Sleep Paralysis, Again

"You awake suddenly at night.  You try to rise, but feel hands pressing down on your chest, groping for your throat.  You try to cry out, but you cannot move or speak. You notice a shadowy figure at the foot of the bed, and hear the steady clomp, clomp, clomp of others climbing the stairs to your room.  Your terror grows, but then as suddenly as it began, the pressure releases and the presence in the room fades into nothingness.  You can now move, rise from the bed, and try to make sense of what just happened to you.  You have just had an episode of sleep paralysis." -- Michael W. Otto, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Boston University

It's almost exactly what happened to me last week. In the dream or nightmare, I was walking toward my bedroom alone, when I felt an invisible hand gripping my wrist. Terrified, I struggled to get away, but my feet felt like lead.  Strangely in my nightmares, I always seem goal-oriented, even when escaping from invisible ghouls and terrifying monsters. I remember that my mind, lucidly clear and determined, was willing me towards the bedroom, struggling against the formless ghost. I tried to yell, but my lungs were choked and my tongue stuck, but still I screamed deep from within my gut as if getting that sound out would release me from my tormentor.

I woke up yelling. Ju lay beside me still sound asleep. Wow. Another one of those. It was quite terrifying, the dream, and I still felt it after waking. The room was far from dark, but Daniel was away in Hong Kong and I had to calm my nerves. It took me more than 10 minutes to get back to sleep. Naturally, I was a bit afraid of a repeat paralysis.

According to Dr Michael Otto, when you dream, you are paralyzed.  "In sleep paralysis, however, the normal cycles of your sleep become out of sync:  your mind wakes up, but your body is still in a dream state.  You are aware of your surroundings, but cannot move and may also experience any number of hallucinations. Most commonly, these hallucinations include sensing the presence of others (including seeing shadowy figures), feeling external pressure on the chest, hearing odd knocking sounds, seeing your body as if from the outside, or experiencing vibrating or tingling sensations.  Any single episode of sleep paralysis may include one or more of these hallucinatory symptoms."

I can remember one or two other episodes I've had, and they were terrifying, to say the least, and likely why I still remember them vividly years later. My symptoms are similar to that described above, except in my case, the dream state is blurred with my consciousness of reality. For example, in one episode, I was lying in bed next to my sister in the house we used to live in, my childhood bedroom, even though in reality I lived someplace else. I was paralysed and an extremely infernal buzzing noise (like the television without a signal) was in the background. My mind was aware that I was in a dream-state (I thought to myself: "You're in a dream, try and wake up! Oh help, I can't move!") and spurring me to reach to my left where my mobile phone lay to call my boyfriend for help. 

The weirdest thing was, there was a dresser to the left of my bed in reality, where my phone probably lay. But the dream backdrop was the room of my childhood. I was suffocating (the heaviness in the chest) and paralysed but my mind willed my arm to move towards the "phone", my source of help. I wonder if in reality, my arm really was able to move since I seemed to be between two worlds, the dream state and wakefulness.

Apparantly, sleep paralysis occurs more often following sleep disturbances. It makes sense if you consider my recent nightly disruptions due to Ju waking in the middle of the night and requiring us to move him to our bed.  Overall, sleep paralysis is normal, and comes with a good scientific explanation. But you can be sure it was utterly terrifying during, and quite bad even after I had woken from it. I would like to know, though, why I seem to experience paralysis within a dream context (my mind is aware it is a dream, yet still experiencing "reality" in a dream world), as if I am straddling two parts of consciousness.

Why Smart Boys Achieve More Than Smart Girls

Research into why bright girls end up achieving far fewer of their goals than bright boys point to a simple observation: girls are brought up to view their "smartness" as innate and given, whereas boys are brought up to view their being able to succeed at something as a result of their own effort and hard work.

This is big. It really confirms my rather shameful belief that my own mediocrity and lack of extrinsic achievements were really a product of my own self-sabatoge. I was always hard on myself when I couldn't do something difficult, eventually giving up and rationalizing that I simple had no "talent" or "natural ability" to do it - like A Level maths and wakeboarding.

I recall my parents telling me that I was "smart" and "clever" enough to ace my exams, be the first in my class (and even the whole school) and expecting no less than perfect or near-perfect grades until I was in secondary school. Yet I also recall my mother berating me for not "trying hard enough", not being "careful enough" whenever I didn't get 100% - the same kinds of phrases the researchers say are usually used on underperforming boys. So I grew up with both environmental signals -- the first, that I was innately smart, the second, that my good grades were a result of my hard work.

And yet I still became an underperforming (read: average) student in secondary school and gave up on the several challenges I never overcame - like Organic Chemistry (I rationalised that I had "no talent for science") and in-line skating ("no interest"). Later on, I applied the same defeatist ideology to graduate statistics and wakeboarding. I can remember the exact moments during each undertaking where I decided mentally that I would not bother to persevere, choosing failure as the path of least resistance.

