Posts tagged "love"
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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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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…
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So This Is the New Year
Dream of the Noughties # It feels like we all just woke up from a collective dream. The dream of the '10s, where we gave our content, perhaps even our personalities, away for free to Facebook. No longer. Not only have I cut that toxic company out of my life, I have also started thinking about how web 1.0 got it right:…
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This Modern Love
I have spent the last six weeks in Reno. There was a point, at some time in my life, when "six weeks in Reno" was something I would eventually do — to atone for some adolescent sins. The sin of believing, as you're in the thick of massive progress for people like you, that just because you can do something…
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Road, Gravel, Mud
It’s been a while since I’ve written about work. Even longer since I’ve gotten on a bicycle. In so many ways, running a startup is like a race. Some people like to do sprints. Some people like lycra. More and more, I find myself preferring endurance sports and comfortable clothing — perhaps because that’s the closest…
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Munduk
Munduk. Two people, suspended between heartbreak and fury, met on Hong Kong Street after almost 2 years without each other. Their hearts, recently broken by others, found each other agreeable — even safe. They made a plan. The universe attempted to foil it. To no avail. Through long public holidays, expensive flights,…
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Do What You Don't Know
Like so many people who grew up with the Internet, there have been many incarnations of my online self. To some, I will forever be the queer blogger who started writing about the lesbian experience as a teenager in Singapore in the early 2000s. Some find that courageous; I found it much more difficult to change…
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What 31 Feels Like
Wonderful but sometimes a downer. Comfortable but invigorating. Stable but enervating. Fun but sometimes mild. Energetic and delicious. World-changing and domestic, depending on the day. Upwards trajectory but sometimes down. 31 is about being happy in my own skin: that it's really okay to have greasy hair and…
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Panic at the Disco
Gay clubs were for flowers. Update: I wrote this piece before we learned more about what happened. I'm sorry about misgendering or mis-identifying the victims. I'm 31 in a few months. Not old, but old enough to remember how coming out was not on Tumblr, it was at Taboo. I would go with my best friends, all of us so…
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In Small Rooms with Betawi Women
Not for the first time, I found myself in a tiny room on a hot day, the youngest among old women. Each with a different thing to say to me, also the only person not from around these parts. You're so old now! And unmarried! Your hair is too white! Eat more soy beans! One woman rubbed my tattoos, making a screechy sound…
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When I Was Young
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.…
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The Manual of Intimacy
First, meet a girl for the first time on the lawn in front of her house. Sit very closely by each other. Say hello, I'm a poet. What do you do? When she replies, I'm an entrepreneur. But I also run a charity. Laugh, and give her whisky, the same one that you've been nursing. She comes and she gives you a cigarette, and…
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Mee Lay
When I was growing up, I thought all families had the same weekend lunches as mine: a giant cauldron of yellow noodles, simmered so long in an anchovy broth that they fell apart when you picked up your noodles with chopsticks. You had to use a spoon. Ah ma made them every Sunday, but ah gong made the chilli. Even…
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To the Mountain
Going to the mountain. In all of my 29 years, my grandparents had been such a big part of my life that I could have never conceived of a life without them. Like the 1128-episode TV serials they watched, Ah Gong and Ah Ma just went on and on. In the background, their voices blended in with the voices of the Chinese TV…
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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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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…
26 posts tagged "love"