Unfair Contest

My friend Abbi – previously featured on this blog, though not by name, here and here – is in the hospital, and for the past week or so, I've thought of little else. I lost 3 lbs in 3 days, probably just from worrying and being sad. I told her about it, and she said, "Hey, I've lost about 25 the past few months 😅" I said this is an unfair contest.

There's a passage in The Great Gatsby which makes me think of her. In the book, the narrator is talking about Gatsby's smile, but in Abbi's case I'm thinking about her conversation and personality.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. … It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

I don't know if other people who know her feel this way, but I really do.

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Blog note: Many of the blogs that were on my blogroll are no longer active: some have merely gone quiet, while others have been made private or disappeared altogether. I moved the inactive links to the sidebar of my CQA page. I didn't want to remove them altogether because it's nice to have this record – a bittersweet reminder of a time when blogging was more of a community activity.

Friends, Older and Younger

It's fun having friends from different age groups; I think I'm lucky that way.

A few months ago I used the term core memory in a blogpost. Tommy, who is in his 60s and a former software engineer, commented, "I'm old enough to remember when 'core memory' was what computers had before semiconductor RAM."

Last week my friend Wu Chi asked me my MBTI type. I said I did the test five years ago, and can't remember what I got.

"Five years?! MBTI is that old?! Five years ago I was in high school!"

I looked up MBTI on Wikipedia, which said the Briggs Myers Type Indicator Handbook was published in 1944. Wu Chi had to take a few sips of yuzu soda to recover. "1944," she said wonderingly. "That's older than New China."

Adulting

Three things which I do now, which I didn't do, say, 10 years ago (okay I was well into adulthood 10 years ago, but adulting is a work in progress):

• Add birthdays of friends and family into Google Calendar, so that I get a reminder on the day. For a long time I thought I could (or should be able to) just remember birthdays, but eventually I realised that's not happening. There is no shame in taking recourse to technology.
• Give myself treats. To celebrate when something good happens, to console myself when I am sad, or to reward myself for doing an unpleasant but necessary task. The treat itself is usually simple and low-cost, often free – like pizza, or taking some time out of my day to go for a walk in nature. I've done this sort of thing for a while, but these days I do it more intentionally, as a treat. Or self-care, you might say.
• Clean my flat before I go on holiday, to ensure a more pleasant homecoming for future me.

Speaking of holidays, I just got back from a trip to the UK; I'll post some photos soon.

[Edit: Photos are now up.]

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Blog note: Last month I wrote 12 posts, which is a new record for this blog. Granted, some of them were photos with not that much text, but hey it all counts. The previous record was 11 posts in March 2011, and some of those were short extracts.

In my final post of 2023, I wrote that (a minimum of) 24 posts a year is a good number to aim for. With this post, I've already reached that number, and we're only in the first week of June. Time to treat myself, maybe :)

Nobody Home

Ornate sunbird nest, now empty because the chicks have fledged.

The skin (technically exoskeleton) of a cicada. When a nymph matures, it crawls out of its skin which is then discarded.

Bike Friend

Of all the things I've owned or used, a bike, to me, feels most like a person – like a friend, even.

The inscription on this bike, which I saw one night when walking back from Toa Payoh Public Library, made me smile. "Always be with you."

Banded Snakes

After banded arthropods, I now bring you banded snakes.

These pictures are from a night walk along Old Upper Thomson Road. I went with a few friends who are amateur herpers.

They are all quite good at spotting snakes, but one of them – a Thai guy who moved to Singapore some years ago – is particularly sharp-eyed. He spotted both snakes pictured in this post – this gold-ringed cat snake:

…as well as this twin-barred tree snake, which – like the paradise tree snake featured earlier – is a "flying" snake.

My friend Kwang Ik and I were sharing a camera – my camera, but with his lens, flash and diffuser. Moreover, one of us typically took the photo while the other held the off-camera flash and diffuser. At this point we don't really know who took which photo, and in any case it doesn't really matter. "Collaboration is the condition of photography in the most basic sense," as this book puts it. We decided to share credit, and also thanked the snakes.

Baby Birds

Large-tailed nightjar with chick, at the Singapore Botanic Gardens:

...and Sunda scops owlets (how cute are they?!)

There are plenty of parks and forests in Singapore, but for reasons best known to the owls, they chose a built-up neighbourhood, right next to a bus stop. In the photo below you can see the tree – and the hollow – where they nested.

Word spread far and wide through social media and news sites, and half of Singapore turned up to see them.

Not that I have any kind of moral high ground; I obviously went to see them too. But I didn't want to add to the crowds any more than I had to, so I just stayed for five minutes, took some photos and went home.

Both the nightjar chick and the owlets have fledged now. I hope they have long and happy lives!

Nothing Left to Read

Outlook shows this message when you have nothing in your inbox:

This is not a state I have ever achieved, by the way. I generally have zero unread emails, but I don't file or delete all my email, so my inbox is never altogether empty.

Once or twice a month, I go to the library and stock up on books – mostly novels. Sometimes I have specific books that I want to borrow, but often I'm just browsing.

When I was a kid, I wanted to read everything. Even in my teens and early twenties, my reading tastes were more varied. And now? I still read a lot, but I feel like my tastes are narrower than before. When I go to the library without specific books in mind, I always worry that this is the day when I finally fail to find any books that interest me. Nothing left to read.

Or rather, the worry is not about running out of books; it's more about running out of interest or curiosity. Of my tastes narrowing to a point where I comb the fiction section of a library but fail to find a book I want to read.

The other day I walked through the fiction section in alphabetical order and, although I was admittedly just skimming and not looking too closely, I almost made it to the end without finding any books I wanted to borrow. Then in the Y–Z shelves, I suddenly found three promising titles: Lion City by Ng Yi-Sheng, The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara and Happiness Is Possible by Oleg Zaionchkovsky.

I didn't enjoy Lion City and gave up partway through. The People in the Trees was really good – like The Lost World (which I loved as a child) but with post-colonial consciousness. And Happiness Is Possible was a cracker – one of those instances when it felt less like me finding a book; more like the book finding me, at a time when I was ready for it.

I liked it enough that, in keeping with my stated policy, I bought a copy for keeps.