100 words a day

Todays entry will be boring but I figured out something that helped me out a bit, so maybe it'll help you too. I'm a little happier today because I decided to make some clearer distinctions between fun and work. When I was young, everything was either work or play. Studying and homework were work. Watching television and playing dodgeball were play. It was very clear and we were very happy. Or at least we knew when we were happy. Nowadays, with us trying to make work and learning fun for the next generation, everything is a little muddled and I have a theory that this makes kids miserable. They're just going through life with a vague feeling like they might have done an honest days work or they might have been goofing off the whole time. My daily routine falls into three categories right now -  fun, work and peudowork. Pseudowork is kind of an in between grey area - stuff that I do to fool myself into thinking I'm making progress in life but I'm really just doing it

One night, I came home hungry and I saw that my wife had left me a half-eaten rice dumpling (zhongzi) for supper. They are usually wrapped in banana leaf but this was unwrapped, half-eaten and just sitting there out in the open. As I stared at it, wondering if I should eat it, I saw a tiny cockroach scuttling away from it. Not the big fat ones you're probably thinking of, but the little ones that are less than a centimetre long fully grown - the ones you don't mind smacking on the kitchen counter with your bare hands. This was a small one, even for its kind. I hate cockroaches, but man, I love rice dumplings! So I chose to believe that the cockroach only helped itself to the outer part of the dumpling. I carved out the insides of the dumpling with my spoon and it just melted in my mouth! It was so good! I really wanted to eat more, so I decided maybe the cockroach only touched the part of the dumpling on the side it was near. I didn't see it near the other side, so it proba

For many years now, me and my siblings have been shareholders of a few companies our father left us. So apart from being siblings, for the past several years, we've also been fellow shareholders. Nowadays we only meet at Chinese New Year, Christmas, sometimes birthdays, and most of the time at company meetings. Now we are getting close to finally winding up the companies. I have been looking forward to this for years. As we mostly stay out of each other's family affairs, the companies have been our only source of disagreements. There has been a lot of heated discussions, to put it mildly, at our company meetings. I try to not let it affect me, but it has taken a toll on my mental health over the years. I have always thought that with the companies wound up, there would be nothing left to argue and there would be no more disagreements. This seems logical. However, I have the fear that the disagreements might be symptoms of ill feelings, and now that we can no longer fight over c

I think I am a memoryhoarder. I have trouble letting go of memories because I have a fear that it might be an important part of a future story I want to tell that I haven't figured out how to tell yet. You might argue that, well, it's just a story. If you don't remember some of it, just make it up. The memoryhoarder does not like this. The memoryhoarder is greedy. The memoryhoarder wants the story to be entertaining and accurate. The memoryhoarder has an undocumented phobia that if memories are not preserved in great detail and accuracy, that the story would not be as genuine or as believable or as entertaining or ... as pure as it could have been. If all I'm leaving behind after I am gone is a bunch of stories, it would be nice if they were somewhat true. Sometimes I wish the human brain worked like a computer and memories were like computer files. We could just keep the ones we need and delete the ones we don't. We'd be a lot less messed up. But we keep everyt

I try not to typecast but this one time, I did this thing in my head that I'm not very proud of and here's the story. I was selling something on FB marketplace earlier this year and I specifically said C.O.D. in my post. This guy said he wanted to buy it but when it came time to arrange where to meet, he said he is from Singapore. He insisted he really wanted the item and he would pay me first and then arrange pickup. His profile had a Chinese name but the way he wrote his messages was a little weird. It wasn't perfect English but it was also not Singlish. There was something weird about his English but I couldn't put my finger on it. I was already thinking this guy is not who he says he is, so I should bail at the first sign of trouble. But we continued the process, and of course when it was time to pay, his "payment" didn't come through. So he wrote something like "No problem. I show you how to get back your money..." and immediately, I read t

Having a teenager is a pain in the ass. The snarkiness I can handle, but the snarkiness while being ignorant just makes me want to tear my hair out because it makes me feel like I've failed as a parent in more ways than one, like I've failed to teach him manners and I raised a stupid kid. Me, my wife and my son were flying back from Singapore yesterday, and we looked up at the big board to check which gate we were boarding at. My son says, "G1!" and starts rushing off. I said, "Wait!" and I took a few more seconds to look at the board. He was exasperated. Then I said, "It's not G1, it's G10." Our flight, AK712 was flying out of gate G10 to Kuala Lumpur. Gate G1 also had a flight to Kuala Lumpur but it was flight AK710. I looked on our boarding pass and our flight was AK712. But my brain had just absorbed all this information and I hadn't yet found the words to explain all this to a rushing teenager, so we went back and forth like this f