HARDWIRED

This perhaps now ties for my favourite TED talk. I always knew my joke about getting cancer sometime in my life had some truth to it. I also always knew there had to be some sort of explanation for my impulsive nature. And the tendency to be depressed. etc etc etc.

However, now that I've watched this talk and learned the causality, it also of course, on the flipside, equips and enables me to say, hey, okay, so those things happened and perhaps it increases some health risks, but those things can be mitigated, and I can always choose not to engage in high-risk behaviour.

Which perhaps is more significant and important to me than you could understand.

HORCHATA

It has been a year since I've been in the US, and it's such a strange thing that my favourite drink is horchata, which I have not drunk since I was in the US. But I remember how it tastes. It's so weird. Whenever people here ask how it tastes, I can't quite describe it to them, and know that they know what I mean, besides using the descriptions from its Wikipedia page, which does not do justice to the taste/flavour at all. I've been to a few Mexican restaurants in Singapore (not too many here, we need a bigger Mexican cuisine industry --- there are too many Korean places recently) and none of them serves horchata. Tbh I think I should just order the sacheted instant ones off Target. I'm going to do that now.

DARK MATTER

I have been taking some time out for myself, and reading, and listening to NPR podcasts. I love NPR, they have episodes on space, and oceanography, and human resilience, and crisis and response. I feel like NPR has been more of my life than my life has been a life. I think one of the recent podcasts I was listening to was titled Shifting Time and a physicist was talking about how the universe is expanding, and at a constantly accelerating rate, which is mind-boggling. The more I listen to NPR, the more I feel like, we are too small to matter.

719.1 km²

It's been a pretty long and tiring year. I have learned some, and grown some, I think. I haven't stepped out of Singapore in 2017, and if you didn't know, the length of Singapore is 50km from left to right, meaning I have pretty much stayed within the confines of at most 50km for the past 330 or so days. If you think about it, which I have, this sounds ludicrous, considering I used to always be the kind of person who would up and leave whenever I felt constrained, and needed to get away. This year, though, I was disciplined and I saved, for the future I have planned towards. I haven't left Singapore. I haven't used my passport in the past year. This is amazing. If it doesn't amaze you, it amazes me.

DEFINE: DANCING

I recently decided to remove most things I had online. By remove, I actually deleted them, meaning I don't even have them to look back on myself, but it's alright, they're kinda intact in my memory. Kinda. I have a pretty great memory, so, that helps a little. I realised that in the past year, everything that had happened last year, and the years prior to it, was the first and sometimes the only narrative people would think about or would use to form an impression of me. I don't mind talking about it or telling people about it, but I think it's time to set out on a new narrative. I am not someone things always happen to, by virtue of my family or my dating experiences or whatever. I have agency over my own life. I am not defined by my circumstance.