Murmurings So here's the thing about being busy with something you can't tell people about. I mean, not can't but don't want to, because it might jinx it, or prompt too many questions, and you just want to be left alone with it till the time is right, when all the pieces are in place and you can say, voilà, this is it! But it's not that time yet, so I'm sitting on it. Very firmly. A little's slipped out and there are some promising signs on the horizon ... but I'm getting ahead of myself again. Focus on the now. One step at a time.But oh so tingly inside. Credit where it's due Today's not a work day for me, but as I was catching up on my RSS feeds, I came across Kate Harding's "A Happy Guide to Not Plagiarizing", which really says all you need to know about writing and giving attribution in the Internet age.It reminded me of Mridu Khullar's "The Way We Outline", in which she mentions how she applies different colours to quotes from different people, to help with attribution after she's finished writing. And I thought I was being particularly anal retentive when I did that. (Sometimes I use more colours than Microsoft Word can provide in readable hues.) Women now International Women's Day was yesterday (according to Singapore time, anyway), which over here drew a lot of chatter about Kathryn Bigelow's Best Director win at the Oscars and local film director Jack Neo's just-revealed affair with a model less than half his age. Make of that what you will.My own thoughts on the matter are more sobering. Blame it on the Economist's report, "The worldwide war on baby girls" (via Heather Chi), which left me feeling rather goosebumpy about artificially skewed sex ratios in the birth rates of countries like India and China (123 boys per 100 girls, for goodness' sake).And the always thoughtful Jessica Lim reminded me about the view from the other side and that it's good to stop and listen to Joss Whedon's speech at an Equality Now benefit in 2006. Oscar material Friends have been asking if I'm still brooding over the incident described in the previous post (I'm not, well, not really, unless I stop and look at a certain view out my window). So to completely change the subject to something much less brood-able:John Scalzi has reposted a delightful article he wrote for the Washington Post about ten years ago, "Oscar and me". In a nutshell:... having an Oscar, even for just three days, is an educational experience. Here’s what I learned.I don't think the article's really dated one bit. Enjoy! In the quiet of the night I got up around 4:15 a.m. I'm not sure why I did. I mean, I do, I went to the bathroom, but I don't usually do that in the middle of the night. Were the cats restless, was that what stirred me? That was what I thought after, after it became apparent from the hushed voices in the corridor that there were people hanging about outside my flat.One downside to living alone is that it makes me uneasy to have even one person loiter outside my flat for more than a couple of minutes. There were a couple of voices now, male for sure, but I couldn't make out what they were saying, even though I did what the cats were doing and stood alert by the front door to listen.I decided I didn't need to call the police or anything. Not just yet anyway. Then I went to the bathroom.Then the pounding on my door and front window began --- not loud enough to make me jump out of my skin, but enough to figure something serious must be going on.When I opened the front door --- and the reason I dared to do this was because there is a reasonably stout and padlocked grilled gate that stands between the door and the outside world --- a man identified himself as a police officer and showed me his credentials. To be honest I was still too bleary-eyed to focus clearly on what was printed on them, so you could say I took a leap of faith when I unlocked the gate and stepped outside.And then I saw the chair, standing beside the parapet, and I knew immediately what must have happened.(I live on the top floor of a pretty high apartment building.)There were four police types out there, two in uniform, two in plain clothes. They asked the usual questions, about the chair and if I'd heard anything. I closed my eyes when I answered some of the questions because my sleep-hazed mind was still trying to construct the sentences properly, trying to be helpful, even though I didn't really have much to offer. They took notes and thanked me for my time.After I went back inside the flat and closed the door, I called a friend whom I knew would be up and we talked for a while, while the cats paced curiously about because they could still hear voices outside. It took a while before I felt more settled, sleepy once more, and we hung up.But then there was knocking on the door again. One of the police types from before, requesting that I make a formal statement about what I'd told them. Which was fine, except that in the middle of it, he asked if I would be okay to look at an image of the deceased.I flinched. "How bad is it?""Just try, okay?" he said nicely. "We're trying to identify him." When he showed me the image on his mobile phone, he reiterated, "It's okay. Just like in a movie."And it was. Because in the movies, we've so often seen people with that wide-eyed stare and some sort of anonymous bloody wound. They're anonymous too, most of the dead we see in movies, as was this man.As I