However, my history has not lacked evidence of my overcoming obstacles and succeeding at something as a result of applying sheer willpower to it. Despite receiving almost no encouragement from my parents, I taught myself to ride a bike, (I wrenched up the training wheels of my bike and spent an entire day balancing on it back-and-forth along the 20 metres of my apartment till I could balance), swim the breaststroke (I stayed up nights analysing the strokes and then practising in the pool), play the piano without a teacher (sheer perseverance and practice) and pass my O Level "A" Maths (practicing hundreds of hours).

So on the counts of my apparant failures, were they due to my own defeatist mentality, somehow caused by early childhood or youth experiences of being praised for my "smartness" and less for my personal effort? It's really hard to say now, and impossible to calculate the countless times I received feedback from people the first 18 years of my life. But I do see that I was able to get by rather well and succeed at the things I told myself I had to succeed at when extenuating circumstances drove me to overcome the odds. "Failure is not an option" - the extrinsic stick - worked very well for major exams and things that mattered to me, like my driver's license compared to the intrinsic carrot - the pleasure of mastering something for its own sake.

This has huge implications for me as a parent-to-be. In a way, I am rather relieved to be having a son rather than a daughter, so I do not have to be extra mindful about how I give him feedback as he is growing up. After all, if he is going to inherit Daniel's short attention span, I forsee telling him to "focus and try harder!" a lot more than "that was really clever" and "you're such a smart boy!".

I believe the story is more complex than the single variable of different types of praise we give to boys and girls. Women have to deal with a lot more subtle societal messages as they grow up compared to boys, for example, the need to appear feminine and not as aggressive as men in their pursuit of career success and the obligation to be the primary caregivers to their parents and children, all of which interact with their own innate personality and belief-systems to produce their responses to difficult challenges. Whether we choose to stay the course and persevere at something is also weighed in a cost-benefit analysis of whether the end is worth the means to achieving it.

My decision not to continue with PhD had me soul-searching and questioning my ability to complete it (answer: yes) but I also did a pragmatic comparison of the opportunity cost (too much) against my genuine passion for academic research (not enough) and I came to the decision to give it up. I predicted that what I could achieve in the long-term would not compensate me for what I could achieve without that opportunity cost.  I think that decision has paid off and I don't blame or credit my parents or my response to adversity for it.

Dan Gilbert on What Makes Us Happy

Dan Gilbert is a Harvard Professor of Psychology. This is an excerpt from interviews he gave which are found on BigThink.com.  I thought what he had to say about humans and how we think and make decisions related to our happiness was worth spending the half hour or so transcribing onto this post. I will post my thoughts later.
What is Affective Forecasting?
Affective forecasting is the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they'll like and what they won't like. When you make decisions, whether they're large ones like whom to marry, whether it's Jim and Charlie, whether to move to Anchorage or Cleveland, or small ones - to have a doughnut or a croissant, to wear the red blouse or the green blouse, all of these decisions are predicated upon some estimation that your brain is making very rapidly, that one of them will feel better than the other one. How does your brain do that? And how well does your brain do that? Those are some of the questions that Affective Forecasting tries to answer.

What Is Impact Bias?
Impact bias is the tendency for people to believe that events will have a stronger impact than they usually do.  And that tends to be the main form of error that affective forecasting takes. Most of the time, when people are wrong about how they will feel about the future, they're wrong in the direction of thinking that things will matter to them more than they'll really do. We are remarkable in our ability to adjust and adapt to almost any situation but we seem not to know this about ourselves and so we mistakenly predict that good things will make us happy, really happy for a really long time; bad things they'll just slay us....it turns out neither of these things is by and large really true.

Why are we susceptible to Impact Bias?

Well there's a whole host of reasons why people are susceptible to this impact bias, one, for example, is we have a remarkable capacity for rationalization. People are very good in finding the good in the bad, very good at making the best of the situations that they are irrevocably stuck with. They don't know they have this talent, so when we think, "how would I feel if my spouse left me" we go, "oh my god, I'll be devastated, I'll be devastated for weeks, months, years in fact." What we're overlooking is the fact that within a relatively short time, we wouldn't be thinking of the same way of our spouse as we do now. We'll be starting to see all the ways in which she wasn't right for us, we didn't share as many interests as I once thought, sex wasn't as good as I remembered, et cetera. All of these are illusions of prospection but rationalization has a funny reputation of having a bad reputation. Most people think of it as making stuff up. It's not making stuff up. It's finding ways of seeing the world that are both accurate and pleasant. Almost everything can be seen in multiple ways, almost everything has a good view, a bad view, the brain is very good at finding the good view. The good view isn't any more wrong than the bad view is, so in a sense what our brains do is to go shopping among the various ways of thinking about the situations we're in, and they settle on the most positive one. That's a talent, that's not a foible.

