quiet cars

Cars these days are altogether too quiet. There was a time when you could hear a car revving its way down the road when it was still a speck in the distance. Nowadays, I sometimes don’t hear an oncoming car until it’s just meters away, and the sound is now a purring rather than a roaring. This may seem like a trivial point, but it’s significant for people like me – I have pretty good eyesight and have spent most of my life without needing to wear glasses, but for some reason I seem to process the world better through my sense of hearing. Remembering people’s voices comes easier to me than remembering their faces, and in the case of traffic, I often hear cars before I actually notice them visually. Now that most passenger cars are designed to reduce noise pollution, there have been a couple of times when that seeing happens just a startled heartbeat away from a near-accident. Benjamin Bloom (of Bloom’s Taxonomy fame) would say that people like me are auditory learners: we make our way through the world in sound.

It’s an odd situation to be in. Most of us would assume that quieter cars are a good thing. Yet for someone like me, or (even more so) for the visually impaired, this apparent blessing might actually be a danger. Things like this are small reminders that our social worlds are, by and large, democratic. The norms we live by are determined by the majority – and that still seems to me the most practical arrangement. I’m not sure how else we can organise things.

My first takeaway (pardon the corporate-speak) is that it would be well for all of us to remember how contingent and context-dependent life is. On an island of the colour-blind (to borrow the title of a book by Oliver Sacks), a red ‘Danger’ sign could well be perceived by the majority as a calm, soothing blue, and thus lose some of its symbolic effectiveness. Design, therefore, has to take into account context in order to truly serve the needs of individuals and communities.

My second takeaway is that it would be well for the majority in any context to always bear in mind the needs of the minority / minorities. I think that nine times out of ten, much of what is often perceived as discrimination is probably mostly just thoughtlessness. Not that thoughtlessness is an unproblematic thing, of course. But it’s not necessarily malicious. And as long as there’s no malice involved, we can come together to communicate our needs and work to make sure that while we don’t do away with norms entirely (because the needs of the majority still need attending to), we make adjustments to accommodate those in the minority.

Now what’s the solution to the problem of quiet cars? Feel free to ping me if you find an answer!

 

never too small

If anyone were to ask me how I got through the first year of the pandemic, after rushing back to Singapore from Pittsburgh with only a cabin-sized suitcase, a shoulder bag, and a small haversack, finishing the last two semesters of my MFA via Zoom, and then never returning to the US after that (it's a long story -- suffice to say that I was helped by the kindness of strangers and near-strangers, and that I gave away almost the entire contents of my studio apartment, except for some clothes and most of my books, which said strangers and near-strangers helped to ship back to Singapore) -- I'd point them to Never Too Small: a YouTube video channel started by Aussie Colin Chee and devoted to making a case for the viability and attractiveness of small-apartment living.

There's something wonderfully soothing about Never Too Small videos. It could be the minimalist instrumental music. Or the zen-like calm of the architects' voices. (Each episode has the architect/s of the featured apartment walking viewers through the space and explaining the thinking behind their design. And I swear, they probably do voice-auditions as part of the apartment-selection process.) Maybe it's the airy, light-soaked spaces and the gorgeous-yet-practical interior designs. The soft-gentle ambient sounds in the outdoor shots: the faint rumble of traffic in the background, the click-clacking of pedestrian footfalls, the rustle of trees in the wind. The fact that the weather always looks perfect on these videos: the sunlight always clear and lucent, the skies always pleasantly blue, pleasantly half-clouded with cotton-wool clouds. Everything is always just right: never too much or too little of anything.

It's a kind of vision of paradise, urban style, transposed into the format of neatly-packaged 3- to 10-minute YouTube videos. I suppose what the channel sells is the possibility of having it all -- at least, as far as one's living space is concerned. The promise is that one can create an oasis for oneself right in the middle of the city (and presumably on a relatively modest budget), do it in an environmentally sustainable way, and still have access to everything one could possibly need, whether inside the apartment (via clever interior design) or outside, in the surrounding urban area. And of course, I recognise that that this is probably a fantasy. A very articulate, well-put together fantasy, but still a fantasy nonetheless. That kind of perfection just doesn't exist, this side of paradise. 

