I have always been a somewhat scatter-brained person, and I’ve also always felt this sort of compulsion to catalog everything. The hope, I think, is that indexing everything would somehow make my life better – that I would “learn my lessons” better.
Anyway. Over the years, I’ve definitely written a bunch of things that are memoir-ish. I’ll index them here.
1990: I was born on June 6th 1990, in Singapore. George HW Bush was President of the USA. The Berlin Wall fell, East and West Germany were reunited, and the Hubble space telescope was launched. Thatcher resigned. Mandela was released. Encyclopedia Britannica reached its all time highest sales. The pope was John Paul 2. The first McDonald’s and Pizza Hut outlets opened in Russia and China. Smoking is banned on all cross-country flights in the US. Voyager sends back the Pale Blue Dot photograph. Gorbachev is elected President of the Soviet Union. The WHO removed homosexuality from its list of diseases. Microsoft released Windows 3.0. Nickelodeon studios opened. Joanne Rowling gets the idea for Harry Potter while on a train, and begins writing. Iraq invades Kuwait, initiating the Gulf war. Civil war breaks out in Rwanda. Tim Berners-Lee begins work on the WWW. Home Alone was released. Lee Kuan Yew resigns and Goh Chok Tong becomes PM. The world population was 5.2 billion.
Misfit / I was the problem child
games from my childhood (2012, re: earlier)
the love of reading (2012) → library ethos (2021)
junior college sucked for me (2012) → My education journey (2016)
Armchair Critic history (2011 re: 2006) / Armchair Critic oral history / memories of jamming with many different musicians (2012)
I flunked out of the GEP (2018, re: 2004)
smoking in JC (2011, re: 2007)
why I stopped reading (2009)
2010-2012:
working at the singapore air show
2015
A bus ride through time and space (2015)
Websites, written 2016: When I was a kid I used to surf the internet looking for video game codes and cheats. I used to find all these amazing sites- IncREDible Alert, SC3k resources… I was in awe at how elegant and pretty those sites could be, with all that information and data- that was prior to the web 2.0 days, so sites were built painstakingly by individuals- and they created a useful and fun experience for others. On hindsight I realize that for me, this was the equivalent of walking into maybe the Sistine Chapel and deciding that you want to do Architecture. The idea that you could create communities and spaces for people online, all over the world, and share information and data that is useful to them… that excited me like crazy, and as I sit here trawling through 700 of my blog posts, trying to put them in some sort of useful arrangement, listening to music from Simcity, I find myself thinking back about how much I loved these online spaces that literally expanded my consciousness, and I find myself thinking, damn, this is what I want to do. #anyhowsayone
School. School fucking sucks. When i look back on my life, after having thought about it several times, I have to conclude that school really fucking ruined me. I’ve essentially experienced trauma wrt things like homework, etc. And that makes it hard for me to do stuff that I want to do.
My first impression was that I fucking hated it. Then I decided that I must have been kinda imagining it. Overindulging myself and my teenage angst. But the more I read and the more I think. I realize that I hate routines and structure and discipline etc etc because they were fed to me with school.
I was reading some stuff about people who had orgasmed when sexually abused and how it fucked them up because they felt like they must have been messed up for having a physical reaction. i don’t mean to trivialize any of that, it’s fucking horrible
but i relate to that a little bit.
My experience with school ruined my experience with discipline, routines, etc. i rejected it so thoroughly that my brain throws the baby out with the bathwater. my dreams are still dominated by guilt and anxiety for all the homework I didn’t do and all the stuff I continue to struggle to cope with. I think I actually preferred NS to school. I wish I did that when I was like, 14.
I was always troubled by the idea of an extended adolescence at all. compensated by playing in a rock band and smoking cigarettes. ok lah. 6/10. nobody wants to leave plato’s cave.
Marketing
I was first introduced to marketing when I was a teenager playing bass in an indie pop-rock band. I didn’t really call it that at the time, but it was a formative experience for me. We were some of the worst musicians in the scene, but we got away with it because we were different and entertaining. This was in 2007 when many of our peers were playing music they called emo, screamo, hardcore, post-hardcore. Everything was really serious and deep and angry.
We positioned ourselves as upbeat music you could dance to. We wore matching white shirts and vests. All of us would sing, rather than have any specific lead singer. I would handle our MySpace page. One of my bandmates initially set up the page in black and pink with butterflies and cheesy fonts. I threatened to quit the band because of it. I was very serious about having a great MySpace page. I would add over a thousand people as Friends, and I would have personal conversations with every single one of them. Most other bands would simply comment on people’s walls (I’m not sure if was called a wall on MySpace..) asking people to go to their shows. I’d ask people about their lives, what music they liked listening to, what they were up to. A part of me just wanted to be different from all the other bands. Another part of me was genuinely hungry for some semblance of real human connection.
The band ultimately fell apart, I think, (maybe) because we didn’t focus on the most important thing: making great music. We had some external factors that came into play- we had school and military commitments which made it harder to stick together- but it was really internal factors that kept us from weathering the storms of everyday life. Knowing what I know now, I would have insisted that we drilled down into what made us different, and focused on that. We should have studied and analysed bands that played the music we liked, and learned from that. We should have practiced a lot more. If we did those things early when we had more enthusiasm and energy, we would have lasted longer, written better songs, recorded the EP we wanted to.
Next I implicitly did marketing for my personal blog where I’d write about local politics. The easiest way to get a ton of hits was to criticise the government and/or the media in a snarky way. I enjoyed the attention initially, but it felt really vacuous and pointless after a while. People were sharing my stuff, yes, but they weren’t really engaging with it. I realized that I’d much rather write for smart, thoughtful people than pander to the lowest common denominator.
Then I got hired to do marketing for ReferralCandy. I was to do anything that would drive up our signups. We knew that we had a product that worked and we had happy customers who loved us. (Getting to that point is an ordeal you’ll have to ask Dinesh about.) The challenge is- how do you get more of that? Do things that don’t scale- yeah, what? In our case I think it means talking to individual retailers. Potential clients that we know our solution will help. Where do we find them? What should we do with our content in the meantime? What is our content supposed to achieve? (/fin)
2018
Leaving work
Freelancing
Writing my first ebook
2019
Visiting San Francisco
2020
Doing ii salons
Pandemic diaries
Writing and publishing Introspect (2020–2022)
New York (2023)