Greetings from Singapore - and yet another Tea Lady rant

So - I have moved to Singapore - yet another city/state country that I now call home. If I could describe Singapore in one word it would be... idyllic. Truly. Sort of a utopian existance to raise kids and dogs. A veritable Discovery Bay on super strength steroids. People say Singapore doesn't have the buzz of Hong Kong. My answer to that is... who cares. I lived in a city with buzz (LA) and it was too tiring for me. Same as Hong Kong - maybe I am just too slow of a walker to keep up with the pace of these fast cities. So, at this point, I am not into the clubs, I am barely into the bars. So if the closest I get to a buzz is my company issued green tea in the morning then so be it.

Speaking of tea, I really loathe the tea lady in the office. Perhaps I have bad tea lady karma? She is a total wench when she is cleaning the toilet, just really despicably inhospitable. The other day the water went out (ahem - the glamorous life of a temporary construction compound) and there was a communal bucket placed in the restroom with a typed sign that read "For Washing Hands." No separate mechanism to neutrally pour the water over your hands. Just a bucket to swish around in. Are you kidding me? How freakin' gross is that?

So I went outside where there is a communal sink and I used a pitcher filled with water to wash my hands. And wenchy tea lady lectures me that this pitcher water is for drinking. I sassily retort that I am NOT washing my hands in a communal bucket. Blah - who would?

I made a comment today that people in Singapore are collectively less cordial than they are in Hong Kong. But I don't care. I still love it here - despite the wenchy tea ladies.

Rebuff on Cyberspace

So I have joined Linkedin. I was linked out for a while (for no real reason I suppose). I had reached out to a guy I worked with and just figured out today how to find who has yet to respond to my inquiries to join my virtual 'network.' Well it turns out old colleague guy said that he doesn't know me! Hmmph. Did I mention I went to his wedding?

I am not sure if this is a bona fide re-buff or just a result of a trigger happy finger, but needless to say, I am a bit miffed that someone I haven't spoken to in 4 years has (perhaps inadvertently) treated me this way!

O well, I sent him another note. I will see how that goes or I will delete him forever...

Celebrity Death rant

So Heath Ledger died today. And Christopher Bowman and Brad Renfro died this year. So far it has been a pretty dismal year for famous people, either on the up or on the down. All three have allegedly died because of drug overdose. Two of them had young kids! I realize that this can be labeled a tragedy by some, but I think that these guys (assuming that they all died from overdoses) were just plain self-absorbed.



My opinion has changed since I was younger. I remember when River Phoenix died – I was so saddened, like I had grown UP with him. This was around 1997 and I was in a less physically stable then, moving around quite a bit even though I was finishing up college. I have always been drawn to these young actor types. I was really kind of down about it. “Why him?” I would ask, as if he was a friend or even someone I knew.



But time passes and perspectives change. Now I am in a really stable place, both physically and emotionally. I have an emotionally steadfast partner who could give less of a shit about what is going on in celebrityville (or any of the Joneses, for that matter). Thankfully some of this perspective has rubbed off on me and I realize it is sort of silly to obsess over celebrities, like their shit doesn’t stink. So now I think about these three adult men and how they didn’t take responsibility for their lives and instead took their lives with their own expensive habits. These guys had serious cash flow – could they not have hired world-class therapists to help them cope with all of their “pain”? Life is a bitch when you are rich and famous – I suspect in all reality it somewhat is as it isolates your friends and I am sure everyday you question whether you are a fraud or worthy and if you can maintain this ride forever and not die a has-been at aged 30. It is quite strange because if I knew a user who wasn’t famous who died of an overdose, there would be no parades or song and dance, just some sympathy for the family and an idle cry out for why they didn’t get help sooner.



And this is how I care to think of these three dead men. As selfish souls.

Grocery Shopping

I am always grocery shopping in Macau. I think that this confounds M to no end but he certainly doesn't complain about the end result. I am hopeful that someone here will begin to carry shortening because I went to Hong Kong this past weekend looking for it and citySuper was out of stock. Christ. Grocery shopping is an ordeal, it is not just going to one superstore to buy everything. Because I a cook on the healthy side it is a bit more complicated. Lower fat peanut butter is available in HK but not Macau, but I can find lower fat mayonnaise in Macau. Rolos are nowhere to be found in the Pearl River Delta period. I went to Park'n'Shop today (the closest semblance to a superstore) and forgot to pick up whole wheat flour. This means that I will have to go back there tomorrow (which I hate as Park'n'Shop is so friggin' crowded on Sundays) so that I can buy flour to make bread. I leave the house with an empty backpack and always come back with several bags in hand and the backpack filled to the brim. Today I stopped at 2 stores, 1 drugstore (that oddly sells very few drugs), a houseware store, and a fruit/vegetable store. Two hours with my slow ass walking. This is typical. I used to try to go with M but he grew so impatient with my browsing that I realized it is more relaxing to break my back with an overstuffed backpack than to deal with his shopping impatience. This should be refreshing in that he is truly a guy's guy, not fussy about food details or the end product so much. But sometimes I sure would like a ride...

