Lately, aka perhaps a short summary of my early 40s

I got myself a pair of glasses with progressive lenses. I wear full-strength contact lens to correct the near-sightedness in my dominant eye, and on the other eye, I wear a multi-focal lens that is powered down for my near-sightedness and has provision for my new-found far-sightedness. There are quite a number of options these days for people with both myopia and presbyopia and none are perfect apparently.

Listening to a bunch of new-to-me music: Bluetech, into.cassette, florist, caroline. Oh I love Bluetech. Especially when your audio equipment is capable of rendering some form of soundstage. I also made a playlist of ambient electronica from the 90s after I watched John Darko’s videos on how he got into electronic music.

I sought out old comforts – film cameras, the Ricoh Digital IV, keeping a blog. I obviously cannot find that version of myself anymore, but living is searching, refining, and hopefully finding some equanimity.

Relatedly, caring a little more about meditation, taking walks, and sleeping better.

I started running in my late 30s, and last year, my running volume halved. Covid undid my efforts at building my running self, and it has been tough trying to get back to the same speed/ volume. I keep things fresh by going to different places but with the world moving on from the pandemic, I find more places more crowded these days, which adds friction to my going for a run. Ah well, I will figure something out.

I read “big” books like The Third Reich, Lord of The Rings, The Complete Works of Plato … and added War and Peace and The Art of War to my list. Even though I once said I decided to not read W&P. Ha. Perhaps someone in her 20s might have wanted to read such books, youth affording the time and headspace but life moved along quickly. Perhaps someone in her 40s might find joy in the labours of reading such fat tomes, so that she does not reach her retirement, thinking, “Oh maybe I really should read these books now, before I die.”

Links from the past weeks

🎥 Everything Everywhere All At Once

The movie looks very madly paced, and I forgot about it for a while. One day, in between reading books, and wondering why it gets such great reviews, I rented the movie from Apple TV.

I really, really enjoyed the movie. I know it is unnecessarily messy and one wonders if there is anything new, but I appreciate that it entertains and also goes, without being too soppy, into poignant themes and meaning. It is a deep breath and a fresh breath of air at the same time. I hope it brings some calm and perspective for the young ones, and also the middle-aged ones like myself, trying to not lapse into a mid-life crisis. There are so many possible lives, but let’s live this one well.

Some notes from Japan 🇯🇵 ✈️

  • Topping up our Suica card (which we added to our phones’ Wallet app on a previous trip) has become more arduous. Of the various credit cards, only the Amex was able to complete the top-up in the iOS wallet app. I had to add my Amex card to my partner’s phone so that both of us can continue to use our Suica cards.


  • Japanese merchants still aren’t that cashless. Trying to wave our cards didn’t work- we are generally invited to plug our card into the machine and sign. I used Apple Pay once. If they allow payment by IC card (a reference to the transport cards), you can use your Suica, which makes things faster. Most payment machines can take payment from your Suica (loaded onto the iPhone’s wallet) without you have to press twice on the lock button to activate payment.


  • Prices are as if there had been no inflation over the recent years. On top of that, the exchange rate had gone in our favour and so, things felt more affordable than usual.


  • I used to buy my contact lens solution after I landed in Japan. This time, there was more difficulty in finding a 100 ml bottle of solution + case. The Japanese are now selling single-use solution + case. It is quite a thing to marvel – the single-use product is quite well made!

Links from the past weeks

  • Harry Styles is very likeable, and while the song’s merits can be debated, the music video for As It Was is a work of art. I had to find out where it was filmed.


  • I was trying the Matter app, and I enjoyed Kieran Setiya’s piece titled What’s the use of hope?

    I like the Matter app’s interface, and the play audio function was great. It was free to try before 15 January 2023; the subscription is US$59.99 per year. I have been a user of Reeder, and I have flirted with Instapaper and Pocket previously but I’ve usually found that I do not use read-later apps that much. Reeder does have a read-later function, but I tend to not use it. I am now also trying out Anybox, which I am treating as a bookmark manager, but it also has a download/ read-later function. At this moment, while the Anybox interface makes things nicer to look at, given my needs (not much), I might just stick to Pinboard since the repository function is the main point for me (I paid a one-time fee previously, before the site changed to a monthly fee model). So I will use Pinboard + Reeder + Apple Notes.


  • The mac mini M2 is finally out. The lowest end model is cheaper than the M1 version. Such a sweet little box.



  • Why You Really Shouldn’t Spend a Lot on a Standing Desk

    This article’s title amused me. We are there already? I haven’t gotten a standing desk, because I’d have to remove from my just-the-right-size apartment our trusty bludot Strut desk. I had considered converters but could not stand the idea of my monitor & keyboard & mouse shuddering as they were being moved up/down. Also, a large converter that would fit a monitor + keyboard seem to be such an ugly mammoth atop the desk. And yes, the “solution” is the same as before standing desks came into fashion – get up, take a walk.


