Medium Delirium

alot can change in a decade

Speaking of things that are wonderfully archaic, this morning while waiting for the bus home I was approached by a tourist who asked me if the bus coming would take him to a certain local attraction. He looked to be in his late 20s or early 30s, was travelling solo, and sounded German (to my untrained ear). Before I could answer, he swivelled his phone around to show me his screen, and explained that his ‘GPS was not working’. Clearly he had no roaming data and since there’s no wifi at a bus stop, his maps app had stalled. I found the notion of not having data while travelling so quaint; I tried to recall when I’d last travelled without data roaming, and landed on somewhere in my mid-twenties, almost a decade ago. Perhaps not a terribly long time in the grand scale of things, but a lot has happened in the past decade, and data roaming is now so cheap and accessible that I cannot imagine myself or anyone I know not being equipped with it for travel. There are obvious perks to having data, like not having to navigate a foreign city blind. But, you know, there is some magic (and skill) in scouting a friendly local to ask for help from, which a GPS simply can’t match.

I helped him make sure he was getting the right bus, and tried to give him some visual cues to look out for that would signal his stop. He thanked me, then asked, ‘Does everyone in Singapore speak english? Everyone seems to speak it so well.’ I got this a lot when I was a student in the UK, but it was quite surprising to hear it asked right here in my homeland, since one would assume a traveller might have done some basic research before arriving, and surely would know that english is the first language here. It’s no matter, of course, and it made me pleased to think how much he would stand to learn about this country, given that he was coming with such minimal background information. When the bus came, I wished him all the best; as I got off, I glanced at the back of the bus and spotted him sitting with a hoodie on, gazing out the window. I hope he has a nice holiday.

5th Aug 2026

life, lifestyle, singapore, travel, writing
sketches

At Pilates last week, I found myself in a cosy little class of just three students. The other two were a middle aged couple, clearly regulars from the way they chatted breezily with the instructor. They didn’t look particularly fit but turned out to be surprisingly strong, managing with ease some exercises that had me shaking like a mound of jelly. Before class began, the husband was putting his things away in the cubby hole and I was standing beside him trying to get my watch off (a fiddly butterfly clip). Sitting on the reformer machine, the wife looked up at the husband and said ‘Wow! I just noticed your socks match your outfit today.” I glanced over at him; he had on a grey dry fit shirt and black shorts. Panning downwards, he’d chosen socks with a pattern of garishly bright circles of primary colours. I have no idea what the wife was talking about. The instructor also looked confusedly at his outfit, then gracefully meandered away onto a new topic.

Ever since reading Shaun Bythell’s excellent Diary of. a Bookseller, I’ve made it a point to try to support local independent bookshops by either buying the books they have, or engaging in what must be the moribund practice of ordering in through them, which I had no idea was possible until I read DOAB. On the hunt for two titles, I wrote to my favourite local bookstore requesting an order, which they noted and put in for me. That was in January of this year. Having never heard back from them since, I took the opportunity when I was in the area to pop in and ask after them. When I explained the situation it seemed to bewilder the young girl at the desk, who hurriedly keyed my details into the shop’s computer. After some investigation she apologetically relayed that, hard as it was to believe, the order was still on its way. She explained that sometimes with standalone requests the supplier could take months to fulfil the order. Since there was zero urgency I assured her it was fine, and they could let me know when (and if) it ever showed up. I find it so charmingly archaic, in an era where almost anything can be ordered online one day and delivered the next, that one could be expected to wait months for a book, or really, for anything at all. It’s hard to say this without sounding sarcastic, but truly, I adore the slowness of it. Of course, I have the privilege of finding this inefficiency endearing rather than annoying, and I’m sure I would feel very differently if instead of books I was waiting on, let’s say, a new set of retainers for my teeth.

Goodnight! Will try to make more of these little sketches of my humdrum little life more often. Really need to write more to justify the WordPress fees.