Cleaning ladies

I work in a construction compound. It is the tidiest building I have ever worked in, except maybe for the other construction compound that I worked in a year ago. Although we are on a construction site there is seldom any dirt anywhere to be found. The floors are so clean you can eat off of them.

There are cleaning ladies (not to be wholly confused with tea ladies). They are sweet, Cantonese speaking. We acknowledge each other with friendly smiles but our exchanges end there. The cleaning ladies whose responsibility is to clean the toilet (the women’s anyways) and the adjacent pantry. I am in the toilet quite a bit throughout the course of the day because, well, I drink a lot of water and tea (green tea, my now replacement to teeth staining coffee). There is a window in the construction compound toilet that looks out into…dirt and muck that is soon to be a beautiful casino. Every time I go in the toilet after lunch I see the 2 cleaning ladies. Sometimes they drink hot tea overlooking the window. Today they were eating crackers.

But do they really need to eat in the toilet? I mean, seriously, the pantry is 10 feet away.

If I have a long visit in the toilet, I really cannot be thinking about these poor ladies having their tea and crackers and really concentrate at the task at hand – and certainly that has got to be uncomfortable for them.

Perhaps this is their domain, their office if you will. Their sanctuary in a bleak, dirty world. I can respect that.

But I would really like it more if they would have their afternoon tea in the pantry.

I have a love/hate relationship with coffee. I have been conditioned by Folger’s ads to have a Pavlovian response of, well, heightened alertness when I smell the stuff brewing. I would like to believe I am a coffee snob (only Peets or Coffee Bean when I was in coffee culture mecca LA) but the reality is if it is more coffee flavor than burned out water taste then I am all in. My consumption is hardly pathological – it is typically one cup in the morning with milk and Splenda. All part of my routine, the master plan of my day.

I visited the dentist in December. He was a new guy. From Macau. Chinese in the face but when a Portuguese accent. As is de rigeur with these biannual visits I was told to floss more and to lay off the coffee. I looked at my teeth in the mirror prior to going to the dentist that day. They were the most yellow that they have been. I would like to attribute it to the coffee (an easy scapegoat) but my consumption has remained consistent. I realize it is because of the water. I know that my teeth have gotten more yellow since moving to Asia and now was unbearable. Dentist salt washed my teeth and got out the stains – but I realized that it was time for a change.

So relatively cold turkey I gave up my coffee. And I have lived to tell about it. It is relative because I was vacationing in Laos and Vietnam and had the local coffee there (especially in Vietnam where coffee is mixed with condensed milk). Towards the end of the trip I was getting a bit sick and subsequently slept the entire next day after my arrival in Macau. I think this aided to get me off of my headache inducing caffeine addiction as I essentially started over with a clean, refreshed slate a day later.

What have I learned from this? That the nebulous claims of coffee being bad for you are not enough for me to kick the habit. Yet vanity, as a means or an end, IS enough of a motivator.

Blah. Enough navel gazing for now.

Sweater

I own this sweater. It is a Ralph Lauren cashmere gray cable knit turtleneck. I don’t think it could be any more conservative. It is a good sweater – I have owned it for probably about eight months and I can only wear it when the weather is being, well, colder than I would like (on an aside it is not that I don’t like the cold weather. When else can I wear my amazing coat collection? I just don’t like that it isn’t consistently cold. A week can go by and it will only be cold here in Macau for 3 of the days, and not consecutive ones). Anyway – back to the sweater. I like it. It doesn’t pill at the underarms. I can wear it several times and it not get smelly. I bought this sweater at my favorite designer dud store in Hong Kong who claim to have authentic pieces (it is a high end ‘fall-off-the-truck store). At any rate, this sweater does not have a tag anywhere on its underside. Not even a care tag – nothing. As a result- I have no idea which way is front on this sweater. Because I am small breasted (finally – this comes in handy) there are no telltale lumps which show which way I wore it the last time. Whenever I wear this sweater it makes me laugh as a physical testament that I have a boy’s body.

On Beauty

I just finished this book by Zadie Smith last night. I really started strong with it, very much liking it. I thought the ending was a bit blah. It is a very long book at nearly 400 pages. Most of the book centers around Howard, a white British man who is very much in the middle of a midlife crisis. Part of the book frustrated me when he has embarked on his second affair with a rival colleague's daughter. He is resigned that he has a future of divorce and chasing younger skirts ahead of him, as if this is his inevitable fate. I think that this mindset was really off the mark. I don't think people have affairs and then divorce and are resigned about their fates so early on. I think that there is a lot of denial about it, a lot of anger and 'how did I get here' - going down the spiral of self-hatred and all that. To be so resigned so early (prior to a separation even) seemed rather naive - as if this is what the author thought (she is my age so early 30's) and was channeling this to the protagonist. Overall it was a good book but it all wrapped up in the last twenty pages. With so much going on at then end, I was sad that it didn't have a more resolved ending.