Other Peoples' Lives / Broken Record

Sometimes, the comment is not about you. Sometimes it's not about you.

I'm back in the same apartment that I had turned my back on almost 10 years ago. I left, trying to take my life to the next level. In some ways, my life is on the next level. In some ways, it is not.

As some kind of backup plan, I had thought about the work that was done in my old workplace. I had written up a white paper about all the problems in there, and while being careful to avoid rubbishing everybody else's work, I talked about what could have been done to make things better.

I sent that paper to a few of my old colleagues. None of them read it, a few skimmed through it. One person did read it, and coincidently or not, he's now the new boss of the place.

I returned to Singapore a few years ago. And I met up with a few of my old colleagues, and talked about what I had written in the paper. Basically my message was for them to embrace big data. I don't think it's controversial, just trying to bring them more in line with what other people are doing in the second decade of the 21^st century (instead of the first decade). Most of the people in that room were people I already knew, but there was a guy who joined after I left.

He made that remark, “you sounded a little angry when you were writing that paper”. I think I replied, “I always sound a little crazy, so don't think too much about it.” But I was thinking, “was I crazy?”

Then a few years later, somebody remarked, “people don't stay long in that work place. People get fed up and leave.” And then it hit me, he wasn't asking about me and who I was. That “you sound angry” comment was something closer to: “if I were to keep on working here, would I end up as angry as you?”

And then that brings me back to the person that I was 10 years ago. Now I'm back in full circle. It was 10 years ago that I set in motion of a series of events that would end up in me moving to “Mexico”. And now I'm back here. I lost my job, I lost my car, and the US is in the kind of pandemic where I would rather not care about living there anymore. And I'm face to face with the country that I left behind. Not that I was even that keen to leave this place behind, but I feel like I've been in some kind of reverse time machine, where nothing has changed, except that you've grown older.

And I bumped into water girl in the lift. Yes, that same girl from my block that I unsuccessfully tried to go after, and magically I got to read her online blog and I realise that she'd make a terrible girlfriend. I'm not happy with her. She sounds immature, excessively neurotic and downright contemptuous. So I did meet her in the lift. She asked, “are you back from overseas?” I said, “you went overseas too didn't you?” I know she went to Australia. And she said she didn't. Which I knew to be untrue. So the conversation ended. We took the lift up to the apartment in silence. Maybe she didn't want to talk.

I may have cared about what she was thinking, or maybe not. But what shook me was that this was the life that I was living more than 10 years ago, and I'm stuck in a loop. I've made no nett progress. Yes, I've done a wonderful thing and lived overseas for years and had whatever adventures I've had in the meantime. But it feels like there's no progress. And I just feel that I'm stuck here, my life span 10 years shorter, cleaning up a 10 year old mess.

But sometimes you just feel sad for her... she hasn't changed in 10 years. There doesn't seem to be any progression. People live in some strange time warp.

Well, maybe I'm not in that time warp. I may be more of a doer than I was 10 years ago. Back then I was just a dreamer. And then I ended up doing stuff. Programming. Music. Feeding myself and keeping myself alive. Wasn't that much, but not nothing. Notebooks full of musical ideas.

It's strange to call her “water girl”. She's not a girl anymore. She's no longer in full bloom, not the kind of person I'd have wanted to go stalk. She's too old to be a troubled youth leading an aimless life. People who are older unfortunately are judged more harshly. That's a fact of life. I probably wouldn't want to get mad at her, but my cutting off that conversation was a flash of anger. She didn't have to lie to me about going overseas. But if she's miserable, then I don't really want to have anything to do with her.

The problem is that I will occasionally bump into her over and over. And it's going to weigh on me. I'll see her and she'll remind me that my life is nothing more than a broken record. I don't want to feel like my progress has stalled, but that might be what life has in store for you after 35. It's just that when people enter parenthood, they have this other distraction, and it's something that counts as progress for them. It's not longer easy from now on. Nothing is given. Everything you have has to be clawed in.

