogether. Today, it means: backpacking, camping, going on long walks in the wilderness, birdwatching, and hiking.

Now that I live in California I have access to tremendously beautiful landscapes, often hemmed in by the Pacific Ocean. Local parks, state parks, national parks and more: there are lots of avenues for weekend exploration. While I didn't always feel fit enough, or brave enough, to join many of these activities, I've finally gotten around to making the most of this access. On foot or by bike, there are lots of outdoorsy options and this past weekend I did my first ever backpacking trip for 2 nights at Wildcat camp in Point Reyes.

I joined a local adventure club that organizes trips and activities and was quickly put into a carpool with one of the organizers. While I didn't know anyone from the trip, we did a Zoom call to say hello and discuss logistics.

The plan was for us to meet at Bear Valley Vistor Center in Point Reyes on Friday afternoon at noon. The drive from San Francisco's Marina district took just over 90 minutes, with a last minute Sports Basement Presidio scramble for camping lights and other forgotten items.

We met the other folks at the visitor center, 12 of us in all, where we enjoyed our last moments of Internet and restroom access.

The hike up the Bear Valley trail was not especially brutal, but for most of us this was our first time carrying full backpacks and walking up any amount of elevation. Carrying tents, sleeping bags and stoves, we slowly meandered up the hills of Point Reyes and nearly 3 hours later, made it to camp.

Wildcat camp was reasonably furnished with two clean toilets and a tap.

As quite a few people on the trip remarked, it's amazing how little you really need until you have to carry it on your back.

We hiked, swam, walked on sand, cooked basic meals on camping stoves, and thankfully nobody got hurt or into any type of accident other than a handful of blisters.

I was lucky to have sought advice from experienced camper friends who told me: do whatever, have fun, but you must have good shoes, good socks, good tents, and a very long spoon.

That advice brought me far. I then supplemented that with more essentials for myself: I brought Indomie, packets of mala fish tofu snacks, Japanese sea urchin cookies (a fave), along with the dire 'dehydrated backpacker meals', and had more of a blast than I thought I would.

I've now been initiated into a group of outdoorsy folks who have the organizational and logistical expertise to make these weekend trips happen, so I'm excited to finally have consistent outdoors plans in my life. Next up: bikepacking at China Camp.

Maybe one day I'll write a quick guide to how to do all of this stuff in the Bay Area without a car. It's time for me to learn how to drive (!!) so I can access more cool spots, but for now, I think I saw a lot of my region without ever knowing how.

Some of you may know that I have spent the last 9 years or so working to support children's education in Jharkhand, India. In better times I visit them 2-3x a year. I want to share something that stuck with me the last time I went: one of the girls we work with showed us their daily schedule.

Tribal Jharkhand girl's daily schedule (24 January 2019):

• Keep house clean, 30 min
• Help mother in her work, 30 min
• Wash my own school dress, 15 min
• Help my sister in her studies, 1 hour
• I have to found (sic) my socks, 20 hours
• Wash utensils used by me, 5 min
• Put my bags, school dresses in appropriate places, 10 min
• Use Whatsapp to write all the notes I have missed as I am not in class today, 2 hours
• I have to call my grandmother as she is sick, 20 minutes

• School time, 5 hours
• Tuition time, 1 hour
• Study for approximately 3 hours a day

I am nowhere as organized, or as funny, as this girl.

Going to Jharkhand twice a year has always been the highlight of my year. I'm glad to report that the girls are well, as are their families, which is an amazing outcome in spite of the current COVID-19 situation there. I've seen them grow up over the years: they are absolutely committed to wanting a better life for themselves and their families, and hopefully through the work that I facilitate there I can help to open some doors. If you pay tax in India, you are welcome to make a contribution to the team (other options coming, in the.. future. Overseas contributions are very difficult). The local team is amazing and I am so glad to be able to support this work.

I have been on a roll of late with my data liberation project.

The last piece in my photo liberation project was to figure out a way to take out all of the data from iCloud. Having been in the Apple walled garden for more than a decade and a half now, I have.. a lot of stuff in there.

Apple's official documentation simply says "log in to icloud.com, select the photos you want and download as a zip". What if you've got tens of thousands, or hundreds of photos like me?

Enter iCloud Photos Downloader, a Python utility that sucks out all of your iCloud photos into wherever you're running it.

In my case, I've already got a Linux server going for my photos so that's where I wanted it. The eventual goal is to put all of the photos into PhotoPrism there, as I like its tagging and deduping functionality. The goal is for all of my photos to eventually live on photos.mydomain.com, which is where all photos are going to.. eventually. Right now, I've only got my Google Photos in there. Time to get my iCloud photos in there as well.

In my case, I just did a git clone of [this repo] into my Linux server. Once downloaded, i cd-ed into it and ran the following command:

$ pip install icloudpd
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

As with any other pip package, there can be errors because of your Python environment. I ran into a problem with having too many Pythons, and I could not run the ./icloudpd.py script, which threw a Python module error.

To fix this, I opened icloudpd.py in a text editor and I edited the first line from: #!/usr/bin/env python to #!/usr/bin/env python3. This tool needs Python 3.6+ to run.

On my Linux server, I created a directory for my photos called icloudphotos.

I then ran the command:

icloudpd --directory ~/icloudphotos \
--username myemail@domain.com \
--password password

The tool will prompt you to login and authenticate to iCloud.

Note: if you have 2FA enabled, you will most likely have to re-authenticate every 90 days or so.

I got tens of thousands of photos as expected. The tool shows you a nice little progress bar with basic information. It ran for several hours (around 5 or 6?) but it really depends on your connection speeds. You can turn off video downloads by using the --skip-videos option. You can also have it email you when it's done by using the various smtp options, but I did not want to bother with that.

The next step in my workflow will be to run this as a cron script. It looks straightforward enough.

I also have Syncthing set up and I am evaluating which workflow I prefer. I might want to continue keeping a copy of all photos on both iCloud and on PhotoPrism for redundancy.

In any case, I'm glad to have found a non-GUI way to access my iCloud photos. This will make any projects in this category much easier from now on.