was reviewing the statement before signing it, the police investigator asked me what kind of stuff I write. I picked up a copy of Singapore: A Biography and handed it to him. He did a double take --- I think he was pretty much in autopilot making-conversation mode by then, and didn't expect to be handed a big, heavy book. Then he asked me what book I was writing next.It was close to 6 a.m. by the time the investigator left. My brain was spinning again, wondering if I was imagining the distant sound of running water --- were they cleaning the area before anyone turned up at the nearby school? Would they check the deceased's prints to figure out who he was, like they do on CSI? What must it have felt like, to look upon the same view I see everyday, and then to let go?Everything looks normal this morning.I wonder if the cats heard anything. Foodied out The problem with cramming too many food tastings in three days, is that it inevitably wears your palate out. Clear standouts: the potato skins with ocean trout caviar at One Rochester and the braised tiger prawns in chilli (crab) sauce at Chinois by Susur Lee. And surprise of surprises, a little homemade bacon mushroom aglio olio in the middle of it all. Now I know why one should bother to caramelise onions. Shilly-shallying Things I hadn't planned on doing over the weekend that turned out to be a good idea anyway:Re-watching bits of Battlestar Galactica season 4, including the series finale (O Starbuck!).Eating a hearty heap of Indian rojak, complete with extra dipping sauce.Taking lots of showers --- pesky hot weather.I wish yakking about Battlestar Galactica qualified as appropriate small talk at all the food tastings I have to go to this week ... Cable TV no more I returned my Starhub cable set-top box today, which means I no longer have cable TV reception at home. For the longest time I haven't known what's on TV at what time, least of all whether it's available on the channels on my subscription plan. I still watch TV series --- I just don't do appointment viewing anymore and if I want the news, I have the Internet.Just over a year ago I passed the VCR (that's videocassette recorder, for you young 'uns reading this) and surviving blank videotapes to my mother, who still watches the odd tape of Cantonese TV series from Hong Kong. She had a working VCR at the time, but I figured it was good for her to have a back-up since it'll be obsolete technology soon.I remember when we got our first VCR in the family. It must've been in the mid-1980s and we certainly weren't early adopters of that technology, more like catching up with the Joneses. When I got married, we got our own VCR as a matter of course, along with a cable TV box. That was just over ten years ago.Faster and faster things whirl. I suppose I should try to tune the TV set to get free-to-air channels, but I'll have to Google that first. The rest of the Chinese New Year holidays Tuesday: Walked. A lot. And then it was Bukit Chandu, just in time for the annual sounding of the Public Warning System to commemorate the fall of Singapore in World War II. As I tweeted: surreal.Tuesday night: Drank. A lot. And then it was dawn.Wednesday: A blur. The good kind. And then the long weekend was over. Oranges are not the only fruit I did not eat a single mandarin orange today. I had chok (thick Cantonese-style porridge), lasagna, pineapple tarts, bak kwa, kueh lapis, muruku, chocolates, nuts, and finally a very non-traditional dinner of lamb tagine, Moroccan mint tea and two bottles of Trappist beer to round off the day --- but not a sliver of mandarin orange.However, I came home with eight oranges --- four for the remaining Chinese New Year visiting I have to do in the next few days, four to eat when I feel like it and because my mom thought she had too many and did her best to offload some on me. Maybe I'll toss some into the bag for tomorrow's Battle of Pasir Panjang Commemorative Walk. Welcome to the Year of the Tiger I was born in the Year of the Tiger. Tigers are cool, yo. None of that namby-pamby Rabbit or dour-faced Ox stuff. But of course, in the grand scheme of Chinese patriarchy, Tiger daughters are disdained. Tiger women are supposed to be fierce, aggressive. One of my aunts was nearly given away because she was born in the Year of the Tiger. In his Chinese New Year message this year, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong saw fit to remind Chinese Singaporean couples that "children born in the Year of the Tiger [...] are really no different from children born under other animal signs." I can't believe some people still need that reminder. I also can't believe (okay, yes I can, but I still wish he didn't say it) that the Prime Minister --- whose wife is the CEO of the government's leading investment company and whose deceased first wife was a doctor --- ditched a teachable moment (TM Barack Obama) about sexism for yet another expropriation of women's fertility for the PAP government's idea of national good. I wish tigers were not rapidly approaching extinction. I wish people would be nicer to animals.This is only the third time in my life that I can remember the Year of the Tiger coming by, so pardon me if I get a little proprietary over it. I like being a Tiger. I look at my cats and I think, ah, they would be great tigers. Ink would preside majestically over some jungle, while Sisu would dart around more