4th Aug 2026

books, life, lifestyle, singapore, writing
propped up and powering through

Illness has a way of making you powerfully aware of the minutiae of the body’s mechanisms. I am afflicted with nothing more than the common cold, yet when I walk a little farther I feel my muscles and something in my chest drawn tight and downwards, towards the earth. The radius of my walkable area has shrunk considerably and I am warned of its limits with a dullness in my head and a throbbing behind my eyes. The wind picks up slightly, or the temperature of the air conditioning drops by a degree, and my eyes begin to water, my nose itching uncomfortably. Conversely, the healing powers of rest and recovery are felt so tangibly. I sit down for 5 minutes and feel a sigh of relief blossoming in every cell of my body. A cup of tea flushes out the chill in my lungs. I sink into the bath till my cheeks are flushed, enveloping my tired limbs in water and lavender oil; a sneeze tore violently through a cumulonimbus cloud of bubbles, sending foamy fragments onto the pages of the book I was reading.

Might take a nap now. This weekend is being heavily propped up by a cocktail of Panadol, Difflam and Tolok Angin, but all in all I’m still ushering in a new year of existence feeling happy and grateful. It helps, of course, that J has planned a surprise weekend away in a nice hotel. I say ‘away’ when really I am only about 5 MRT stations away from home, but the white sheets, mood lighting and 24/7 air-conditioning of a hotel room never fail to make me feel like I’ve crossed over into another world without needing to get my passport stamped.

25th Jul 2026

life, lifestyle, singapore, writing
bookmarks in the story of an ordinary life

My posts here are few and far between, and yet every one seems to require a mention of how miserably hot the weather is. The general rule these days seems to be to get by with as little clothing as possible without constituting a crime. I took a shower 15 minutes ago, walked around the house a little, et voila – enveloped in a thin film of sweat once more.

It takes a special kind of person to, upon seeing a mother and baby headed their way, move to occupy more of the 2-seater bench they are solely occupying, instead of making room to share.

I took the baby to an indoor playground the other day, a favourite past time of ours that kills both the baby-entertainment and air-conditioning birds with one stone. As she was crawling around, she abruptly face-planted downwards (which she seems inexplicably prone to doing every once in awhile). As luck would have it, her head landed, with considerable force, smack on the soft fleshy part of my right foot, thus averting a mild head injury and a lot of crying. Sweet serendipity.

I took a bit of an evening walk yesterday around the river (read: storm drain) in my neighbourhood. Amongst the usual crowd of runners, joggers, dog-walkers and pram-pushers, one man stood out: he was dressed for manual labour, and was kneeling, alone, by the railing at the river’s edge. As I walked by, I watched as he prostrated himself, bowing in (I assume) the direction of Mecca. Evening prayers. As he raised himself back up onto his knees, I saw flecks of gravel and small leaves on his forehead, so deeply had he pressed himself into the ground. I was struck by the magnitude of this simple but reverential act.

The baby is stirring on the monitor. Back to work!

6th Jul 2026

baby, family, life, lifestyle, motherhood, parenting, singapore, writing
no rest for the sweaty

Finally, a moment to sit and write for abit.

I’ve been thinking over the past few days about how I spend an inordinate amount of time on heat management. The weather has been perilously, oppressively hot, the air thick and fiery like a furnace; how are people supposed to be nice to each other in weather like that? It’s all I can do to keep from stripping bare in public and kicking a plant out of frustration. It’s worse with a baby, of course, because now I have to think about how to keep two people cool, instead of just me. Most days, this results in us popping out twice or even thrice a day to malls for air-conditioning – the colder the better, polar conditions are ideal – for however long she deigns to stay confined in the stroller. Whatever heat we are able to expel on our expeditions is quickly regained during the short walk from the MRT station back home, which inevitably results in us both being covered with an uncomfortable film of sweat by the time we get to our doorstep.

My absence from this space is largely due to trying to juggle two creative projects at the moment: drawing a comic for a charity organisation, and designing a book cover for a local poet’s upcoming self-published collection. On top of that, the baby is extremely active and requires constant supervision. Whatever pockets of time I’m able to wrangle from the day, I spend being the rapt audience of a series of marginally different ASMR vlogs on Youtube.

I’ve started doing reformer pilates, albeit at an unhelpfully slow rate (about one class every 2-3 weeks). It’s so expensive that I can’t tell which makes my heart race more: the intensity of the exercises, or the process of paying for a class. For what it’s worth, each 50 minute class sees my body worked to its limit, and the other day my legs were so shaken I had to limp out of class, pretending I was taking a slow stroll for no particular reason. I spent the next day in deep, deep pain; my hamstrings and glutes were positively pulverised. In some twisted, masochistic way, the pain made me feel better about the money I’d paid for the class, since it was a tangible reminder that results had been reaped. Ah, the saccharine hell of a life spent groping through the garden maze in this capitalist wonderland.