Historically, what has made people happy?

Well of course we don't know how the antecedents of what makes us happy have changed over time because there are no good fossil records of smiling. Um, the really serious research on the scientific bases of happiness have only begun in the last couple of decades. Nonetheless I'd say that it's an educated guess to say that social relationships have been, and continue to be the primary predictor os human happiness. We are a social mammal.  And the thing that makes us happy is the...the affiliation and the esteem, respect, goodwill of other human beings. We like...we're happy when we have family, we're happy when we have friends. And almost all the other things we think make us happy actually are just ways of getting more family and friends.

How To Be Happy Update

Not long ago, I posted a thesis on how I believe we should approach the search for happiness, or equilibrium in our lives. I did consciously put it into practice and I daresay the results have been highly satisfactory.

First, I made the effort to give myself as much intellectual stimulation as possible each day, even if it was not to be found through my work, I got it from other sources, like books. I finished Tom Plate's "Conversations With Lee Kuan Yew" which was really a precursor to the just-published "Hard Truths", another book of interviews with LKY written by a bunch of Straits Times journalists led by chief editor, Han Fook Kwang, who very likely ripped the idea off of Tom Plate. But this is not a book review, I will get to that another time. The point is my mind was highly engaged and I had very interesting thoughts and ideas as a result of reading, this made me extremely satisfied and I did not feel restless, bored or dwell on useless things like the past and the future.

Second, I continued to work on my relationships.  The one I am most satisfied with is that between my father and me, perhaps it is because of the baby or perhaps he realised I am seriously making an effort to normalize things between us. Whatever the reason doesn't matter, only that he has made something of a choice to relent and speak to me.  In life, there is not much else available to us humans except choice -- as constrained as we may think of our choices, we still have them, and it is but only the lack of courage or insight that keeps us from exercising the very choices that would change our lives for the better.

Third, the "flow" is coming in spurts and starts, mostly when I am reading and when I am busy at work, or when I am cooking (this is one of the enjoyable things I have begun to do more of) and yes -- when I am ironing Daniel's shirts! Today I found myself looking almost disappointedly at the rack as I realised I had finished ALL the shirts. I have become something of a pro when it comes to ironing his shirts, they are not completely perfect, but I do them quite efficiently and in half the time I used to take 2 years ago before we had the part-time help.  Indeed, I get some strange kind of flow in ironing, it is almost therapeutic!

The overall assessment hence, is it has worked for me. I have not felt unhappy, angry or depressed in as far back in my short-term memory as I can remember. Even driving has become less stressful -- I only swear once or twice a day and I seldom honk the horn. What I feel regularly is a sort of placid calm, marred sometimes by irritations but they pass quickly. My mind seems to be achieving more focus and clarity, I approach tasks with less reluctance and more focused neutrality.  I have achieved what I set out to achieve 4 years ago when my entire life had been upended in a black hole of chaos: equilibrium.

The next challenge is our project: little Julien is becoming more and more of a human entity and less of a surreal idea. As I feel his tiny but increasingly self-assured kicks against my uterus, I cannot help but marvel at the whole journey we've taken.  The jitters about the impending responsibility to a hapless child has passed. Daniel and I have both achieved what we set out for ourselves in our 20s, and we have been happy simply being together the past 3 years; this baby isn't an attempt to bail a sinking ship or plug any dissatisfaction we have with each other, it's something like the icing on our cake and it gives me a feeling that is beyond happy.... it all just seems right. As in, I did the right thing, and it feels right, and this is worth more than all the money, fame, status and gold in the world. 

How To Be Happy

On Sunday, I finished reading this book by Jonathan Haidt. In it, he tells us about a lot of good research done in the fields of psychology, sociology and economics which discovered what made people feel happy or gave them a sense of well-being and purpose. He also talked about what he had discovered in his own research on morality. Since Sunday, I have been hit non-stop by many ideas, thoughts and snapshots of all the things that have happened to me, the things I have learnt and the things I've talked about with people in the last 10 years. I was so excited, I wrote an email to my brother-in-law, Tobi, but still I had so many ideas and things to SAY.

This (long) post is about how I plan to become a happier person, and why it is so important for everyone to try to do it, at some point in their lives. I will divide it into two parts: THEN and NOW.

Then:

Some years ago, in 2007, I bought The Happiness Hypothesis while browsing at Kinokuniya bookstore. I read two chapters then I never finished it, it sat on my shelf till last week. I didn't finish the book then probably because I wasn't that interested in how to be happy and what scientists have to say about it. Ironically, I was in a most unhappy time of my life: i was just recovering from a terrible breakup of a 4 year relationship; I was in distress that I would never finish my graduate thesis (I had been working on my Masters research for 3 years); a good friend had destroyed our trust and ten-year friendship and it would be another two years before I learnt that she had betrayed me in the worst, imaginable way; a combination of the above, mistrust and misunderstanding had caused my father and I to be estranged, and it would be 3 more years before we would start communicating again. 

