Emotional Distance

 

I thought about the last few years. Something has changed, and one of the biggest things is that I stopped being very emotionally involved with people.

It is an exaggeration to say that I no longer have a friend in this world, but it's true that I haven't really taken the hard work to hang our with my friends.

I also think about my love life. There's not really been anything. The first phase was when women were untouchable and unreachable. I hadn't really known how to approach them, and they were painfully awkward years.

The second phase was when I was emotionally involved with a girl for the first time. And some of the moments were probably good (probably because I don't really remember.) The term didn't really exist in those days, but I was very likely the victim of narcissist abuse.

The third phase was when I still hung out with that girl, and I thought we were going to be “friends”. But I've come to realise that some of it was that I didn't want to lose her company, and some of it was that I still harboured the hope of getting into her ass. Time went on and it slowly dawned on me that

1. The prospects of consensual sex were very dim.

2. She was a bitch and I was wasting time with her.

3. We were growing apart. You could go along with anybody you found attractive when you were a teenager, but when you grow older, you'll know each other better and the differences will start to matter. I started to see more clearly that the person that she really was was really getting on my nerves. She was studying things that did not have a strong relationship with reality – an incredible amount of postmodernist mumbo jumbo.

We started getting contemptuous of each other, and eventually I made the decision to ghost her, which was quite easy because at that point I was mainly the one initiating contact. To be honest, I ghosted her because it was the one thing I could think of doing that would piss her off the most.

And as time went on, I didn't just ghost her, I promised myself that I would not talk to her, ever (it was surprisingly easy to keep this promise) and I would not hold on to any memory of the time that we had together. It would be like “Sunshine of the Eternal Mind”, when a person wiped his memory of an unhappy relationship. It brought me a peace of mind that I hadn't had for ages, at least since my adolescence. And I wasn't totally unaware of it, but every time I took out pictures of Japanese gravure models to get myself off to, I was emotionally distancing myself from women by reducing them to sex objects (and getting an hour of fun while I was doing it.) If my love life was a cute furry animal, this was a conscious decision on my part to strangle the life out of it, and also inflict the same kind of abuse on my own privates. 

The fourth phase was when I finally got my freedom back and I loved not having around so much that I didn't look for a girlfriend for the longest time. After a few more years, I ended up living in Mexico and that probably killed the prospect of me finding a girlfriend. Life was great.... up till the point when it was not.

I've now realised that that was very short sighted. When you are older, that is when you need the most the girlfriend that you met when you were young. My entire youth had gone by without me being in a proper relationship, and I had missed that rite of passage. I spent half an hour at the public piano, bashing out song after song. It happens very rarely but I did have one or two people clapping for me. That's me, reaping the reward as an old man, for what I did as a young man. Maybe I should have gone through the ordeal of having a girlfriend. Your happiness level outside of a relationship is a 5. Your happiness level in a relationship is somewhere between 0 and 10.

So while I'm happy that I got myself a peace of mind after emotionally distancing myself from that girl, I'm wondering if this is filtering into my contempt for the opposite sex. And while wiping my memory of all the good and bad things that took place was good in the short run, I wonder if it would have cost me in the long run.

Every School is a Good School

 

In hindsight, there is some consistency in the policy that the government wants to close down Yale NUS, and wants to close down the GEP. In both cases, they're taking what was purportedly an elite form of education, and trying to scale it up and make opportunities available to more people.

I'm an alumnus of the gifted program. I enjoyed my time there, and I will mourn the passing of that program, but I'm not going to mourn if some of the programs that made it what it is are opened up to more people.

When Singapore was newly liberated from colonial rule, there was some kind of sense to elitism. You didn't have a lot of money, and whatever you did have, you probably wanted to pool them together and select a few of your brightest people to send to developed countries, so that they could get educated, come back to Singapore and help build a society.

That was why a Columbo Plan scholarship was set up. And that's why, in a family of five, you would choose your eldest son to study and get into the middle class, so that after that happened, he could figure out a way to bring the rest of the family into the middle class. There's a mirror of that in Black America: Harlem was the place of art and culture for the Black people. It was where the entertainers went to prove themselves, at the Apollo theatre. Morehouse would be their Harvard University. (It's a respectable school but probably not an Ivy, unfortunately.)