cautiously, occasionally sinking her teeth into your hand when you thought she was tame enough for you to pet her. The last time the Year of the Tiger swung around, I did not have any cats (nor any blog). I was also ... well, let's just say I was in a different place, then.What's strange to think about is that I'm probably about halfway through my life now. I'm not about to get morbid (or maudlin, for that matter), but these 12-year cycles are certainly a different way of reckoning things. Since I've gone freelance, I've often felt like every year has to have something, to mean something. The museum project, the book, Vietnam, Korea --- what's this year's thing then? All the more (and I realise this isn't exactly a rational urge) because this year is my year.My friend Cheryl is writing a book called A Tiger in the Kitchen. She's a Tiger too, so it's a clever title. I'm not quite a Tiger who cooks, but it's not like I've spent my life deliberately throwing myself against stereotypes either. I'm just not very good with the cooking, no matter how hard I try. I much prefer to just eat. Is that Tiger-like?So it's the Year of the Tiger, and here I am. What Google Buzz is good for 1. Procrastinating.2. Telling the whole world something --- by default Buzzes are public, which I think is an extremely confusing state of things for the average user since Buzz resides in Gmail, which is very much not public. (The first Gmail "add-on", Google Chat, defaults to private mode too.)3. Telling the whole world who your most frequently emailed contacts are, unless you remove that information from your public profile (Business Insider shows you how to do that, via The Not-So Private Parts).4. Never losing another idle comment again, and storing it in a much more searchable format than Twitter or Facebook.5. Ambient information overload. As Kashmir Hill writes in "Why Google should have stayed out of social networking":The problem with Google Buzz is that it basically tracks and consolidates EVERYTHING that we do on the Internet.At this point it feels like my Buzz stream is just replicating everything I already get through my other information streams. So ... we'll see.By the way, I've finally made my Twitter stream public and I might have another go at using it. I blame it on Buzz. Talking about it In case you haven't been following the ongoing furore over Singaporean pastor Rony Tan's comments about other religions at a church service:Tan made comments about Buddhism and Taoism that, according to a Ministry of Home Affairs press statement, "were highly inappropriate and unacceptable as they trivialised and insulted the beliefs of Buddhists and Taoists". Online videos of Tan's statements were circulated on YouTube; they've since been taken down, but I watched and transcribed the ones in which he "interviewed" converts from Buddhism --- one male, one female --- in front of his congregation, and my firm impression is that Tan was behaving in a way that was flippant, disrespectful and wilfully ignorant of Buddhist beliefs.The government's Internal Security Department "called up" Tan on Monday and told him not to "run down other religions" (again, I'm quoting again from the Ministry's press statement). Channel Newsasia reports that Tan published a public apology on his church website on Monday. It's four paragraphs long and the apology itself reads:I realized that my presentation and comments were wrong and offensive. So I sincerely apologize for my insensitivity towards the Buddhists and Taoists, and solemnly promise that it will never happen again.Tan met the president of Singapore Buddhist Federation and the chairman of the Taoist Federation on Tuesday to make an apology.The Minister for Home Affairs Wong Kan Seng characterised Tan's statements as "clearly offensive to Buddhists and Taoists". However he said that Tan was not arrested, as three young men were for posting racist remarks on Facebook, because – as far as I can make out from the Minister's statement – someone lodged a complaint with the police against the three men, so the police had to take action. Which I guess meant arresting them if sufficient suspicions had been raised? By inference, did Tan avoid getting arrested because no one lodged a formal complaint with the police against him?Now that the online videos seems to have all been taken down (and I wouldn't be surprised if someone's taken a hammer or strong magnet to the hard drive that held the original files), the message from the powers that be seems to be: keep calm and carry on. Which doesn't stop people from fretting over several possible issues:"ZOMG we are shocked --- shocked! --- to find that pastors are saying these awful things to their congregations about other religions! We must stop them!""We need to make our feelings known! Please join this [Facebook] group to demand that Rony Tan be sufficiently punished for his religious insensitivity!" (No, really. The group is called "Embrace Religious Harmony! Disgrace to Zealots like Rony Tan" and currently has 295 members. Via Temasek Review.)"No double standard! Either Arrest Rony Tan or let the three young Facebookers off with a public slap on the wrist!"Interestingly, someone named Andrew left this comment over on the website Blogpastor, responding to the post about this incident:I just don’t see the fairness in all this. To me it’s all always double standards. When the Da Vinci