Recently, on a whatsapp chat, a few guys I knew from way back talked about a project that I did when I was in primary 4, and people still remembered that project. It's like that Springsteen song, "Glory Days", when people are reminiscing about the past. It was nice to be reminded of a time when I was one of the smarter guys in class, and in an environment where that was regarded as a good thing. The great and terrible aspect of life is that the definition of success is constantly changing. In fact I would say, at the moment, it is a bad thing, because the definition is also narrowing. When the definition narrows, it's a more unequal society, because the number of people who can succeed is smaller. But yes, there were times when I did have a lot more going for me than right now, and it's just a shame the good times don't last for long. 

And yet the thread that ties these three stories together is that by the time you're in middle age, you will be haunted by your past in many ways you didn't expect to. You might find yourself longing for days gone by, you might find that you have to start over in many ways, and you're unable to because you're still tethered to the past. When you young, you live in a reality that you instinctively understand because you know it with every fibre of your soul. But when you're older, you have one foot in the past and one foot in the present, and you might get conflicted between two completely different cultures. 

Blank Spaces of History

 

It's usually the case that some of the biographies publishing industry will write biographies of big political figures. None of them come bigger than presidential biographies.

When we look at the presidents of the USA, usually what happens is that we'll look at the first few presidents, and they are the really consequential ones. And we'll look at the presidents from the time that the US became a great world power, maybe from McKinley or Theodore Roosevelt onwards. And there's this big gap between Andrew Jackson and McKinley, where there weren't many presidents of note, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.

So I was looking at Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan. These were the anti-bellum presidents. During this time, there was the North and the South growing apart from each other. There were a lot of tensions that led to the Civil War. Polk was the president who oversaw the Mexican War, I think, so he emerges with some credit. The rest of these guy were people who just oversaw slavery and expansion of the territory of the USA, and the building of the empire.

The US was a country which grew slowly. We're not accustomed to this. Singapore went from a third world country – not a backwater, cos it was never a backwater, but it was a third world country – to a first world one in less than 50 years. The US eventually became a great nation, but the transformation took more than a hundred years, and there was that greatest of all hurdles to be crossed, the Civil War.

But there was a lot of this blank space in between. Maybe I hadn't really researched that far into that, but there was a lot of blank space. And then, most of the history that I read about took place in the 20^th century. When the west was won, when the imperial expansion of the continental United States was over. Perhaps I hadn't paid close enough attention to the legends of the US: the Wild West outlaws, the Mexican war legends, the literary figures like Mark Twain. Maybe I was looking more at the periods when the modern government would exert a greater influence on peoples' lives.

IT was when the US started becoming an imperial power that its history became more notable. The conquest of Philippines, Hawaii, the south Pacific and Alaska. Then its involvement in the first World War, the rise of the FBI, the roaring twenties and the jazz age.

The thing about the US was that it seemed like a little corner of the world, all by itself. Even when the Americans took trips abroad to Europe – which was basically the only other part of the world they considered civilised, there was this air of bewilderment, where the old world had a kind of sophistication they could never understand. And yet there was this moral hectoring that you saw from the Americans, when Fitzgerald accused his fellow Americans of being “careless drivers”. In more modern language, we'd say that these people do not live with mindfulness. This was the land of the free, and some people would equate that with being the land of the careless. You simply did what you felt like doing, and you couldn't care less. Slavery, genocide was all part of this care less attitude. People could still get by, regardless, because there was always a way to distance themselves from everything else.

What is interesting, though, is that I think about the parallels between my life and the history of a nation. When we think about history, we are actually not that interested in the continuities. The people doing the business of getting through their everyday lives are not that interesting to us. What is truly significant is the times of turbulence, when things did change. We also have to look at the blank areas in between, when things stayed the way they were. Why were black people slaves for hundreds of years, generation after generation? It's not only about why things change, but also why they didn't change. The US of the 13 states is so different from the US of the 1960s. How did it morph from one shape to the other? Universities lasted for centuries. What stayed the same about the Ivy League universities and what changed?

Now I'm in my 40s, and this blog has been around for almost 20 years – I blogged a lot more in the first 5 years. What did I change about myself, and what did I do over and over again, without really knowing and understanding why?

Nighthawks at the Diner

I still remember that when I was on that crazy 10km hike in the middle of the night. It was a tradition that all the sec 3 ppl in that crazy uniform group had to hike from a certain girl's school to East Coast Park, and set up a tent there and spend the night there till morning. I don't know if they still have that tradition, but these days, some people actually live in tents on East Coast Park.