But then the existence of elite universities is an uncomfortable one, because a few people could climb the ladder, and then kick it away when they reached the top. Over the years, there was this obsession about who would reach the top of the pile. There was the mentality amongst Singaporean students, that they needed, as children, to obtain the best credentials, then as adults they could take it easy and coast along on those great credentials. This is hardly a formula for maximising peoples' potentials.

Also, there was a crying need for Singapore to embrace multiple paths towards excellence. There was a lot of wastage of talent for people who may not fit in with the main strain of test taking.

These days, the computer science schools of NUS, NTU and SMU all have good students coming in. I know some of the graduates who are from neighbouring countries. I wish I knew what the Singaporeans who came through those programs are like. At the Factory, which is where I work, I've seen people from those three major universities, as well as Singapore Tech and SUTD.

Another significant change is that they've narrowed the credential gap between polytechnics and “A” levels. There are clueless morons who are chiding the youngsters for choosing polytechnic over the “A” levels. But polytechnic is better for preparing you for engineering and IT, whereas “A” levels is better for preparing you for science and data science. Obviously “A” levels is more intellectual, but polytechnic teaches you a lot of different skills. Instead of teaching critical thinking, it teaches pragmatic thinking.

We're in a different phase of developing our education system. We're no longer seeking to find our best people to create a beach head. It's now about Singapore being a magnet, and trying to attract the best talent from everywhere to turn it into a future ready economy.

I even spoke to one or two of the colleagues who worked with me, and they were wondering why Asia has this obsession with sending their children to the best grade schools. It's also notable that a lot of youngsters from overseas just enroll into whichever neighbourhood school they can find, and the best amongst them still end up in the best integrated programs and get good university places. 

They may be living in a world where it was no longer the case that all the best resources would be funnelled into the Raffles schools. Those schools would probably continue to be centres of excellence, but they would have to compete with the rest on a more level playing field. 

The idea that a leaving cert from a good school would set you up for life is an old idea from the 80s and the 90s. We have entered an era of creative destruction where it would not be good enough to latch on to a prestigious institution - a blue chip company or a prestigious government department. You had to be good, and had to prove yourself constantly, or else you'd get left behind. 

Changi Airport

 

Changi Airport is one of the most Singaporean things ever. A modern metropolis, a futuristic caravansarai. An island in the tropics which is somehow not like the rest. In a relatively backwards (but not necessarily unpleasant) part of the world. Hospitality, cosmopolitanism. A gateway between worlds. Between the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Western worlds. Between the civilised and rural worlds. A concrete jungle in the lush tropics. A piece of tarmac carved out from filling the sea in. A garden city housing a facility which is inherently destructive to the environment. A waiting room, a quarantine. A check-in area which is neither here nor there. A hundred kopitiams await you as you while the time away. In case you didn't know that Changi Airport is a bubble, they even built a glass dome around Jewel to press the point home.

Singapore is one of those great contradictions. It aspires to be a great city, and yet it is obviously too small to be a great country, let alone a great power. It is not a great cultural centre, and yet it imbibes from the great cultures of the world. It is small and yet it aspires towards exceptionalism. This exceptionalism is necessary, because without it, that would be the end of our existence as a an independent entity.

I was talking to a visiting angmoh, and he told me that this was an unreal and ephemeral vision. That was back in the day when Asia was still a rising power, and not yet a serious challenger to the west. I thought there was something quite condescending about that remark, but other than that, it showed how the idea of an Asian metropolis is quite strange and alien to his point of view, and it does highlight the vast contrasts – if not contradictions – in the various aspects that make up who we are.

It's not true at all that we are nothing more than a vision of the “floating world”. There are solid bases to who we fundamentally are. You should look at all the old photographs of pictures from the Rust Belt during the glory days. Your Detroits and Cincinnatis and Kansas Cities. The beautiful art Noveau buildings which no longer exist. That's ephemeral too!