Code movie and books were popular here, it hurt many Christians and caused many to question their faith, yet the authorities did nothing about it, though we voiced our concerns. It was quickly followed by documentaries on TV that further undermined the Christian faith. It seems like its ok to ‘mock’ Christianity here, but it’s not okay to mock the other faiths. What’s up man?!Which brings me to what I think is the crux of the entire matter. Yes, Pastor Rony Tan said some very questionable and upsetting things. But the worst thing about his entire shpiel was not that he was caricaturing certain religions. He could've been caricaturing anything, but the worst part was that his line of questioning and conclusions were so obviously flimsy, barely containing anything resembling proper logic, and yet he gets away with standing up there every Sunday and saying things that don't quite add up logically, and no one goes up to him politely and says, "Excuse me, sir, all due respect, but you're not making any sense."I mean, that's the thing about this surreal world called Singapore. In this system, we can castigate people loosely for threatening religious or racial harmony, but we can't sit down, look closely at what they say, examine it thoroughly, thinking it through, and point out, "Um, excuse me, this sentence is relying on faulty logic."I recently re-watched the infamous "I'm on page 73" speech made by Thio Su Mien at last year's AWARE meeting and of course lots of people were heckling her even before she got to "I'm on page 73". But it intensified at that point because it was precisely the appropriate response: it was ludicrous for her to assert herself as a "feminist mentor" merely because she had been acknowledged in an AWARE publication as the first female dean of the law faculty. Benefiting from any gains made by feminism doesn't make one a feminist (exhibit A: Sarah Palin) --- that's just bad logic.Coming back to Tan, there were countless instances of faulty logic in his comments, but instead of people having the opportunity to watch the videos and talk about them and peg him for what he is --- a poor thinker, who really shouldn't be allowed in front of a classroom of any size or age group --- he gets labelled as a religious bigot and will probably never speak of the incident again. Which means there's a very good chance that a) he'll never have to question or improve his powers of reasoning, and may go on to say other illogical things, just not necessarily about non-Christian religions, b) no one else will get to dissect his statements, check and improve their own thinking, and in future be better able to see through other specious arguments.For instance, I think Andrew's comment above is well worth parsing. What is it, really, to mock a religion, and is the goal of society to be so happily harmonious that no religion or social group ever feels offended? I happen to be a huge fan of Dogma and a huge opponent of burning books, even the lamest Chicken Soup books, so you know where I stand on that. But I'm still saying we should have a conversation about it.The other thing is, if the Internal Security Department gets activated every time anything drifts remotely close to a religious organisation, and/or the Sedition Act gets whipped out to police this type of speech, ordinary people are never going to learn to talk about race and religion in a meaningful way. All the more the current government and its gatekeepers will be wary of letting such conversations even happen, and we will be stuck in deliberate ignorance and with untested logical thinking skills. And then if another AWARE hijacking takes place, I'll be surprised if anyone has the presence of mind to notice that, hey, wait a minute, something's not right in the logic of what certain people are saying here ...I don't think we should shut people up or shut them away for saying grossly bigoted things. I think we should stand up and point out (sans violence) their faulty logic and lack of compassion, and we should make it clear that their viewpoints are not acceptable in the kind of society we want to live in. I think we should train our minds to pay closer attention to what people mean when they speak. Yes, it's tiring. Yes, it's hard. But that is the only way to make sure people don't get away with saying outrageous things sidiously, moving around certain goalposts to suit a hurtful and/or hateful agenda.Edited to add (February 13):Commenter Astron has added links below for the videos on YouTube. I don't know how long they'll be active.Channel NewsAsia reported on February 12 that the police have placed one of the three youths accused of starting a Facebook group that stirred racist sentiment on a "Guidance Programme", while the other two administrators of that group have been "cautioned"; none of them will have a record of criminal conviction (source: "Youths involved in Facebook racism incident to be given 2nd chance").Kennethism highlights another video of Pastor Rony Tan speaking in church and making preposterous statements about gay people (again, I'm not talking about faith-based issues, merely all sorts of logical fallacies). This is what it has come to In my neighbourhood is a name-brand primary school, the kind founded in the colonial period by some rags-to-riches chap, whose reputation in Singapore over the years has calcified into some kind of saint-like symbol of