18th Apr 2026

baby, family, life, lifestyle, motherhood, parenting, singapore, writing
revisiting: HCMC & memories of The Best Pho

Parenthood milestone – took my first holiday since getting pregnant, a pocket-sized weekend getaway to Ho Chi Minh. I flew off on a Friday afternoon and was back on the couch by Sunday night; a blink of an eye by vacation standards, but the longest I’ve ever spent away from the baby. It felt good to bask briefly in the illusion of freedom, though my boobs decided to dampen my feelings of liberation by promptly becoming engorged. I spent Saturday trying to deal with an achy chest heaving with milk – mind you, milk production is never this zealous when the baby is actually around to have a drink – and at regular intervals had to return to the hotel room to milk myself like a cow.

HCMC is less chaotic than I recall, but perhaps I feel this way because I’ve been to Hanoi now, and that, well, that is TRUE chaos. Since we didn’t have much time at all, we mostly circumambulated within walking distance of the hotel, which was in a very central location. The area was teeming with tourists and every other shop was peddling identical, kitschy souvenirs. My sister (who I was joining on the tail end of her work trip) was deathly afraid of contracting food poisoning, so unfortunately we had to steer clear of street food; this being Southeast Asia, those places of course were where all the good food was to be found. Instead, we had mediocre pho at more sanitised joints and ultimately concluded that we’d had better Vietnamese food back home in Singapore. Personally, I’d also had way better in both London and New York. The Vietnamese diaspora, as J reminds me, reached far and wide and took their excellent cuisine with them. One of the best memories of my uni years in London is of countless evenings spent at Cafe East, a humble but excellent Vietnamese restaurant in Surrey Quays. It occupied a standalone, one-storey building at a corner of the Odeon’s outdoor carpark, and in winter we would tuck our chins into our cheap Primark puff jackets and brave the freezing gales that swept, unobstructed, across the large expanse of empty lots, arriving with relief to a steaming bowl of pho that would thaw our frozen cheeks and warm our young and restless hearts. Cafe East’s pho tai is still the best pho I’ve ever had, and I suspect will continue to be because it was seasoned not only with herbs and salt and fish sauce but also the irreplaceable taste of nostalgia and crystallised youth.

This trip was a bit of a warm up exercise for a longer one I’m hoping to take later in the year, to go gallivanting in Europe for a little bit. We’ll see!

20th Mar 2026

family, ho chi minh, life, lifestyle, motherhood, parenting, singapore, travel, vietnam, writing
The weather this week has been infernally hot and humid; the storms and cool weather of the Lunar New Year seem to be well and truly over, and we hurtle straight on into the furnace that is March. Simply doing nothing at all seems to generate a sticky and uncomfortable layer of sweat. On the way to my mum’s place yesterday, we walked past an older caucasian couple. The husband had on a shirt, jeans, and, unbelievably, a scarf around his neck. It was late afternoon and the air had well and truly been stewed in the blazing heat of the day. This was the sort of weather in which one wishes to divest oneself of all unnecessary articles of clothing (even some of the necessary ones), so it’s hard to imagine what possessed him to not only not remove any clothing, but add more on. Perhaps he was ill, or from a climate even more oppressively hot than this.

Last week I ran into a friend from my teenage years at the hawker centre. This friend of mine had been quite popular as a teenager – you know the type. Loud and funny, played basketball, busts out obscure references to American culture. Tall, quite good looking, physically fit, cool. It’s probably fair (though quite unkind) to say that he has aged like, if not milk, then definitely something with dairy in it. In place of his abs (probably) he now sports a sizeable belly, and appears to have inherited not only his father’s good features but also his receding hairline. He doesn’t look bad, just, well, normal, significantly different from his youth, and probably not how he expected himself to look at this age. To his credit, he seems well aware of this physical decline and often pokes fun at himself on social media, with a great deal of mock (I hope) bitterness about the genetic card he has been dealt, and his penchant for fried chicken. When I said hello he did however look a bit embarrassed to see me and we had a brief but awkward exchange where I laughed too loudly in front of his sleeping baby. Maybe he felt uncomfortable because I had known him when he was in his physical prime, and I’m sure it’s also harder to make fun of yourself convincingly when you’re not typing a caption but speaking to an actual person. I suppose therein lies the benefit of not peaking too early, especially in your teenage years. Fifteen years down the road, when you no longer have a sky-high metabolism and bountiful supplies of collagen, people are less likely to wonder ‘what happened?’; at best, they regard you as having glowed up, and at worst they think it’s just more of the same.

