Wooo

The new year is dawning upon us. Hurray to being older & closer to death! “Realize that sleeping on a futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing. You know what's worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you're not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate. You'll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There's no risk when you go after a dream. There's a tremendous amount to risk to playing it safe.” This bill burr quote is a great summation of why I choose to stray from the norm. I don’t think I should give up on my dream yet. I’ll still only be 30 next year. There’s plenty of time to realize it. I’m almost done with folks who keep on telling me that it’s time I think about starting a family. I’m not going to let people’s idea of the perfect life dictate what I do. Yes, other my age have a wife & kids by now, but so what? Why should I follow in the footsteps of people w...

I wake up every day with my Star Wars Rey figurine staring at me from across the room. If she could talk, she’d say “what a loser” in her adorable British accent. & then she’d ignite her lightsaber & chop off my head. I’ve always wondered why no one in Singapore ever inherits the coveted British accent. Singapore was, after all, once a British colony. As a traveler, observer, dreamer, weblogist, writer, & Pokémon master, I’ve come to the conclusion that people who wear earphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, & more beautiful individuals than someone making the dreary, solitary drudge to work or any kind of destination without acknowledging their own interests & power. Even those who walk/run for fitness tend to have a different look of concentration based on whether or not they’re in tune with their tunes. What about those who blast music very loudly in public? They’re the opposite. They’re obnoxious, loud, objectionable, & have no regard fo...

Yet another day has passed, & Emma Stone is still not on any social media platform. If you’re thinking, “why should I care about it,” well that’s a pretty hostile way to put it. I don't know, I just simply adore Emma Stone's ‘smokes 3 packs of cigarettes a day’ voice. There is a fun little game called “Would you rather...” which I’ve been playing recently. The object is to come up with two random activities or options & ask someone if they’d rather do one or the other. It’s a game of preference if you will. Here are a few examples: “WOULD YOU RATHER: take a punch from Mike Tyson in his prime or give a punch to Muhammad Ali in his nursing home?” “WOULD YOU RATHER: buy a copy of the Ant-Man & the Wasp 3D DVD or an ant farm of your own?” “WOULD YOU RATHER: check Facebook or be stabbed in the face multiple times?” “WOULD YOU RATHER: marry Donald Trump or watch an episode of The Bachelorette?” “WOULD YOU RATHER: post a picture of yourself with the dog face Snapchat filt...

After finding out that a Pikachu locomotive exists in northern Japan, on the island of Hokkaido, the habitat of Siberian chipmunks, & the home of an unconventional Japanese bar quaintly named ‘Miso Horny’, where you can get terrific miso soup & ramen noodles drenched in bud light, Wangibraltar decides to gather all that he has in his savings account(is just several pairs of unwashed jeans on the floor that may or may not still have change in the pockets), & auction off everything that he owns(his PlayStation console, his entire Pez dispenser collection, & six issues of the magazine Tiger Beat from between 2003 & 2005) just to purchase the unparalleled, one of a kind subway train. A spokesman for Gibraltar admitted they’d probably still be short which is why he’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign in the coming days. When reached for comment regarding his asinine idea, a recalcitrant Wan was quoted as saying, “when dealing with a time-travel story, it's very di...

“Do you ever question your life? Please tell me why do we build castles in the sky?” Those are the wise words of one of my favorite songs to skate to, Castles In The Sky by Ian Van Dahl. That song is just a pop quiz wrapped in melody. I was way into skating on my skate scooter in my youth. Occasionally, I would sneak into a rollerway & drop my skills on the floor guards. Every Friday night, you could probably find little me running around & around in giant circles in oversized boots, gliding & grooving to the fresh beats of early techno, trance & whatever Alice Deejay was. It’s amazing how drastically my taste in music changed. My father used to give me 50 bucks a month as an allowance to teach me a thing or two about money management. Saving it, spending it, whatever, so I would never ask him for cash. I could always expect my Yusof Ishak to arrive on my desktop before my first skate night of the month. Little known fact: Yusuf ishak was tiny. You know the portrait on ...

Did you see the ring around the moon the other night? Or was that just over my house? Either way, it looked like a great big hole in the sky with the moon’s eye half opened, peering down at me. Radical climate changes & twilights, along with sunsets & moonrises are my kind of movies. If I could record the skies, I would. I mean it’s not impossible but it’ll just look shitty in the recordings. Perhaps the moon-ring was God’s monocle. To no one’s surprise, the nighttime sun won the staring contest yet again. I surrendered, actually, & wrote these words. If I had a kid, I’d name him blood moon. It’s backwards for noom doolb, which is probably some dumb astrology reference that no one knows. In all honesty, horoscopes are just plain stupid. When you don’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend to blame for your failures, try the solar system! For the record, in 1948, Bertram Forer proved conclusively through meticulously designed experiments, that astrology is nothing but pseudo scient...