generosity, philanthropy and all-round goodness. As I was walking by the school at lunchtime, a large MPV, the kind that costs S$70,000-120,000 brand new, pulled up. An elderly man got out from the driver's side, the kind of elderly man who has a head full of white hair and wears jet-black socks with sports shoes. He looked healthy enough, but he was moving at that decelerated pace that's not quite doddering but not quite spry, either.Waiting at the pick-up point was a boy, seven or eight years old and small as they come. He got into the front passenger seat, while the elderly man made his way to the spot on the pavement where the boy had left his school backpack, picked it up, walked back to the vehicle and placed it in the back seat. And by school backpack, I'm talking about one of those units that come with little wheelies these days. It didn't look impossible for the boy to pick up.So the boy leaves his backpack for his grandfather to pick up. Which grandfather does. Because, I dunno, boy is small and precious, or something.Just yesterday I was catching up on my Instapaper reads, which included Nancy Gibbs' "The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting" in TIME. The second paragraph reads:We were so obsessed with our kids' success that parenting turned into a form of product development. Parents demanded that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it's never too soon to prepare for the competition of a global economy. High school teachers received irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as "crispies," who arrived at college already burned out, and "teacups," who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress.I do admissions interviews for freshman applications to my alma mater, and every year on average they're getting more well-prepped and less able to talk about anything that wasn't scheduled into their lives. Being alternately coddled and prepped-for-life clearly isn't a "uniquely Singaporean" experience of growing up, but you know, who I'm worried about is not so much the boy, but all the other people who are going to have to pick up after him for the rest of his life. Same same but different For lunch today I made spaghetti aglio olio with bacon and white mushrooms.For dinner tonight I had bak chor mee with minced pork and mushrooms (and liver, which I didn't expect but didn't mind eating anyway).It's funny what two different cultures can do with noodles, pork and mushrooms. The final frontier There is something about watching videos that remind me of how small our planet is, and how impossibly small of a space we occupy in the universe, and how incredibly little we know about either planet or universe, that gives me that tingly feeling inside.This week, I got tingly while watching The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History (via Gee Len on Facebook, who shared "This Link Leads You To The Entire Known Universe")And that made me think of one of my favourite TED talks ever, wherein the delightfully cute Brian Cox talked about the CERN supercollider (before it was completed last year). The part I love is towards the end, from 10:50 to 14:35, in which he recites what he calls "a wonderful narrative --- almost a creation story, if you'd like --- about the universe, from modern science over the last few decades". Mmmmm ... tingly.When I was a kid, my first adult-like ambition was to be a teacher --- pretty much par for the course for any wee urbanite who's packed off to school where teachers wield all the classroom power --- but after that what I really wanted to be was an astronomer (which I've briefly mentioned before). Not doing well in physics, or really, in any science subject in school put paid to that vague dream, but I still get a kick out of reading or seeing astronomy-related stuff (the ones I can understand, anyway). The best non-visual link I've found recently is this lesson plan for "The Earth as a peppercorn" (via Slate's "Learning To Love the Moon"), which uses a "thousand-yard model" to help people understand the relative sizes of the planets and the distances between them.In a nutshell: even if the Earth is represented by the size of a peppercorn, while the sun by a ball 8 inches wide, even then the distance between Pluto and the sun is, well, pretty damn far. Go read and imagine it for yourself. Okay, so now we know it's called an iPad (Image above of my old iBook used here for nostalgic reasons. Someday not too far in the future, I don't think we'll be wrangling with keyboards like this anymore.)Now that it's been more than 24 hours since the announcement of the iPad and everyone's had a chance to freak out about all the functionalities it doesn't have and how it's not going to be the tablet-killer everyone thought it was going to be, let us remember a few things:what David Pogue calls the three-phase process of the standard Apple new category roll-out.Lucian's tweet on an important side-effect of using the device: "No one mentioned the iPad being able to fry eggs on its aluminum back after 30mins of use?"sangsara's lengthy, thoughtful meditations on "The Causes of iPad Disappointment".Me, I just wish they'd called it the iSlate instead because I'm old school that way --- I think the word "slate" has more resonance. "Slate" also makes me think of all the fun doodling goodness (literally or metaphorically) you could have with it, whereas "pad", once you get over the jokes about feminine hygiene products, merely conjures images of lined notepaper (perhaps even in that sickly yellow hue of legal pads) just waiting to be filled with, ugh, work.Edited to add (10:48 am): Oops, except that I forgot about the HP Slate --- which I suppose tells you something about how much mind share it holds with me. Sleepwalking I feel like I've been sleepwalking through the last few days. Maybe it's because what I'm working on right now is related to, yet wildly different from, what I usually write and research about; nonetheless I seem to have taken to it like a duck to water. The most embarrassing part was walking into Borders on Monday and buying up one of every local women's magazine --- I must have looked like a freebie junkie. The most fun part was rambling about Singapore to a client from overseas over many beers. The most difficult part will be when I have to sit down and write up all this material in less than a week's time.Sometimes, the more I write and talk about Singapore, the more I feel that it appears to be just like every other modern city in Asia --- but really isn't, upon closer examination. Or maybe it's natural to think that way about the city I've lived in for so long.The other reason for my metaphorical sleepwalking is, predictably enough, that I haven't had proper sleep lately. Mistaking weekday nights for the weekend will do that to you.I am also rather distractionable. Which, you know, makes me rather distracted. Milton Glaser and more A Design Film Festival is on right now, featuring a slate of eight films about different aspects of design. Tonight I saw Milton Glaser: To Inform & Delight (he's the legend behind the "I ♥ NY" campaign) and tomorrow I'll be at Herb & Dorothy, "the extraordinary story of Herbert Vogel, a postal clerk, and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian, who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history with very modest means."The overall line-up's pretty impressive, featuring films about individual designers, as well as groups and movements. Check it out. I paid how much for SMSes? My latest mobile phone bill informs me that I sent 907 local SMSes in the last billing cycle. That works out to about 30 messages a day, which is not inconceivable considering that sometimes one message may spill over into several 160-character SMSes.Nonetheless, 907 is a lot considering that I averaged 500-600 SMSes a month last year. Plus it added about $20 to my monthly bill ($0.05 per SMS, which is also a lot considering that the cost of zipping all that data around is negligible with all the paid-up mobile phone infrastructure in place).Hmmm ... more WhatsApp, less SMSing. It would seem we are still talking about this Speaking of "mixed race" issues, here are some old but relevant links that I meant to blog, um, months ago.If you missed them:1. "Mixed-Race TV Contestant Ignites Debate In China" (via nimbupani)The only thing I wish the article had gone on to parse is the extent to which the racism in question is directed at the woman for being part African-American, as opposed to being merely mixed-race. Likewise someone still needs to take a hard look at the dimensions of racism and attitudes towards race in Singapore – how different "mixtures" of race are viewed differently. Even though the government's now decided to allow parents to include both races in the child's registration information, that doesn't get around the fact that there are different social or cultural implications in Singapore to being legally identified as, say, Caucasian-Chinese vs. African-Chinese.2. "Ward Helps Biracial Youths on Journey Toward Acceptance" (via my friend Peter on Facebook)The "Ward" in the headline is American football player Hines Ward, who is of Korean and African-American parentage. Korea has its own murky history of dealing (or not) with people of mixed-race parentage and it's becoming a more prevalent issue as many Korean men in rural areas are marrying women from Southeast Asia. (No doubt one of the reasons why most people guessed I was Filipino or Vietnamese when I was travelling there last year.)3. And just to round up the trifecta, "Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race", which was written in the wake of Obama's presidential campaign.Things from this article that seem to me to be stating the obvious, but that obviously haven't been absorbed by modern mainstream thinking yet:“There’s this notion that there’s an authentic race and you must fit it,” said Ms. Bratter, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston who researches interracial families.“When you’re mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is.”