« December 2006 | Main | March 2007 »
January 26, 2007
The Checkup
I went to a clinic in Singapore for a check up today. I did this because I messed up on my insurance form by stating that I had asthma (which I did when I was young) and then reading the fine print that said “have you had any of the following in the last two years” and then scratching out the asthma comment because I don’t have asthma, really, now.
I've not had a physical in 19 years. I’ve never had a physical like this. I spent the night fasting before I arrived. They pumped me dry of blood, shaved half of my chest, attached ECG electrodes and set me, starving, decaffeinated and delirious, up on a treadmill for an 18 minute stress test. I distinctly remember getting the impression that I could speak in Urdu by the end of it. The attendant even checked off a “Speaks Urdu” box on a form at the end of the test. I don’t remember whether that was before or after the attendant ripped the 12 electrode patches off of my chest and sent me downstairs for x-rays. There was also an eye test and an interview/ regular checkup in there somewhere. I walked in for the appointment at 9:15 in the morning and left at 12:30 in the afternoon. I did not even spend that much time sitting and reading back issues of Singapore Architecture (now even more diagrams of malls!).
After I got back, I went out to the middle eastern district with the rest of the office for lunch. We had terrible Lebanese food at a place that specializes in Shisha. I might go back for the Shisha (and the Halva) but I will forever avoid the falafel, which looked like and had the texture of well cured roadkill.
It has been raining all evening. And my chest itches.
Posted by jb at 06:43 AM | Comments (1)
January 23, 2007
Fortune Cookies
I bought some fortune cookies this morning. An acrylic bag of 60 to 80 fortune cookies. I was happy to carry the fortunes of other people back from the 7-11 to my house. It made Santa Claus seem awfully pedestrian. He brings you gifts but this bag brings you fate.
It does not, of course. Fated fortune cookie fortunes cannot be extracted at a restaurant or via a takeout bag. They need to be found instead, on a sidewalk or in a hallway or a train station or bus depot. Someone else needs to open the cookie and reject the fortune. This proves that it is was received by the wrong person. The chance that it was intended for you increases. Delivery is no longer a predictable matter. You might not notice the fortune lying on the ground. In that case, it remains lying in wait, intended for someone else.
Or it could be that the landfill is the natural destination for a fortune cookie fortune. There are probably thousands of them in Fresh Kills (the Staten Island Landfill) alone. They lie there, scrunched between discarded objects, from diapers to newspaper, patiently informing car batteries and discarded tires that “You will be fortunate in the opportunities presented to you” It is all very surreal from the outside but comforting to the tires. I may be wrong. I don’t speak tire or any other inanimate object.
At any rate. I’m going to give the fortune cookies to the rest of the office and collect the fortunes afterwards. I’ll then tape the fortunes to benches and bridge underpasses around Singapore. I’m not sure why. I just feel compelled to do this. I was compelled to do this from the minute that I decided to purchase the bag. It may,again, be fate. Just last week I got a fortune cookie fortune that told me I’d be doing this. A meta fortune cookie, produced by the queen bee of fortune cookies, from a big hive in Plano, TX, where worker cookies extract fortunes from the queen cookie and implant them on small balls of warm dough.
Posted by jb at 06:54 PM | Comments (4)
January 22, 2007
Date: Yesterday
Date: Yesterday
I’ve decided to become left handed today. On the scale of decisions it is not big, but it implies lots of small changes. Shaving and brushing my teeth this morning…left handedness as a problem. Tying my shoes was also a challenge. I typically eat with my right hand and I spilled coffee down my shirt as I tried to drink while walking between the kitchen and my desk.
So it is difficult, but important. I feel lopsided, like a hermit crab. A while back Adam and I were talking about maps that stressed items other than distance. Travel time maps, for example, can look very different. A travel time map of the United States pushes all of the major cities together (since you can travel reasonably quickly from city to city by air) but pushes the suburbs, the ex-burbs and rural areas farther out that you’d expect. In the same way, I am thinking of a map of the body. A coordination map favors the right side of my body. A sensory map favors my fingers but not the skin on my knuckles. Like everyone else, I favor symmetry but I’m symmetrical only in the context of a normal visual map. It is funny to think about this, the hundreds of people, the crowds of people I see each day, crawling around like hermit crabs. Emotional maps are even worse. The scariest thing in the world would be a person with a perfectly symmetrical emotional map. I’ll tell you the variables used for an emotional map later. I’m too lazy to make them up now.
