Confidence is probably the hardest thing for a new mom. You second guess everything. Maybe I should have breastfed for another month. Then she wouldn’t have caught that cold. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone back to work so early. Then he wouldn’t have so many tantrums. Maybe I shouldn’t have co-slept. Then he wouldn’t need me to put him to sleep all the time.
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Everything in Singapore is so efficient. We map, track, and project everything. Demographics are changing, so we merge schools, put building plans on hold, perhaps even hire less teachers so we don’t affect the ideal student-teacher ratio.
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Last Friday, I deactivated Facebook. Seventy-two hours on, I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done for my emotional health. At the risk of sounding younger than I really am, let me share that this is probably the longest time I’ve gone without Facebook in a very long time. I joined Facebook in 2004 at college, using it intermittently to keep in touch with my friends in America, frequently as more friends came on board from 2008, and almost daily for the past two or three years. Even while in China, which I visited often for work, I was always on VPN, using Facebook to keep abreast of news of the outside world and remain “plugged in”.
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He motored into Starbucks on a blue plastic contraption that looked like an adult’s Go-Kart, parking next to our table. His hair was not yet grey, his skin a weathered brown, with a moustache that showed he still bothered to shave. Perhaps he had been handsome in his youth, tall with a large build, but age and disability had worn down his muscles. He shifted his weight, trying to swing his bandaged right leg to the other side. After much difficulty, he clambered off his motorised device.
Leave a CommentThere’s been a lot of nonsense from various quarters about “tolerating the gay person” but not the lifestyle, and supporting gay people who “accept the status quo and don’t push their agenda.”
Let’s not even get into whatever-the-bejeezus a “gay agenda” or “gay lifestyle is”. Hello, do you even know any gay people? No, Dick Lee doesn’t count.
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What is the role of our public libraries? Following the removal of two seemingly innocuous children’s books and a strange clarification by the National Library Board about “adhering” to a”pro-family” stance, I decided to examine the charters of some of the world’s greatest public libraries. Since Singapore Inc likes to benchmark.
Leave a CommentArt to me is personal expression. Just like writing is the commitment of a thought onto paper; painting, sketching, or photography even is the physical realisation of an idea the artist has conceived in the mind. Art is beauty. It transforms and elevates the prosaic into something more desirable. In the hands of a talented artist, a commonplace, mundane scene is often rendered more vibrant, more enigmatic, more whole. But my friend Joshua recently expressed another opinion.
“Art is attention-seeking.”
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I thought I was going to continue yesterday’s post about writing, but my mind took a detour and ended up in China’s southwest frontier, where horses roam the wild plains, staggering peaks tower into the sky, and dreamy mists rise from ancient lakes …
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My writing history has been a series of fits and starts, no thanks I’m sure to my hereditary impatience. My friend Ben calls this the classic ENFP personality: chasing butterflies. Which is all a very nice way of saying I give up too easily. I don’t regret it for most part because I enjoy the lateral exposure: traveling to more places and experiencing more things than I ever imagined possible.
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