If you’re reading this, you’re most likely on your phone right now. Unless of course you have a kind friend who printed this out & taped it on the restroom wall to browse like a stall street journal. See what I did there? The most immutable law of physics states that no matter how hard Shahirwan tries, he still won’t win. I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately about taking chances. & how it's really just about overcoming your fears. Fear produces a kind of parallel universe where the unreal seems real, & the real seems unreal. We only fear what we don’t understand, but when we find out the cause of our fear, then that fear usually goes away. That’s beside the point. Every time you take a big risk in your life, no matter how it ends up, you're always glad you took it. Because at the end of the day you’re going to regret what you didn't do more than what you did. Take a chance, you may succeed. If not you’ll fall, it’s that easy after all. Something happened last w...

I get up every day & I live in hope that that will be the day that I’ll be surprised by the news. But mostly I’m just shocked by how unsurprising everything is. Once upon a yesterday, there traveled a burly, freakie man from Khatib with his pet garden gnome. Far & wide they wandered, sipping bubble tea & staring fiercely into innocent faces from behind a single pair of contact lenses, willing to try whatever the world was willing to offer them. The weird freak wasn’t always burly. He was at one point of time skinnier & more timid than me. He had, though, always been my best friend. Alan & i have placed ourselves in many situations. We had explored the country the same way we’d strolled the easy streets of his neighborhood. That aforementioned neighborhood used to be mine, too, but I was forced to trade it for a more woodland, if you will, scenery. Alan was known by our group of ever changing peers for laughing about how odd we must have looked hanging out together, ...

I’ve been hanging out a lot with little Star Wars of late, making sure he’s entertained enough to forget that he needs to cry every single second. Why do babies cry so much, you ask? Good question, imaginary voice in my head. I’m unsure, honestly. I do have a theory, though. Maybe, babies cry all the time because they’ve realized their potential for greatness decreases with each passing second until they die an old soul with lost dreams. Yesterday, we pretty much did nothing because the day before, we weren’t doing anything & we didn’t finish that. Today, though, Star Wars made me sit through a whole hour worth of nursery rhyme videos on YouTube. I wasn’t quite content but it wasn’t my decision. I know I was supposed to be in charge, but the little tyke didn’t. He always has an agenda, & often that agenda is sleeping or going out of his way to ignore or annoy me. He also has an admirable philosophy. He has this belief that me being bored with whatever he enjoys means absolutely...

The greatest skill you can ever learn in this modern world is to stay just below the radar. Keep yourself a mystery, but provide the clues. Writing letters to shadows of what you used to be. On flights, I have a routine where I write to my loved ones in case of emergency. I like knowing I left last words to all those who make me who I am. The smaller planes encourage this behavior more than others, especially the saw-like rotating blades spinning outside blocking my view of freedom. I wonder if any propeller has ever popped off & cut a plane in half in midair? I wonder which direction we’ll spin if it misses us & we fall from grace. I wonder if my phone will survive the small fire created by the blast of impact. Did I mention, that I just write whatever I need to on my phone without actually sending it to the ones intended to receive the messages? That’s right. I craft everything before boarding. The personalized messages will only be sent if the plane is going down & I kno...

So i was sitting around all high on ice cream & soda, just thinking about this vast & spectacular world. Thinking ice & cavity. Feeling cold & full. & i thought of our founding fathers before us & recalled what they had written about, feeling this same feeling. I believe it was Ben & Jerry who said, somewhere i'm sure, "we know you will like this." & they were right. Is this cold I feel coming from the rain or from the shame of my existence? As you all know, I’m well versed in the language of rain. & I’m in love with the current weather. As a country near the Equator, Singapore does not have the four seasons. Instead we have the monsoon season. The widely prevalent belief is that natural disasters don’t occur here because of this particular reason. That is false. Here’s a succinct summary. We are invulnerable because we’re not near a major fault line, & also because we’re encased. Earthquakes are pretty much nonexistent, so too volc...

I've always held the belief that however you spend your New Year's Eve, it will be reflected in the year ahead. Suffice to say, it determines the course of your life for the entire year. It’s dumb, but I have dumber beliefs. I also believe in the Powers of Ten, & how much space actually exists between us, within us, & how we are all made of the same stuff. Here I sit, somewhere in Singapore, sometime in the middle of night writing out the last entry of the year. My night was average. Boring even. So was the night before. I spent most of it, & a good chunk of the morning, just binge watching movies. Old classics & new ones. I was supposed to play soccer this morning. It’s tradition. New Year’s eve football session with the peeps, but the universe had other plans. It decided to bless us with rain, disregarding our tradition. It’s fine, though. We have the traditional New Year’s Day session to look forward to tomorrow morning. Maybe. It rained all day. No reason to...