DIARY OF MOMENTS ❖ singapore slingin
just some vibes really & THREE READS
A Singapore Sling tastes like popping candy, sweet and sour, bursting with cherry. Its bar of origin is now a tourist trap, in the most gorgeous white colonial style building you’ve ever seen.
The cocktails are insanely good here. Pho-inspired cocktail that does taste like pho but also tastes like the first time you ever had candy as a child. Or the spirit of basil in a clear gin and soju mix, subtitled in the menu: ‘For shits and giggles I thought I’d make an insanely flavourful cocktail that looks like clear icy water, LOL’.
People aren’t shy to complain here. Maybe it’s just my face. That I look like I’ll listen to your shit, I mean. And probably the fact that I loiter around comfortably in the corner of the bar like some kind of mafia spouse. Everyone everywhere is the same though. Bitching about their work or their situationship. Sometimes they’re the same: ‘I’m giving my everything. It never gets better. Just more shit, ah.’ I like complainers, only I have one policy: make it funny.
Because Singlish trashes half of English grammar, most locals are pretty funny. They beeline for the punchline. Using conjunctions? So long, ah. Very ang moh.
Another thing that is ang moh: going to expensive places with worse food. Go sweat in the hawker, stupid. Spice? Soup? Egg? Close fridge door quick. No pay wave. Cash, NETS lah. At the mall there’s a Michelin noodle shop sandwiched between the Filipino helper agent and the tailor. Good food and price have no correlation. It’s Asia. Did you forget again? Pay for comfort (air conditioning), status.
Money, money, money. Its importance is palpable. Sometimes unsaid pride in the struggle. Live to work, not work to live. ‘There is no coastline on Singapore where you cannot see the ships,’ S said. Cargo, oil, navy. This world is material, you remember.
Getting out of the metro is a puzzle. Sliding from lettered checkpoint to checkpoint. Miss yours and get eaten up by a mall, spat out in Malaysia.
The air is a fat thick blanket. No thoughts, only heat. Every walk is a straight line from A to B. B is an air conditioned room. No time to saunter, you are sweating. Heat is god and you are her bitch. Plan your life around it, when to walk outside, when to transfer, what office job to get, what cafe to sit in.
33°C: construction men in headscarves, girls posing in sundresses. Mothers on tandem bikes with kids. Barbie coloured terraces on one end of town, uniform white housing blocks on the other.
Also, smells. If you’ve never had durian it’s like if someone cartoonified a mango and then made it evil. It looks like Bowser and has those cartoon stink lines coming out of it. Even though it’s banned on metros it’ll still get you, like one of those face huggers from Alien. It’s delicious. Damn good, damn good.
I’ve been trying to conceive of what I think about this place but all knowing is in the body. Copenhagen is perfect but I would sort of hate being there if it weren’t for H. Peaceful, happy and totally enraging. So content I might already be dead.
There’s an ambient level of annoyance that everyone wants in their life. That’s all it is with picking places to live. Like if you prefer sitting in clubs or cafes or your room. We get along with people who believe in putting in the same amount of effort as us, the same amount of resistance to reality. I like that some people love it here and some people hate it here so much. Some are indifferent, swept up by their corporate job. People are open about their workaholism. Open about scarcity, competition. Don’t some of us relish dissatisfaction more than satisfaction. Enjoying on some level the license to complain, come out on top. Luxuriate once the competition ends. If it ever does.
THREE READS:
🎆 All Things Are To Small by Becca Rothfield. This has been promoted to death on Substack, for good reason. Her prose is delicious to read and provocative, and she never condescends to the reader. Becca Rothfield wants to lift you up into the dizzying heights of excess and make you remember everything you’re sinfully hungry for. Essays against mindfulness, minimalism, fragmentary novels, even if you disagree, you’ll admire her verve, vitality and viciousness. Desire is good, actually. Thoughts and things are good, actually.
A positive review from Goodreads:
I was certainly too dumb for some of these essays but others were spectacular. You can tell Rothfeld is deliriously smart
An even better negative review that makes me love it even more:
Rothfeld has a plethora of opinions about activities that are not only a waste of time, but a personal affront to the essence of humanity. She has taken not shutting the fuck up when other people are doing something she's deemed stupid, self-delusional or contrary to her beliefs as her life calling. Some of these things include decluttering, meditation and reading Sally Rooney.
📉 All of the existential risk, none of the economic impact. Holy shit, this neuroscientists’s coined “supply paradox of AI” seems like a ‘no-duh’ problem with the prophetic promise of AI: “the notion that the easier it is to train AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is.”
❤️ Do we really want more male vulnerability in fiction? Sometime in the last few years, a secret council of white women far far away deemed vulnerability to take a certain shape: the bashful disclosure of squishy feelings, admissions of long-repressed childhood trauma, the quiet beautiful holding back against tears. But the reality is we are now less accepting of different flavours of un-PC vulnerability:
You see the thing is, that [male] vulnerability, that rawness that people seemingly want, may very well sound too rough, cringy, uncultured, un-PC, un-woke, or whatever the hell you would like to call it. Those stories might include characters, for example, who use words like bitch to refer to women, or characters who think often about women’s bodies and sexualize them in their minds or in real life, or characters who are violent and mean, and cruel, as men can often be.
I need to have that pho cocktail immediately
Hm, the only time I had a Singapore sling was on a Singapore Airlines flight. I felt like I'm missing half the experience not having it at the Raffles Hotel. But alcohol on a plane!