Still. The videos got me through the first year of a global pandemic. They were what I turned to when I was quietly mourning the loss of my own studio apartment in Pittsburgh -- my small retreat in an alien city, the one thing I really, 100%, unequivocally loved about my life there. I felt somewhat gratified watching these videos and thinking to myself that I hadn't done too badly in terms of doing up my apartment with whatever resources / budget I had. And they gave me room to dream about possibly owning such a space for myself again -- maybe -- at some point in an uncertain future. 

So. To Colin Chee, if you ever read this: Thank you. I know the channel has since become a global phenomenon. But I don't think anyone expected that to happen at the beginning. And the team probably doesn't need any more encouragement now. But let this be an encouragement regardless -- a small nod to that initial seed of an idea and to all the early videos, before the channel gained its current viewership figures. And I hope this is an encouragement, too, to anyone else out there with a hope and a dream and a willingness to work hard to make it happen. Keep going. I really believe that with hard work, perseverance, and not-a-little-bit of luck, no effort is ever too small to make some sort of a positive difference.

off days

It's the middle of January, and by now, most office-workers in Singapore would probably already have booked their leave for the rest of the year. At least, that's how things used to be done Before Covid (BC). When we could still travel and getting first dibs on the coveted stretches of time before and after long public holiday weekends could mean the difference between being stuck in Singapore and a week-long holiday in Bali. The stakes don't feel quite so high now, During Covid (DC). But perhaps we still prefer to book our leave early. It's just the kiasu Singaporean thing to do. 

We call them 'off days' here -- the days when one is on leave. Elsewhere, though, that term means something quite different. In the world of global English, 'he's having an off day' means that the guy in question is not at his best that day, that he's been making boo-boos in his work, that all is not as it should be. It's something akin to what used to be called 'having a bad hair day'. (Though I have to say that between the two, I much prefer the sound of 'having a bad hair day'. There's something adorably disheveled about it, that locates the fault of the bad day in something that could be easily fixed with a nice blow-dry and maybe some handy hair-gel. It just feels more gracious, somehow.)

Off days (in both sense of the word) are reminders of our humanity. No matter what the self-help books and that wonderful song from Wicked tell us, we are not unlimited. Whether BC or DC, we need our days of rest: our long lazy days for sleeping in or running errands, our three-day staycations at Sentosa. And there will be days when things just don't go the way we like, when we will not be at our best, no matter how hard we try. I think that's a relief, really. We're free to be human. We don't have to go through life always defying gravity. And anyway, as anyone who's tried doing that for too long will tell you, there's no defeating nature. Not in the long run. Someone should write a song about that. Maybe they can put it in a musical about Isaac Newton and call it Discovering Gravity. 

trees in the wind

How many different words do we have in English to describe the sound of the wind in the trees? 

Rustle. Whisper. Murmur. Susurration. Sough. Psithurism. (Ok -- I confess one of those words was actually entirely unknown to me before I found it on Google today ...)

How is it that the English language is so impoverished when it comes to describing one of the most beautiful, soothing sounds in the natural world? When compared with the sheer variety of synonyms for 'cry', for example -- it really does give one pause. 

I'm reminded of the 1994 film Nell, starring Jodie Foster as a young woman who'd been raised almost entirely in isolation by her mother in a cabin in the North Carolina mountains. After her mother's death, Nell is discovered by the local town doctor, who takes an interest in her case and eventually learns that the apparently undecipherable language she speaks is actually a distorted version of English. Most of the film escapes my mind -- but I do remember that Nell had a habit of standing in the outdoors with her face tilted up towards the sky and swaying in almost-ecstasy from side to side with her arms raised above her head, all the while murmuring to herself in her sing-song, lisping way, 'tey in the wey ... tey in the wey...' Which turned out to be her way of saying, 'tree in the wind'. 