Date: Today
My multi-entry Indian work visa came in the mail today. I sent my passport back to the United States last Thursday because I can’t get a work visa here until my Singapore work visa comes through. Passport stamps, they don’t mean so much. My new goal is to get as many work permits as possible. Anyway, I sent my passport to one of those express passport services firm in the US. I sent it out on Thursday and they called me late Friday. “You paperwork is messed up… this letter from your employer… it is not right….but look, don’t worry, we’ll take care of it…” Take care of it how exactly? Anyway, the passport arrived back in the mail so it all seems good.
I walked back to the bike store during a break from work this afternoon. Still no bikes big enough for me. Well, one bike that is big enough but it is a mountain bike and I’m not willing to spend money on suspension forks (however cheap) in Singapore. It is the principle of the thing. My new favorite bike store sells a line of bikes called Moontine, with square top bars. The store also sells some plastic semi retro furniture. I’d like the integrate the two. It is the first store that I have been in where I like the bikes and the furniture.
I just bought airline tickets for a six week visit to the states. It looks like I might be asked to fly to Singapore/ India in the middle of the trip. That is why I’ve purchased a six week ticket. Four weeks in the states and two weeks somewhere else. The trip dates go from February to April. I’d like to assert that this reflects some cunning schedule ability on my part but it really means that I will get to watch some new movies since movies change monthly on airplanes and I don’t sleep at all ever on flights longer than two hours in duration (I completely pass out on flights between Boston and Philly or Boston and Florida but that’s it). I've watched all of my theater releases on airplane video screens since leaving Boston. Maybe this is because Singapore theaters have assigned seating.
Read through Shantaram this week. Also “When we were Orphans” by Ishiguro and part of a series of short stories by Murakami. The first is better than the second. The third is very different. Short stories should only be compared to novels when a novel would be better as a short story. Ishiguro is a novelist who could write short stories if he only removed the buffer text.
Date: Tomorrow.
I just finished reading the paper. I can’t believe that this guy just blocked a bullet for a bystander. There have been lots of odd acts over the last few weeks, from the man surviving his fall from a hotel to the man catching the toddler, to the man who saved a kid by jumping on top of him and holding him down in a mid-track cavity as a NYC subway train passed overhead. Last week, police in the UK were aided by a guy with a samurai sword who interrupted a shootout, whacking away at the bad guys and disarming them before disappearing. There have been a lot of these stories but many of them have passed under the radar. The first I can think of is Rick Rescorla back in 2001. These days, it's as if the rules are getting bent. Maybe it is related to the weather. Global warming for personal narratives. Ice storms in July, one armed taxi bench presses to save kittens, that sort of thing. The world is and always will be an interesting place. I blame Marquez and his penchant for magical realism. We’ve been infected on a personal level.
Posted by jb at 07:50 AM | Comments (1)
January 16, 2007
Ramblin'
So the question came through, about six months earlier than expected, at a bar in a hotel in Delhi, where the partner in charge of the seven person company that I work for asked me what I thought about living in India and so, if the current round of projects works out, it looks very much like I'll be able to get out of Singapore and into Bombay. My goal: moving over there by late March, in order to really start visiting factories and mid income households and second tier cities and slums (maybe) and rural areas (absolutely) in order to figure out which products can be developed that will address latent needs in the Indian (and, in some cases, American) market. What do I think about living in India? The word unqualified comes to mind. Then I think that half of all shampoo and lipstick sales in India take place in rural channels (shampoo happened once Hindustan lever had the insight to sell single use sachets, which allowed people in rural villages to control the amount they purchased) and I realize that nobody really understands these markets. Let me add a proviso. There are tons of other people who have a better understanding than I do but over the last five years, lots of product development and design people have been forced to re-learn the way that they approach these markets and I'm pretty sure that nobody considers rural populations to be some sort of idealized (or denigrated) homogenous mass any more and I'm pretty sure that almost anyone who is not being a jackass will tell you that he/she does not understand these markets. Anyway, this is not a sure thing yet, but I will know soon, and I am interested to see whether this can happen.
Posted by jb at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)