  • Ten Percent Happier has a course they call “The Dalai Lama’s Guide to Happiness”. I enjoy the format, where you watch a short video before the meditation session. Roshi Joan leads the meditation sessions, and she has a very calming presence.




  • We started watching The Chase, a trivia game show, and of course, I had to find out more about the Chasers. Buzzy is such a fun presence and Victoria Groce was so good, I thought she was an actor who was supplied the answers.



📖 Walking 

“My next project is to draw circles around places in which I find myself, say with a radius of one to five miles, and then to follow the circumference on foot all the way around.

Walking sometimes means undertaking an inner voyage of discovery. You are shaped by buildings, faces, signs, weather and the atmosphere. Maybe we were made to walk, also in cities? Walking as a combination of movement, humility, balance, curiosity, smell, sound, light and- if you walk far enough – longing. A feeling which reaches for something, without finding it. The Portuguese and Brazilians have an untranslatable word for this longing: saudade. It is a word that encompasses love, pain and happiness. It can be the thought of something joyful that disturbs you, or something disturbing that brings you plenitude.”

“Everything moves more slowly when I walk, the world seems softer and for a short while I am not doing household chores, having meetings or reading manuscripts. A free man possesses time. The opinions, expectations and moods of family, colleagues and friends all become unimportant for a few minutes or a few hours. Walking, I become the centre of my own life, while completely forgetting myself shortly afterwards.”


Erling Kagge
Walking

//

I was in the library and saw plenty of books on running, and I thought that’s not what I want, why aren’t there any books on walking? The simple act of walking is perhaps too ordinary to deserve books to be written on it. But I took a step to the right, and there they were – books on walking. I was pleased, the bright pleasure of discovery in a library, amidst too many books that may or may not interest you.

I enjoyed the author’s book on silence, and had expectations for the book. It did not disappoint. This ode to walking is a perfect book for my December. Contemplative but not too much, and in December, I took a few more walks, one much longer than usual.

Highly recommended.

📖 Lucy by the Sea 

“We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.”

“He told me that his wife had Alzheimer’s, and that he could not remember the last word she had spoken to him, because she’d become gradually more and more silent and then she remained silent. And this man, her husband, could never remember the last thing she had said.”


Elizabeth Strout
Lucy by the Sea

//

This is a book about the early days of the COVID pandemic, and it is surreal to read about something while you are still in it. (In our country, the pandemic is in a way, over, and we are living with it endemically, but one can never be too sure.)

The prose is sparse, but words precisely used, evoke a sense of delight in this reader. The main character is a lady in her 50s and the writing was such that I felt myself slow, to inhabit her world and her surroundings. The book is poignant but does not overwhelm. There is a lingering sense of hope, which we all need.

Links from the past weeks

Reading – 2022

Books here are only listed if I’ve completed them; recommended titles are in bold.

//

Snow Crash
The Hobbit
Born to Run
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Crying in H Mart
Autopsy (Kay Scarpetta)
The Fellowship of the Ring
Mother of Invention
Truly Peculiar
超譯佛經
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
The Nineties
Portrait of a Thief
Just Keep Buying
Metronome
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir
Plays Well With Others
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
Happy-Go-Lucky
Samsung Rising
Death and the Penguin
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
The Puzzler
Cloudmoney
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
Stolen Focus
Lucy by the Sea
The Two Towers
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
The Power of Meaning
The Simple Path to Wealth
Walking: One Step at a Time
Impractical Uses of Cake
Life Time
How Will You Measure Your Life
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Total:
38 books; 15 fiction

Mega books are being dealt with, and although LOTR is not done yet, I’ve decided to go into HP for 2023. Quite a number of good books this year; my top ones are Death and the Penguin, and This is How They Tell Me The World Ends.

📺 Some things I’ve watched – 2022

Outlander
Dopesick
Next Level Chef
Singles Inferno
The Amazing Race S31
Top Chef
Inventing Anna
Endless news footage of Ukraine being invaded
Seeing Red (movie)
American Idol S20
ER
Dr Strange (movie)
Bullshit
The Handmaid’s Tale S5
Sisters Who Make Waves S3
Masterchef Singapore
Iron Chef – Quest for an Iron Legend
Bridgerton S2
Call Me By Fire S2
Pulau Ujong (a play)
Spy Family
The Playlist
Friends reruns
Generation Wealth (documentary film)
Foundation S1
Harry Potter 1 (movie)
Severance
Slow Horses S1
Harry Potter 2 (movie)

I would recommend those in bold. Oh, Severance is very, very good.