“Ultimately,” she said, the goal is “to not have to check a box.” [the last two said by people of mixed-race parentage]Less angst about sorting people into skin-colour-driven/parentage categories, more rational discussion about what people think those categories mean and how that affects their behaviour, please. Drawing up the longest checklist of politically correct racial categories is not going to help any society make a more sensible decision when it comes to figuring out, for instance, how words like "Allah" should be used. In which I put blogging-by-iPhone to the test I'm sitting at my laptop at home, so I thought this'd be a good time to test if I have BlogPress Lite set up right. It's a free app, but obliges Blogger users to have Picasa activated as well (even if, like me, you have no intention of ever using Picasa).Edited to add (5:51 pm): Hey look, it works --- except that I had to manually add labels (or "lables", as it's misspelled in the app) to this post because BlogPress Lite imported only the five labels I'd used most recently. Solo efforts It's not every evening that you walk into a friend's birthday party, only to be greeted by a look of dismay from the birthday girl. "I brought you wine!" I said cheerily, waving the bottle of Shiraz."Yu-Mei Balasingamchow," she intoned in her distinctive singsong way, albeit with a tinge of disapproval, "you were supposed to be here earlier.""Yah, sorry, I had dinner with some friends and ---""No, you were supposed to be here earlier." She gave me a look. It turned out there had been a Very Nice Man at the party whom she'd been hoping to introduce to me, but he'd booked it for another party before I got there.Nonetheless, she proceeded to tell me several significant details about him, which now makes me wonder if I'll be able to keep a straight face if he and I ever get round to meeting (nothing wrong with him, just my friend's enthusiastic description).Unrelated to this, a couple of months ago someone asked me what type of guys I like. In response my mind went completely blank. One doesn't simply walk around with a list in our heads, do we? Hiding from the heat I meant to go to a book launch today, but after fighting the unforgiving currents of Saturday traffic with sarah (it felt like all of Singapore's five million people were out on the roads) while being subjected to the full force of the tropical sun, then recovering in the cool tranquility of Papa Palheta's courtyard --- heading to the National Library was just too far to go in the heat. The farthest I could make it was to the home of some friends who lived within five minutes' walk.Tomorrow I'm staying in. New year, new work I have been working hard since the work week began. No, really. Just ask the cats.What I'm working on right now takes a lot of, um, soul-searching and brain power, so I haven't really had the energy to write anything for this blog.For example, I was going to write about how 'mixed-race' (what an ugly term!) children are plonked into a race category by the Singapore government, but Yawning Bread and my father beat me to it. My father's letter to the Straits Times was printed today: "A missed opportunity".I don't entirely agree with the last couple of paragraphs as published, because I think you can be Singaporean without being in Singapore, but other than that it's pretty much what I was going to say. I've had my own (minor) struggles with the Immigration and Customs Authority to recognise my 'race', so I've long recognised the daftness of this particular government requirement.Apropos, I also just finished reading Farish A. Noor's What Your Teacher Didn't Tell You: The Annexe Lectures Vol. 1, which has a chapter, "The Lost Tribes of Malaysia", on the meaning(lessness) of racial categories bestowed upon us by British colonialism. In grossly simplified terms: 'race' is a legacy of the colonial census, and not a very well-thought-out one at that, though today in Malaysia still effectively buttressing the colonial policy of 'divide and rule'. I've been saying that as far as this racial labelling in Singapore officialdom is concerned, we should all just tick the 'Others' box --- and carry on. Hello 2010 I meant to write something suitably offbeat for New Year's Eve, but I hadn't finished it by the time I had to go out to my aunt's last night and now that draft blog post just reads wrong.So.I still don't know what to call this decade, now that we're done with the Noughties/Naughties/nowhere-in-hell-are-they-the-Ohs. Is the new decade the Teens? The Twenty-'Teens? The Two-O-one-ies as Shan has suggested on Facebook? Someone think of something catchy, fast.(Speaking of catchy phrases, I like "The Catchphrase of the Decade". A lot.) Traditionally speaking When we gathered for the traditional Christmas family lunch yesterday, Packrat noted that he and Ondine had snagged the next-to-last French loaves at their neighbourhood bakery that morning. The shop owner had said to them, "Yesterday, this time, no more already." Then she had added, sagely, "Christmas, a lot of people eating curry."I kind of miss having curry at Christmas. When I was a kid, for some reason the family lunch was crowned by large tubs of chicken and fish curry, which my parents would order from their Little India restaurant of choice for that year. At some point we transitioned to having turkey and ham as the centrepiece of the meal. Now that I sit and think about it, though, nothing says Christmas to me like neat slices of French loaves and copious amounts of brown curry sliding all over a disposable plastic plate.Later, at a friend's gathering for strays-and-waifs (i.e. for friends who don't have family in Singapore to celebrate the holiday with), there was an attempt at pong pong croquet.But I couldn't stay and play, because there was more Christmas food waiting elsewhere. And friends too, of course. We rang out Christmas with glasses of Choya (Japanese plum liqueur), which given its alliterative attributes, seems like a fine new tradition to spread around. Don't say Singapore got nothing to do If you're not the Xmasy sort and/or you're wondering how to fill the hours meaningfully this holiday weekend, here are some totally cool, totally unrelated-to-Xmas things going on in Singapore that are well worth your time:Pretext is a photography exhibition going on at 2902 Gallery (which is at Old School). As the official copy says, "Pretext brings together nine artists who explore the interplay between text and image in art." The images happen to be all sorts of things, from grungy Singapore toilets to warm domestic images to ... well, go see lah. The exhibition is on till 23 January.