Many studies have shown that adversity helps people become more resilient and thereby more capable of being happy even in difficult circumstances. In other words, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger (and by extension, happier).  I certainly have had my share of misery. But don't get me wrong, my project to become a better person started way before my adulthood. Being "happy" is something anyone ruminates over at some point, and I was certainly put to the test as a teenager grappling with self-esteem issues and later as a young adult struggling with constructing a "positive" identity and self-image. You see, I have a pair of the most cantankerous, negative parents anyone could have - they are cynical, risk averse and not quite open to new things and ideas that challenge their worldview. I do not blame them for bad parenting, in fact, they gave me some of my best attributes: prudence, skepticism and realism.  It's just that whatever it took to overcome my negativity and depression, I had to look for within myself.

When I was 18, I decided to become a "happy and confident person", yes, just like that! So I ditched my glassed for contact lenses, forced myself to get busy with activities in university and avoided my friend who for the past 3 years had done nothing but talk about herself and complain about other people. As soon as I did all that, I began to feel different. As I made new friends and started new plans, I became more confident of myself and that was maybe how I met my first boyfriend who, at that time, was everything I wanted in a boyfriend - goodlooking, sporty and popular.  Of course he was about as deep as a bottlecap, but at 19, you don't really concern yourself about the intellectual aspect of your relationship. I would regret this in years to come, but that's for another discussion.

I was sure I had succeeded at being happy and I had solved the equation to ending all depressiveness. I was wrong.  By 22, my relationship ended, I wanted to kill myself and every day I embarked on self-destructive behaviour (smoking, promiscuity) in order to validate the hate I had for myself and my deficiencies. Through sheer reason and self-will, I decided again to be a better person - out of spite. I would become strong again (confident and happy), successful (get a Masters degree) and special to someone worthier. And I did all that, in fact I did it so well that at 27 I almost went on to do my PhD, almost got married and almost ruined the rest of my life.

Like the Battlestar Galactica rollercoaster on Sentosa, I felt my emotional life spiralling out of control and plunge into hell yet again. I had shown potential academically: I was doing "serious" research in mental health (compared to some of my classmates, I thought condescendingly then), had the opportunity to co-write and publish papers in a psychiatric journal with notable professors at the NUS Medical School, I enjoyed being a teaching assistant and the feedback from my Sociology students reflected my capabilities and popularity every semester, and I was learning like never before, my mind was literally burst open and absorbing like a sponge those years in graduate school. I thought I could do it, that maybe intellectually, I had what it took to be a real researcher, to pursue and produce knowledge, to inspire and teach others.  Emotionally I was a complete fatality when it came to making the ultimate choice -- what do you do when you realise you do not love your fiance the way he loves you, that you cannot be faithful to him and you might find happiness with someone else?

I handled that very badly, you might say it was something like the North Korean crisis meets September 11th. So as my world fell apart at 27, I had to again figure out how to be happy, how to fix the mess, and which way to go, because so many things I had thought to be a given (like marriage and career) had been destroyed. It was nothing I could talk to my parents about, few people knew what had truly happened, and I was riddled with shame, guilt, anger, resentment, hurt and despair. As always, I had the help of one or two people who came into my life at the right moment to help me (finishing Masters and graduating) and support me (seeing the positive and moving forward). This time I was done being the victim and I decided to be happy in spite of the chaos that was my broken relationship with my father,  and the shambles of my shortlived academic life.

So I got myself a job just to be financially independent doing what I enjoyed - teaching Sociology - and ended a relationship that was going nowhere (finally I was able to recognise a dead-end when I saw it and quit). I approached relationships with a new vigor, it was like I was a new person, I didn't care about the guy anymore, what HE wanted, what HE expected of me, I did what I wanted, and who I wanted! It was liberating to be thinking about what made me happy and search for things I wanted to do.  Then I met Daniel and I made two risky choices that would change the direction of my life. First, learning from past mistakes, I decided to be with Daniel exclusively even though when I met him, I was seeing someone else and I found myself in another of those damn dilemmas (trust me, having to choose is not better than having no choice at all). Second, I moved out of my parents' and in with Daniel so that I could live the way I wanted (independently) and away from the stress at home (my father).

Little by little, I became happier as I constructed my life in the manner I had always wanted: doing the work I enjoyed, becoming responsible for my survival and loving somebody who loved me as much as he respected the person that I am. We took another risk last year and bought our first apartment together just before the economy rebounded from the recession. I decided then that it was time to fix the last thing that was wrong in my life - me and my father. I must stress it took me almost 4 years to acknowledge that if anyone was going to make the first move, it would have to be me. It isn't something you can just tell me to do (many people have, and failed), it's something I have to be prepared to do. The turning point was us getting married. And I have to thank Daniel for being the bridge between my father and me, it made it easier since my father now accepted Daniel as a bona fide part of our lives and not some ang moh bum I had shacked up with. Daniel still thinks he should get the Nobel Peace Prize, but I reminded him this is the Gaza Strip, not China after Nixon and Deng Xiaoping. There's still a long way to go.