I had walked past a diner. I can't remember which – was it McDonald's? Burger King? It seemed like such a wonderful vision to me at first. Me and a few friends, hanging out at one of those booths. I don't know – was I trying to recreate those moments over and over again? 

There was a period in my life when I actually tried to be a McDonald's kid. I was 30 by then. I would just buy a medium coke, and sit there with a book for hours. I don't really know why now, looking back at it. I think back then I lacked a larger sense of purpose. All I knew was that I had a job, and I didn't have to worry about it. Back then, quite possibly, the only thought on my mind was escape. Maybe I just liked being in a comfortable position. Now that I'm even older than that, I think back and I wonder, what was I thinking? I could have been doing something that had some positive consequences in my life, and I didn't do anything. Well I got some knowledge from books. I treaded water. I don't know.... 

Then I actually went to America, the land where you had all these diners. I liked going there. I liked drinking coffee, eating bacon and eggs. I did that a lot. It was great for the first few times, until something seeped into me. The emotional coldness of the whole thing started to eat into me. I'd be alone, somebody who I didn't care about, would never see again, would be filling up my coffee. For a while, it felt great to be quaffing down the pancakes, even though you knew the syrup was nothing but empty calories. 

And the waitresses … I don't know.. I hardly made small talk with them. I could never relate to them. The only thing I cared about was getting a second or third refill of coffee. Maybe that was back in the first decade of me drinking coffee for fun, when somehow it was the most wonderful thing ever invented. 

Maybe books were fun because back then I was dating – over the internet, of course – a girl who also loved books. Maybe I discovered books around the same time that I discovered romance. Maybe I spent a life time trying to convince myself that I loved books and studying, and for an all too brief moment, everything clicked. Maybe that was the first time that a few things came together in a nicely bundled package – a steady job, a few years in a gothic architecture wonderland that was Snowy Hill, a love of books. I was sold on the university dream. 

And maybe the diner was a wonderful dream, because it was the end of me being cooped up in the house with my parents. It smelled like something that I had been deprived of for a long time. It was a bright light in the middle of the night. 

Diners in America are single storey buildings, with a large signboard, which basically are advertisements for the highway. You can't get more 20th century than that. You slowed down on the main road, and then looked for somewhere to turn in. I remember going back to America during my trip across the continent, and somehow I just wanted to go into a KFC, a Jack in the Box, an In n Out and a Popeye's. Somehow, it just seemed like a pilgrimage that I had to take. 

And somehow, that area – which was basically Kallang – ended up being a place that the last 10 km of the marathon snaked through... it was the most dreadful part of my marathon, the hell that I had to go through in order to claim my finisher's medal. I don't know if that factors into that. 

What I did like during my first working years, at the factory, was sitting at a cafe and ordering a cake or a pie, and eating it. Or sometimes it would be an ice cream. Somehow I just liked going to all the ice cream spots and thought nothing of dumping $5 on a single or double scoop, and sit there and go my way through a book. I could go to a place that had soft serves. I remember that when meeting up with some of my old classmates, I even brought them some ice cream, even though it was half melted by the time I got through with that. 

I don't know if that dream went away. All I know is that by the time I went to live in Mexico, it stopped being attractive for me to while away my time in the interior of a restaurant. Of course, I would be searching through the pages of yelp, and trying to find this or that barbeque place. But possibly I had too much of a sense of purpose to want that. No, I never wanted to be in a tavern, and I didn't really sign up for that. And all the coffee shops were closed by nightfall. And I seldom got up early enough to spend my morning in a coffee shop. Sometimes I went for super early breakfast at the broken yolk, but that was about it. In America, you could go to one of those diners late at night, and there'd be one or two of those homeless people. And for all you know, the waitress serving you could be homeless herself, spitting in your food, whatever. 

Some things would still be great for me. For example, sitting down at a kopitiam and eating a good meal. But that's somehow different. 

The pandemic has basically destroyed the possibility of me sitting down at a restaurant. It's going to be quite a while before I go back to doing that. I was out and about during the weekend, jogging to a shopping mall where I used to go to frequently. I was alarmed to see a few upmarket coffee joints packed with people. Not really packed, but with people sitting there and chilling for hours. It was terribly alarming.