(Full disclaimer: two of the nine artists happen to be my friends: the delightfully talented Ho Hui May and Jeff Chouw.)Nature Borne is a sculpture exhibition going on at the Singapore Botanic Gardens, also till 27 December. There are over 25 artworks by ten artists --- five Korean and five Singaporean --- exploring "the interplay between man and nature". I haven't seen this yet, but I plan to make a little ramble tomorrow.Finally, Burma VJ is an excellent documentary about some of Myanmar/Burma's freelance journalists (by which we mean individuals armed with small videocameras, internet links and the courage to file news stories about their country that its ruling regime would throw them into harsh labour camps for) and their eyewitness account of the 2007 protests by the country's monks. The documentary is straightforward, powerful and ... Argh, words fail me, just watch the trailer.The film came out last year and I saw it at a special screening organised by MARUAH last month. Now it's got a really short run at the Picturehouse till 27 December. More information is available at the Facebook page for Singapore screenings. Cultural cognizance I realise this is going to make some sound damn kentang (Westernised), but several times this week I've had to swot up on my Singlish/Asian street cred. To wit:Leceh (troublesome)I've been mispelling leceh (troublesome) as leh cheh (see for instance here and here). This has been going on for as long as --- well, ever since I started typing these words.冬至 (dongzhi, winter solstice)I did not know anything about the traditional Chinese celebration of 冬至 until I saw Adri's tweet yesterday:Guy next door said to the only Chinese girl in the group, "don't you know it's a big Chinese holiday today?" (No.) "You from Singapore?"Now I'm chagrined to find out I've been missing out on a lifetime's worth of annual tangyuan (glutinous rice ball) consumption. Gah!Potong (cut) vs. curi (steal)Yesterday I wanted to use the Malay word for 'steal' in an IM conversation. For some reason all my brain would spit out was potong and even with my miserable knowledge of that language, I knew that potong was not exactly the word I wanted. (For curious readers, a little Googling threw up this recent article from The Edge Malaysia, "What is life without 'potong'?")Anyway I had to resort to Dicts.info's online Malay dictionary, which clued me in to curi --- and the moment I saw the word on my screen, I could hear my mother's voice saying "Sometimes people curi-curi the thing ..." I knew the word, it just wasn't there when I needed it.All right, with all this talk of cross-cultural communication, it's fitting that I leave you with this rendition of Jingle Bell [sic], which I just received from an Indiaphile friend (not Adri, this time):Merry Xmas, everyone! To be a good guest I'm not sure when it is that I developed the habit of not showing up empty-handed when I visit someone or show up at their dinner/party, but earlier this evening I was picking up some groceries and suddenly it dawned on me that I'd better stock up on wine, so that I can always grab something from the fridge when I'm on my way out to any number of social engagements that are coming up this Xmas weekend.My mother is not the most custom-bound person, so this is not an upbringing thing. She's of the opinion that with close family and friends, you don't have to be so 客气 (scrupulously polite, to the point of standing on ceremony). Me --- maybe it's the fact that I'm not a good cook who can contribute anything to the dinner/party table. I feel a little shy if I show up to eat without proffering also at least some simple libations.Last week, a friend and I were making a call on some older friends whom we don't know that well, and we fretted in Cold Storage about what to bring along. Eventually, we decided on fresh lilies and some chocolates. As it turns out, we lucked out on the latter and happened to select the very brand of chocolates that was the host's husband's favourite.For this weekend's festivities, everyone is summarily getting wine, except for the party where I've volunteered to bring some food (from the delightful Garden Slug).Speaking of parties, it's time for that immortal quote from Oz in season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:Oz: We should figure out what kinda deal this is. I mean, is it a gathering, a shindig or a hootenanny?Cordelia: What's the difference?Oz: Well, a gathering is brie, mellow song stylings; shindig, dip, less mellow song stylings, perhaps a large amount of malt beverage; and hootenanny, well, it's chock full of hoot, just a little bit of nanny.--- "Dead Man's Party"I don't think there are any hootenannies awaiting me this week, but there most certainly will be gatherings (though probably sans brie) and perhaps if I'm lucky even a shindig or two.