Now:

I said so much about the past because it was a 15 year journey of searching for happiness, coping with adversity and going back again in search of happiness without committing suicide along the way.  I jest of course, my life cannot be worse than any average person's life with so many starving, diseased and wretched people out there more miserable than I've ever been. However, every person is given what he/she is given at birth and throughout life, and each of us has to make the most of it, for better or worse. I had learnt how to overcome bitterness and unhappiness but I had not quite mastered the knack of finding happiness ALL the time. Is it possible?

Many people think it is. People who deem themselves "holy" or "spiritual" think so, you've probably met people who don't seem to live a single unhappy day. I used to pooh pooh such people, I dismissed them as shallow (how else could they escape the depression that thinking brings?) or naive (see previous) or just lucky (they live "charmed" lives and just don't suffer as much adversity as others). I questioned if happiness was an illusion, as the Buddhists say, pain hides joy, joy hides pain, the palm hides the back of your hand, turn it over and it hides the palm - in the end, suffering and happiness are one and the same. The only true state of being that does not leave you dissatisfied is freedom from all states of mind -- Nirvana, ultimate peace. I really believed that there cannot be a lasting sort of happiness or contentment, because when I was "happy" I was mostly in an unthinking state of "flow", and I got a lot of this the past few years just hanging out with my friends, socialising, holidaying, dancing, singing and drinking. But when I wasn't doing all that, I found myself, from time to time, depressed about the shortness, the pointlessness and the meaninglessness of life.

Back to the book, it finally drew all the parts of my experience of life thus far (which I have just described above) into one stream of consciousness, if you will. Haidt drew much of his inspiration from one positive psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. His name is a mouthful, but what he has to say about "flow", the state of being completely immersed in the task you are doing, be it dancing, working, talking, playing sport, validates everything I have personally learnt and discovered about happiness. He said, "It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. We can be happy experiencing the passive pleasure of a rested body, warm sunshine, or the contentment of a serene relationship, but this kind of happiness is dependent on favorable external circumstances. The happiness that follows flow is of our own making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in consciousness."  If you want a concise article of his ideas about finding flow, go to http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199707/finding-flow.

Haidt wrote that to be happy one must have love (positive, rewarding relationships) as well as to do work that one truly enjoys and finds purpose in doing. He said that in the latter one can experience Csikszentmihalyi's "flow", and the third ingredient is "spirituality" - the awareness and feeling of something greater than oneself. Some like to call it "god", some like "universe", I personally have not been awed or awestruck by a higher power or had some near-death experience (even though I wanted to be dead at times) resulting in some born-again experience. But I believe his results and research have a point to make about people being happier when they experience this, that's why mega churches that sing, sway and chant do so well, and people who meditate are so much calmer and at peace. But at moments, I do feel this sense of awe, of beauty that is pure and....good. It's when I happen to look up at the trees swaying under an azure sky, and when I look at a particular portrait or landscape (it's like the painter painted an emotion or feeling state into his canvas and pow, I saw/felt it).

So the plan to be happy as much as possible starts here. Rather than focus on the things I want to be rid of (like irritation, and annoying things at work) I am going to do these things whenever I can remember to:

1) Concentrate on whatever I am doing, whether its work (it's not boring, it's not annoying, it's something I can do properly, and properly is how I will do it!) or cooking or washing the dishes. When your mind is focused, it is clear of all nagging, distracting thoughts like how much you dislike what you're doing, and how you wish you were having a nap or at lunch. You make fewer mistakes because your mind is calm and uncluttered and in the end, you might get "flow" because you are so absorbed in it. Time passes faster and soon you're finished.

2) Build and nurture the good relationships I have now, and fix the not-so-good ones. All relationships are important, be they personal ones or social ones, my newest one would be with my kid - the ultimate rewarding relationship!

3) Find the time to do some of the things I have enjoyed in the past - playing the piano, reading (I do it plenty nowadays and it HAS made me happier) and painting (this one is harder cos I work with pastels and it's messy and I have no room in the apartment for my easel and tools). Cooking is really therapeutic when I don't see it as a tiresome chore, especially at 7pm after a long day at work.

4) Do something for others. Volunteering has been shown to boost one's health, well-being and suppress depression. It's hard to find a cause to volunteer for, what with all the things competing for our time and attention during our rare slices of spare time, but I will search for something to do just for the sake of helping someone else out or improving the life of someone else in a small way.

