Posts tagged "life"
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Two Pairs of Pants
I've been selling and hustling for much of my young life. I've learned loads from each part of it, no matter how small or insignificant it may have been at the time. I sold cable car tickets. iPod cases. DVDs. Button badges. Most things, really. In hindsight, they've come together to define what I do today. It's…
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To the Young Queer Nerds
Dear (your name here), Imagine for a second that the year is 2000. Holding hands with your girlfriend in public is either an act of defiance or shame. The world is years away from The L Word: nobody knows yet that it sucks, that lesbian life does not have to be "like that". (Bette Porter is bad for you; Jenny…
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Don't Work With Assholes
There's a wealth of literature out there about this, but it can never be said enough. Too many people work with assholes. You see them everywhere. The cafe owner that takes a shortcut by hiring an asshole barista? The barista plays shit music at your cafe and nobody wants to go there. The startup founder who values…
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Stress Balls.
Some time ago, some people (read: entrepreneurs) I follow on Twitter posed a seemingly innocuous question. What drives us, as so-called entrepreneurs, to do what we do? Is it hubris? Ego? Is it an out-sized and unrealistic view of one's abilities? For most of us, choosing this life also means the opportunity cost we…
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A Tale of Two Cities
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a bit of both, really. I'm not one for the mumbo-jumbo of the Myers-Briggs test, but I suppose it was striking that when I did it before my startup I rated very strongly as INFP, and yet now I'm very much on the ENTJ spectrum. It appears that having to do shit…
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Some Updates
I've moved to Jakarta to take part in Ideabox with my startup, WoBe I'm writing more on Medium these days. The blog format is unsatisfactory to me at the moment Over there, I've started two collections which may be interesting to some of you. In The Java Diaries, I obsessively track my time in Jakarta in the name of…
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The Freedom to Love
Ten years ago the Internet was a different place. Singapore was a different place. While it wasn't exactly the sort of pitchfork-wielding, gay-vilifying environment you would imagine, you certainly did not feel like people understood. You felt, at that time, at odds with large swathes of society, as though it would…
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All In
I turn 29 in a couple of months. T-W-E-N-T-Y-N-I-NE. This is doubly a shock because in my head I feel forever young, partly as a function of always having been the youngest person in every single circle I have run in, from friends to career to everything else really. I started blogging when I was 15 — nearly 15 years…
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What I Learned
Two years ago I found out I have an autoimmune disease. I will always have it. It changed everything about my life from what I do for money to where I live. It prompted a reinvention of myself which was at turns painful, but ultimately necessary. This is what I learned. Never forego sleep. "You'll sleep more over…
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Don't Lugi Be Happy
In peninsular Southeast Asia there is a word of Malay origin, bastardized by Chinese pronunciation that perhaps best describes the prevalent mindset of the middle class in everything from career to politics: lugi. More than the losing of face and the losing of status, our collective great fear is the fear of losing…
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An Indian Decade
I've been coming and going from India for the last ten years. In 2004 I started to hatch the first plans to flee the terrifying life laid out for me - that of a student in a Singapore university, doomed for the corporate world or for the civil service - into the wide open arms of India, which changed everything, and…
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I Follow Cities
When I think of the 1980s, I think of the news. In English and Mandarin, both brought to you by Raymond Weil. When I think of the 1990s, I think of Michael Stipe's sonic-drenched wailing about his religion, or his lack thereof. And about the one sorry period of global history when everyone wondered too much about…
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Back in the SL
I have become one of those people. For the fourth time this year, I am sitting at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Colombo airport drinking the world's worst coffee and the worst food. I am also strutting around in heels. Here. Also in Indonesia. In the Philippines. Everywhere. I walked into a TASMAC in dodgy…
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Another List of Things
(63 Random Things in 2012) 1. Causeway I still remember the day you drove me across the Causeway with our dog and all of my life's belongings in your little car. We made that journey many times, usually in the other direction. Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. Happiness, not desperate anger. We were even talking back then. I…
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Living with Graves
A year and a half ago, my friends sent me to a local emergency ward in Singapore when I moved in and out of delirium in the middle of dinner. I had been unwell for a long time, but there had been no suitable diagnosis or treatment. I lost nearly 20 kilograms, had the shakes, became insomniac, and most of all,…
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Sitrep
Frak yes: my Battlestar Galactica tattoo. I got a Battlestar Galactica tattoo I'm pretty pleased about that It's one half of the pair of wings and Caprica constellation that Starbuck gets when she marries Anders Within a couple of hours of getting it, a random stranger proposed to me — saying she would get the other…
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I Hate Cabbage Soup
White cabbage is death. If there is a Creator, it is one of his less glorious moments. The only thing worse than white cabbage is white cabbage soup. I am a soup maniac, but white cabbage soup I do not touch with a ten foot pole. I cannot even sit at the same table when it is being drunk. The sight and smell of it…
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A Drinkable History of My Family
The following piece is an original piece written specially for Ceriph #3, published by Math Paper Press. It's on sale at my favourite bookstore, BooksActually, and also at Kinokuniya.. Fish Sauce We are Teochew, people of the coast. Fish sauce, more than hot food, opera, more than even yam paste desserts - is what…
58 posts tagged "life"