Singapore I've Missed You

(Update: Of all of the random stuff I’ve done over the years somehow it’s this that gets featured on Mothership and The New Paper)

Before I came back to Singapore I pledged to myself that I would write at least once a week. Seeing as how Summer is more than 2/3 over and I still haven’t written anything that hasn’t quite worked out for me. Never too late to start though. Since I decided not to expand the golden coffers of SIA by flying back home last christmas, this summer marks the first time I’ve stepped on Singapore soil in close to 9 months. As the popular saying goes, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone for 8 months and 5 days”, so here are some of the things I’ve missed (and several that I didn’t) about our lovely island nation.

Uniquely Singapore

1) The Sweat a.k.a If Genius Is 99% Perspiration Then I Must Be Albert Einstein From the moment I stepped out of the air-conditioned heaven of Changi airport till this very moment seating in front of my computer with two fans pointed directly at me, I have been sweating. Constantly. Every non air-conditioned instant of every day sees beads of sweat poring from every pore. Sadly as I am not a flower, this isn’t as attractive as one might think.

Why can’t humans look like this when we sweat?

And do you know what the most insulting thing is? The whole point of sweat is to evaporate and cool down the sweater’s body, but the atmosphere here is so humid anyway that none of it does. This is useless sweat. Every single day I am doing utterly pointless sweating. If sweat was sentient and had a society then mine would be living in its mom’s basement, refusing to leave my skin for the real world. I have hikikomori sweat.

Even right now as I type in this 30 degree heat I see those smug sons-of-bitches sparkling smugly at me. Evaporate you salty little shits, evaporate god damn you.

2) The Singlish

After spending 9 months in a country where my accent often renders me unintelligible, it was a tremendous relief to finally return home and hear Singlish phrases sprouting all around me at rapid fire speed. I often hear people overseas trying to imitate our unique vernacular, yet Singlish is more then just inserting lahs and lors and liaos at the end of every sentence, and it is literally music to my ears to here it being spoken all around me in a proper (or as proper as an ill-defined and hodgepodge dialect like Singlish can be anyway) fashion. And as I watched the ending credits of the recent Godzilla movie, I couldn’t help but wonder. What would Hollywood movie and TV show posters be like if they were “localized”? Hence, presenting:

If Hollywood Was Based In Singapore