So that's how I think one can start being a happier person. Not by comparing yourself to people worse off than you, or by trying to change bad habits or things you don't like in your life. I've never before tried to focus on the good, positive and rewarding things life has to offer because I spent so much of my life eradicating negativity, rising above misery and failure, and avoiding things I considered "bad" for me. It's time for a new perspective, and now that I am 31, being happy is my new project.

Vacation

Snow, snow, snow.

There will be an abundance of it, and even more when we are in the mountains for wintersport. This is where we will be for Xmas. How do people with no body fat survive? With thick socks and a lot of vodka apparantly.

Except the only things I will be drinking will be devoid of alcohol. Oh snap.

Still, on the scale of all things, there is much to rejoice about in spite of the sub-zero temperature:

• Seeing the family again
• Eating
• Friends
• Looking more pregnant than chubby?
• Cheese
• No housework for 3 weeks
• No aircon for 3 weeks (I think being in 19 degree air-conditioning is 10x worse than being in 0 degree weather)
• Cheese

German + Chinese = 100% Hapa?

I came across Kip Fulbeck's project on Hapa people, also known as those of mixed heritage, part Asian and part something else.  It's a book of 250 portraits where each Hapa person answers the question "What Are You?"

Hapa comes from the Hawaiian word for "mixed descent", a derogatory term not unfamiliar to other cultures who have their own labels for those who do not fit in with the majority. In Singapore, we have the Hokkien word "Zup Jing" which literally translates to "mixed genes" and isn't exactly a very neutral, politically-correct name.  Incidentally, I wanted to use http://www.zupjing.blogspot.com/ for our gestating baby but Daniel refused.

Whether we (or other people) are going to label our kid Zup Jing or Hapa or mixed or whatever, one thing is for certain: he or she is going to look and be special.  50% German and 50% Chinese really doesn't mean anything since "German" does not come prepacked in a jar of genes on the western end of the chromosome-market shelf. So what will our baby be?

I have always wondered about how children of two or more cultural heritages construct their identity. How would they answer the questions "Who am I?" and "What am I?"  If they lived in the same society most of their lives, would they identify with that culture and not that of their other parent? If they looked more like one parent, would they identify themselves with the ethnic/cultural group of that parent?

Race and ethnic labels (like German and Chinese) are pretty simple signposts for the more complex concept of identity -- who you are.  If both my parents are Chinese and I grew up in Shanghai I would not think very much about who I am. For those of us in Singapore, few lose sleep over this question since we've been told since the day we could read and activate the remote control that we have a "Chinese" (or Malay or Indian) race and a Singaporean nationality. The rest of us who do not agree with these signposts have to work a little harder to convince ourselves we are "Eurasian" or "Arab" or "Cockapoo".

Whatever scratches your identity itch. 

In fact, more and more people are joining the ranks of those who do not fit neatly into a "race" category.  Even people who fit neatly in on paper do not identify themselves with that group. If you were a Chinese Singaporean who grew up in America, spent your youth in Europe and then worked in Hong Kong, what about those experiences make you a Chinese, and even Singaporean? Maybe you speak some Chinese but that is not going to get you invited to a Chinese person's mahjong session. Your American-accented English is going to get you ridiculed amongst your Singaporean coworkers and your once-yearly trips to see Grandma and Grandpa back home are not going to make you au fait with the ways and wonders of Singaporean slang and the local love-affair for the best street food.

The new world of global movement and global economies has begun to dramatically alter the landscape of traditional identities long tied to homeland, nationality and race/ethnic groups. It's not even so new anyway, but the evolution of the way people work and live and move has sped up in the last decades and will spiral even faster in the decades to come.  There will be less space for identity politics like (single) national allegiance in a burgeoning population of Hapas and Zup Jings who hail from two or more nationalities and cultures. Already, people are becoming less anchored to one home, one place as they travel the world in search of jobs and experiences. Will there be any more relevance to national identity or cultural identity once people no longer spend enough time in one place to engender IDENTIFICATION with that place and that society?

In 7 months, our baby will have two nationalities - German and Singaporean.  S/he will live in Singapore until which time my job or Daniel's job takes us to another city.  We will visit Germany at least once a year. In several years, maybe more, we will rethink where we want to live. Decisions such as ours will have a profound impact on any child growing up in a family with strong blood ties to two cultures on different sides of the planet.  Family and employment would be the biggest factors that either push or pull us this way and that.  Our kid will have to figure out who s/he is and where s/he fits in while juggling three languages, two sets of culturally-distinct relatives, two or more societies that s/he will live and socialise in before s/he turns 21 and has to decide what and who s/he wants to be. A German or Singaporean.

I feel sorry for the kid already.  S/he is going to have to pick her/his way around all kinds of labels that people are going to try to shove at her; s/he will look in the mirror and see a question mark; I long to tell him/her that the only important label one should give oneself is "Adaptable". 

