wanderingintofocus

Stories (of Your Life and Others) As a person, your biggest problem is usually other people. You are vulnerable to people, and also dependent on them. But imagine instead that you were a freshwater sardine, or rainforest. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to people, and dependent on them. I think one of the biggest problems that we face as human beings is that we are stuck within ourselves. I will never know what it’s like to experience things in the way that they mean to you. I can only see you through the context of myself. Stories, in that way, can serve as paths to empathy. It is only through stories that I can piece together and imagine the richness of your life, in the same way that I hope you may be able to glimpse mine.  The school offers a graded module on storytelling. I’m mildly vexed at its credit-bearing structure, as it makes academic a personal pursuit that’s meant as a respite from that. But what it has also done is to make me more conce...

ORTO [2022] This is ORTO. I'd describe it as a kampungesque rejuvenation extrovert meditation wellness retreat spirit kind of place— plus prawning, tortoises, and bars that operate 5pm-3am. It so happens that I'm here today for none of those things, but a youth facilitators training event. In the URA Master Plan 2019, the Urban Redevelopment Authority has plans to redevelop this land to build HDB public housing flats next year. I'd wanted to visit this place at an indeterminate time before that as well, so today is a pleasant coincidence. Walking the ground, I can't really identify the target demographic of this place. Perhaps "grandparents generation brought kids here so now that those kids are middle aged they feel a community nostalgia", and those people who used to fish by the canals until our national water agency PUB barred the practice. ORTO seems to be predominantly shared between the privatised paid recreation part, and a new-age-through-yesterday...

The PSC Scholarship Scores of tourists throng the streets about this urban cafe in the heart of Tiong Bahru. Seated across from me is a colleague from one of the year-long projects that we have just completed. Two ice-cream waffles separate us on marble-esque plates. There was finally some time to sit down and catch up. As I recall it there wasn’t a missing beat in our conversation. She led mostly about our personal lives, dreams, intentions and plans. We chatted for a bit over the 90 minutes that we had between schedules. I had always known intellectually that we live very different lives, but I did not imagine the great extent to which this is true. She shares of adventurous climes in overseas travels (and missing our local food while abroad), studying a fourth language, exploring a part-time job, applying for internship, writing original songs, taking guitar lessons, chairing a student conference, and training for badminton up to four times a week at the community club. Some people ...

The 10-point Rating System In The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, Green writes his thoughts on the format of the review: “Booklist reviews were limited to 175 words, which meant each sentence must work multiple jobs. Every review had to introduce a book while also analysing it. Your compliments needed to live right alongside your concerns”.  In many ways, this is what I attempt to do here– except that we get a slightly more generous 2200 characters on Instagram, which converts to about 400 words. Recently, in my capacity as a resource panel member, I’d had the opportunity to review and user-test some new toolkits on designing ground-up projects for public health. After about an hour of giving our opinions on the various aspects, we were asked to offer a rating out of 10. The 10-point rating scale doesn’t exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems. Everyone's experience is different and thus fundamentally incommensurable. But it is almost impossible to quantify ex...