Why that one detail stands out for me so clearly, why it seems to me to epitomise something of the film's very essence -- I really can't say. It's just an odd detail that has stayed with me all these years, long after almost everything else about the film has long been lost to my memory. 

waiting in line

I've spent a good deal of time this last month waiting in line. And not just queuing to make payments for purchases. The kind of waiting in line I was doing involved the sorts of things that render the wait unpredictable -- because nobody had any way of knowing in advance how long the people ahead of me would take for their individual transactions or interactions. Waiting at the doctor's; waiting at the bank; waiting for a free slot to open up on some Super Uber Busy Person's schedule so that that long-overdue conversation could finally be had.

Waiting in line is the great equaliser. That's why I tolerate it. ('Like' would be asking too much. I'm not yet a saint.) It seems to me the most sensible way of distributing scarce resources. Which is why I've always been rather bemused when I hear talk of how queuing is a distinctively British tradition. Distinctively British? What do other countries do? 

(And yes, I do know what the alternatives are. Prioritisation based on need or ability to pay, whether over or under the table; lotteries; and perhaps, in some places, Sheer Anarchy...)

(Perhaps my puzzlement simply highlights the extent to which my mind has been colonised -- but let's leave that discussion for another time.)

Except in cases of genuine need, my boring colonised mind rather likes the idea of everyone just boringly waiting in line, patiently contributing their share to building a fair and equal society. There's something so civil about it. So hip hip hurrah! Three cheers for waiting in line! And excuse me while I go queue for my Chinese New Year bak kwa ...

sitting quietly in a room alone

The morning rush hour is back. Now that Working From Home is no longer the default, people are heading back to their offices with a vengeance. The traffic jams are back, as are the jam-packed MRTs. I wonder if anyone actually misses any of this. 

It’s become a truism that the pandemic has generally been kinder to introverts than to extroverts. For those of us used to doing things on our own – whether by necessity or by choice – the fact that the rest of the world found itself having to adjust themselves to our more sedate, more solitary mode of being was probably … well … not entirely unsatisfactory. It probably made us feel -- ironically -- less alone. 

‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ I wonder what prompted Blaise Pascal to write that. What had he gone through to arrive at this insight? 

About 300 years later, Siegfried Sassoon had this to say about being alone:

Alone ... The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown. 

Those who have come out the other side of silence and solitude emerge different. Changed. Whether in a positive or negative direction. I think the ones who deal well with it – whether through religious means or perhaps via meditation, philosophy, or some sort of spiritual-but-non-religious practice – do arrive at a clearer understanding of themselves. A deeper capacity to tune in to the essential, and choose what is truly important. 

I think it’s a useful exercise, sitting quietly in a room alone, just once in a while. Or, if not a room, then perhaps some outdoor space, out in nature, with no other people around. And better to do so by choice, from a position of strength, than to wait for life to force one’s hand through some terrible and unwanted circumstance, somewhere down the road.

paperwork

Artists usually enjoy complaining about bureaucracy, red tape, and paperwork. I suppose there's something annoying about all those forms (in more than one sense of the word), hemming them in, cramping their style. 

I've never felt much animosity towards paperwork. At least, not that I can remember. In fact, I tend to find a rather comforting regularity in following templates and filling in forms: a rhythm much like doing algebra exercises in secondary school. I was never good at math, in the sense that I don't think I ever really understood it in that deep, intimate way that mathematicians understand it; but I didn't mind doing math homework. Because at the high school level, math isn't really about thought or creativity. It's about learning the rules and following them. And once you've mastered that, there can be real (albeit tempered) sense of achievement that comes with just getting through one's sums. That's how I feel about paperwork. 

My current job involves me doing paperwork for people who hate doing paperwork. Most of my friends were greatly surprised when I told them I'd applied for this job. "But it's admin!" they said, their voices quite appalled. I suspect I nearly didn't get the job because one of my interviewers simply couldn't quite believe that a writer would even want to do admin, let alone be competent at it. Let's just say that the work has been tolerable so far, and less painful than my previous job. It's giving me more time to read and write. I'll have to wait and see if that 'more' turns out to be 'enough'.