So kid, no matter how stupid government policies that force you to pick one identity are, no matter how incompletely you feel trying to fit in to one group, and no matter how few friends you have that look like you do, life is not about belonging to one or two groups of people who talk the same junk and behave the same way. Life is about making the most of what you've been given and doing the most good with it for yourself and the people around you - no matter which group they belong to - in the short, short time you have alive.

Eine Moment Bitte

How nice to be able to stay frozen in this moment, staring out blankly at a sea of waves and nothing else, for all of time. Of course our minds would have to stop moving, otherwise Daniel would either get bored or fall asleep.

Hence, the moment never lasts. I find one split-second of stillness (the state of tranquility people like to call "peace") and the next second I am awash again with the neverending cacophony of thoughts about my today, tomorrow, yesterday and what-next. No wonder it takes a few thousand life-times or more to get to nirvana - if I'll ever make it there.

In my 20s, I was gripped by periodic states of anxiety and anticipation, it was like I was dangling over a small cliff, trying to get up to safety, where there would be another cliff on which I would perch precariously for a while.

I learnt how to push out the noise and became much calmer and happier when I hit 29. I felt like I had reached my first plateau and I now wanted to be something more than just the blind and pointless "happy" that arrives like a big wave and recedes just as swiftly. That meant fixing a lot of stuff that had gone awry in the past few years of scrambling and battling. There are broken relationships that cost too much emotion to mend. But it is never too costly to mend a relationship with your parent, no matter how long it would take. I have been trying over the last 4 years to overcome the blame I put on certain people whom I believe had contributed to the breakdown of this relationship. I tried to focus on how I could mend the rift and take responsibility for my actions even though my indignation and pride protest against taking all of the blame.

It hasn't been easy. A human's sense of injustice and anger at events long past, and people long gone manifest in dreams of rage and recrimination. I believe it was the philosophy of the transience of all life that my mind was able to focus and not fall into a low-grade depression.

Meanwhile, the part of my mind that wasn't passively engaged in emotional damage-control worked overtime to achieve Balance. I call it Balance and not Happiness because I do not feel Happy. I feel better than that. I wake in the morning and Daniel is beside me, a reassurance that I am loved (for who I am and not what I have or what I can provide). The work I do and the satisfaction I feel at the end of the day attests to my competency as a member of society and the fact that I belong somewhere. The roof over our heads attests to our mutual committment to each other and a future of joint venture and parenthood. The options to move overseas and opportunities that come with this assures me that there is much more to learn and experience beyond our current existence.

I did not set out to achieve things to become "Happy". Don't get me wrong, I have many moments of happiness but I notice each one of them as they come along and ebb away again. Like when I am laughing with my colleagues at something, when I'm lazing in the pool with my friends, when I'm talking to my mother over dinner and when Daniel proposed.

I've learnt to respect the moments of calm nothing-states I experience nowadays as balance. It's no longer like the ennui of my youth and the resentment in my 20s. The unbearable lightness and heaviness are now in equal measure and sometimes, the stillness cancels each one out. Achievements, big and small, are thrilling, but equally transient. They make my day, but I want to work on this Balance thing now that the 30s are upon me and feel the pleasant state of stillness for more than a few moments each day.

Marriage

Me: So, are you going to be with me in sickness and health,
in poverty or wealth; through thick and thin; no matter
which country we're in?

Daniel: Yes.

Me: Aren't you gonna think it through?

Daniel: If I do, I'm gonna fall asleep.

And so we begin our odyssey at 31 in relatively good health (notwithstanding some hamstring and shoulder pain for him; and some joint muscle strains for me), relatively sound financials (albeit shouldering a big-ass mortgage), no children or other time and emotion-consuming burdens and relative personal stability in our respective careers in Singapore.

As with most good headstarts, we should take our daily dose of reality check, we all saw what happened to Argentina. One day, we will be forced to make decisions because someone is sick, we have to move to another country, the kid conspires to deprive us of sleep, our parents need us. Things that money alone cannot fix.

That is the real test of a marriage. Not solving the problem of who does the laundry.

Traditional Chinese Medicine

I got sick 2 weeks ago, the same old virus that attacked my gut (made me puke) and gave me flu-like symptoms (cough, cold, sore throat). No fever. I went to the Western doctor (aka GP) to get medication to stop my nausea, vomiting and what-not. It worked as long as eradicating my symptoms went....but a week later, my dry scratchy cough was still bothering me. So I went to the Chinese sinseh (traditional chinese medicine practitioner). The first time, I took the bottled medicine (pre-cooked) which brought ALL the worst symptoms back - day one was my nose dripping non-stop; day two my whole body started to ache; day three i started coughing non-stop, the phlegm that was congealed in my lungs started coming unglued. Completely disgusting.