J got his medical report back – bad cholesterol at astronomically high levels. He has now been placed on a diet (by me). This morning I made 3-ingredient oat pancakes (banana, oat and egg) that looked disconcertingly like meat patties, but turned out to be quite delicious.

Happy weekend!

28th Feb 2026

family, life, lifestyle, singapore, writing
slogan central

One of the perks of not staring at a screen while out in public is getting to read the things people wear on their clothes. Mostly you get run-of-the-mill stuff like JUST DO IT and ANTI SOCIAL SOCIAL CLUB. Then there are the cringe ones like DON’T TEXT ME I’M BUSY (?? just saw this on a gentleman we passed on our evening walk), or various other mundanities. If you keep your eyes peeled, however, and persevere, you do eventually spot the gems. I once saw a Buddhist nun in her robes wearing – on her shaved head – a glaringly incongruous neon pink cap with the SUPREME logo splashed across it. Most memorably, I was once sitting on the upper deck of a bus when I looked out the window and spotted an old auntie on the pavement. She must have been in her 70s, with a bow-legged and onerous gait, half relying on the shopping trolley she was pushing to support her as she limped along. Emblazoned across the shirt she was wearing in bold font so large I could see it from the upper deck of a bus a significant distance away, was GET READY FOR THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION.

Rather ambitious considering she was struggling to even walk. I suppose readiness could be about mental preparation as much as the physical, and who would I be to deny any individual their chance at a SEXUAL REVOLUTION?

27th Feb 2026

life, lifestyle, singapore, writing
Oppressively humid day – the air hot, still, and heaving with moisture. Took a shower to cool off, and within minutes of exiting the bathroom and getting dressed, I was coated with a thin film of sweat once more.

Today was tinted with an inexplicable shade of melancholy, an anonymous heaviness bearing down upon me for most of the afternoon. Mercifully, I can’t remember the last time I had an episode like this. In the few weeks after giving birth I was quite a weepy mess, but I suppose that can easily be explained by hormones rushing all through me in every direction. Some years ago I was quite regularly plagued by moments of despair that, like today’s, seemed to strike for no rhyme or reason. If you’re poetic, you could call it melancholy. If you’re pragmatic, you might call it undiagnosed depressive episodes. It’s embarrassing, but a lot of the gloom and misery that churned in my gut were caused by an intense fear of being left behind in life; everywhere I looked, my peers were settling down, having families, and, well, moving. There was much I enjoyed about my singleness and its freedoms, but I often felt intensely alone too. I am well aware that to other single friends, I am probably now that person who ‘has their life together’, and I remind myself to try to be as considerate and thoughtful towards them as possible, since I know how isolating it can feel.

Rolling around on the bed today, my ten month old prised a hair velcro off my head and managed to stow it away amongst the sheets, refusing to tell me where even after I harassed her for it. Later in the day she also managed to get her hands on my butterfly clip and wasted no time in absconding with it. This time I managed to catch her as she released it into the chasm between the mattress and the bed frame, and when she looked away I hurriedly fished it out and reinstated it on my head.

Trump’s State of the Union address is playing on the TV outside and bits keep wafting in, bringing with them a strong sense of dystopia and the cloying scent of delusion.

Goodnight!

25th Feb 2026

family, life, lifestyle, mental-health, motherhood, singapore, writing
My poor mother has had to cancel a credit card because some enterprising hacker in the US has used it to spend $400 on Only Fans. Reporting the fraudulent transaction, she asked the bank staff on the other end of the phone who would eventually foot the bill. Upon finding out the merchant would, she fretted about ‘the company having to pay’. I assured her it would hardly put a dent in Only Fans’ profits.

Ploughed through the afternoon while fighting a brain fog caused by the cocktail of pills I’ve had to take to combat this vile and persistent bout of flu.

24th Feb 2026

life, lifestyle, singapore, writing