Posts tagged "life"
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Year of the Fire Horse
We celebrated Lunar New Year a few weeks ago, and as usual, I was 8000 miles away from home. What does home even mean now? I have not left the U.S. for three years. That must be some kind of record for 'no international travel' for me. This month feels like the start of a new season of life. Our 8 years of 'visa…
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A Year of Creative Endeavors
In 2023, I got to explore a whole year of creativity, namely in film photography, photographic darkroom printing, piano and saxophone-playing, and drawing Film photography felt like an old friend I was coming back to: I was already shooting film 20 years ago, but dropped off for the digital world In moving to San…
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Interview Waiver Experience for H1-B1 Visa
I've learned a few new things since I last posted about how other Singaporeans can apply for, and receive, the H1-B1 visa. In renewing my visa in Singapore this September, I opted for the new-ish interview waiver process (available since 2021). Although I have never had a rejection, going to the US embassy is always a…
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Merantau Cino
A scan of a film photo of a wooden table in Tretes, Indonesia with light coming in through the window, making it a very atmospheric picture Tretes, Indonesia (link to some photos I took I have been struggling with my feelings on and about immigration. Some time in mid 2023, a woman at a bus stop in San Francisco…
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Applying for Singapore Visa for your Friend
Citizens of some countries need a visa to enter Singapore. If you have friends or family that belong to those countries, you can do them a huge favor by applying as a local contact. As long as you are a Singapore citizen or Singapore PR with SingPass, or director of a Singapore-registered business, you can help your…
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What Pride Means to Me
Screenshot of a photo of a queer couple *With my wife Sabrena in the Paris metro in 2022* 1993: I am 8 years old. I am a scared little autistic girl who felt in my bones that there was something strange about me. Was it my obsessive, hyper-fixation on the things that interested me? My intense feelings? Or that I felt I…
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I Now Have an Attention Span
Various things in the last few years have alerted me to the terrifying fact: I don't think I had an attention span at all until, well, now. That I was able to graduate from college, get married, hold down jobs... privilege, and opportunity. Most of the time, I was told that I was that way because I was simply careless,…
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Feeding My Soul
Maybe some day, I'll think of the years between 2009 and 2019 as a lost decade. It was a decade of development, when I came of age, when I left home, when I made my home in so many different places in the world, where I tried on different ways of being, as if they were seasonal coats, or swimwear. Things are different…
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Goodbye, Twitter. Hello, Slow Socials.
Almost exactly 16 years ago I signed up for Twitter, curious about what it might be. The social web was so young then. I was still in university. The hashtag had barely been invented. Technology seemed like it might change the world, and I was excited to be a part of it. 16 years later, I am midway through my career in…
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America is the restaurant that gives me food poisoning.
Sometimes I think of countries as restaurants. Every country has a different concept. Every country has something to offer. Some have menus, some do not. Some are large multi-concept food halls, others are exclusive white tablecloth places where people have to fight for the scraps—outside. My country, Singapore, is a…
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So far, so sober
It feels like not very many years ago that hackathons, free beer and drunken nights out with startups were, for a brief moment in time, cool. Perhaps it was even normal. It was in this environment that I came of age, so to speak, in my work. It was therefore no surprise to anybody that I soon developed a drinking…
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The Moving Calculus
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…
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Life in Anxious HD
Before I came to this country I led a very different life. My luggage was never unpacked. My passport was tethered to my body. My weeks often began with breakfasts in Yangon on Mondays and ended with drinks on Jakarta rooftop bars on Fridays. On weekends, I might retreat into a Balinese forest alone or return home.…
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Letter to my Eighteen Year Old Self
In my younger years, meaning when I was a tween, I became acutely aware that my life would be different. I dated boys because I was supposed to, but whenever they said they loved me or that they wanted to marry me, I just shuddered. I don't like it when men sweat, I told them. In hindsight, that was a big, red sign. I…
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The Day the Sky Turned Orange
Today's headlines: Orange is the new bleak Surreal orange skies as wildfire smoke blocks sun in Bay Area Orange Oakland Why does the West Coast's Sky Look Like Literal Hell Right Now? Today's soundtrack: channel ORANGE I don't have any commentary other than 'oh shit'. So I grabbed my camera and walked around a bit.…
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Memories of Home
Every overseas Singaporean has the same fear: that when we return, we will not know our way home. Our city builds and tears down much quicker than most other places. Nothing is safe. The price of progress: everyone's memories. No time for nostalgia, or poetry, when we can have... growth. When I move between worlds, my…
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A World of Adventure
On Twitter, where I live, I posted snippets of the things I have done, the places I have been, the places I have gone. Where they might have felt jumbled up and messy on a blog or Facebook post, the Twitter thread / tweetstorm format seemed to be a natural home for my adventures. I am grateful for the mess that my…
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We Got Married
If you are a queer person in Asia, like I was, moving away and starting a family might be top of mind as something you should do. To be fair, I did not feel extremely oppressed, I did not often face homophobia, and I generally felt like I could do whatever I wanted to do as a queer person in Asia. For a long time, that…
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Blogging in 2020
Why don't we blog anymore? I don't know. In 2003, I certainly was, and I had been for a while. I started my blog on Greymatter CMS, then Movable Type. At some point, B2, then Wordpress. Blogger got sold to the Borg (Google); LiveJournal.. what happened to them? They were so cool. Tumblr felt inane to me, an Internet…
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Love in a Time of Quarantine
The last few months have been all about the virus. Having lived through SARS and several other viruses growing up in Singapore, I wasn't particularly worried at first. Now, it's clear the best way to deal with all of this is too impose extreme social distancing measures. Where I live, in San Francisco, we haven't gone…
58 posts tagged "life"