Second visit to sinseh led me to the home-cooked prescription. I was to boil the entire prescription and drink it religiously. The medicine consists of a ton of leaves, roots, seeds and things I cannot even recognise much less spell. I soaked this for half an hour in water and brought it to a boil. After simmering for 15 minutes, I strained the liquid from the gunk.

Absolutely disgusting and smells as bad as it looks.

But $58 and 4 days of drinking this later, I am glad to say I feel a lot better. All symptoms gone except the putrid phlegm trying to make its way out of me.

Happy 2 Years Together

Daniel...........................................................Vivien

1) Ideal outdoor pastime: .................................Ideal outdoor pastime:

Kite-surfing, snow-boarding, football................Drinking in the shade

2) Dislikes: driving & washing dishes............... Dislikes: driving & washing dishes

3) Eats potato chips: by the handful................. Eats potato chips: one at a time

4) Owns an iphone, iPod, Blackberry: Yes........Owns an iphone, iPod, Blackberry: No

5) Drives Vivien up the wall when:.................... Drives Daniel up the wall when:
he hangs out the laundry wrongly...................... she doesn't squeegee the shower dry

6) Loves: gummi bears & ice cream................... Hates: gummi bears & ice cream

7) Dislikes it when Vivien: shouts loudly........... Dislikes it when Daniel: mumbles inaudibly

8) Usual response to sexual overtures: ............Usual response to sexual overtures:
"I'm very tired leh" ..............................................."You're not tired meh?"

9) Longest attention span: 26 seconds ................Longest attention span: 2.6 hours

Eat in Japan - Yes We Can!

Japan, land of the rising sun, of Mount Fuji, temples, cherry blossoms and geishas. That is the Japan of popular culture and the tourism industry of course. But for uninitiated rookies like Daniel and I, we were happy to go forth and experience what Japan had to offer us.

Japan did not disappoint.
Sure, there were more temples than we could ever see (or want to see) in a lifetime....

Buddhas galore....but the best part of Japan for diehards like us was really...

the food!

Come to Japan ready to taste, otherwise, it would be a complete waste of your time and money. Tasting Japan is opening your senses to a whole new dimension of euphoria....and yes, even from a slimy LIVE oyster curling resentfully about on your plate. Rice wine, or sake in Japanese, is the other ecstasy you would not want to miss. It's smoother than vodka with none of its smelly turpentine fumes, it melts down your throat like an easy song and it never gets to your head till you're ready to leave the table.

Eating and drinking were the things we enjoyed most in Japan, and after that, the only other thing is onsen!
Daniel said I should post my overall insights on our trip, so that people can get an idea of what Japan could be like for total aliens (yes, us) to this unique culture. I've already put up several posts on eating in Tokyo, and I will post several more, especially on some superb finds we made on our eating spree.

But first, for those of you who do not speak any Japanese, or read any Chinese (their kanji writing is the same as our Chinese writing) here are some offhand information to help you enjoy that authentic local eating experience:

1) Be ready to ask for an English menu, and if they don't have one (which is most of the time), be ready to ask for the waiter's recommendation even if you can't understand what he is saying. We highly recommend this option for those of you who are more adventurous because the only thing better than great food is eating great food you didn't expect.


2) Many restaurants offer photos of their menu along with the prices, like this one. You won't understand a word, and most likely won't find the pictures too appetising either, but trust me, it's worth being surprised. Daniel found that sashimi really tasted better than its international reputation. Trust me, until you have tried horse sashimi, raw fish is like oatmeal. (yes, the horse that neighs)

3) Best part of eating in Japan is the prices you see are the prices you get. No sneaky GST or service charge applies at the end of your meal so you can really go ahead and enjoy that tempura ramen. The other good news is you DO NOT HAVE TO TIP. Japanese serve you with ten times the professionalism as American waiters and do not expect anything in return (besides the price on your menu).

4) Go for small tavern-like establishments for a cosy, local feel. The prices may not be much lower than any other restaurant, but you get great ambience, usually because these places seat about 10 people max and the chefs cook and cut behind the bar. Only catch: everybody smokes in these places so prepare to wear cigarette smoke and the smell of your dinner home afterward.


5) Order beer (Sapporo, Kirin and Asahi are the biggest names), we recommend Asahi and do go for the sake, which comes in hot or cold. Hot sake is usually heated up at the bar and comes cheaper (I got one for 300 yen). Cold sake is really good and comes either in a bottle (like a small beer can) or they pour it by the cup from a bigger bottle. Usually they pour it till it overflows into the saucer, and you pour the excess back into the glass.

If you have patience, walk around until you find something that appeals to you. There is no dearth of restaurants, cafes and sushi bars in Tokyo. We didn't find pubs though, not the kind you would expect in a Westernised city or a resort beach like Bali. You would find instead nightclubs (varying degrees of sleaze and kinkiness) or karaoke lounges. But the search for food is well worth the effort if you want to avoid touristy joints and sub-par cuisine.

Look out for our Onsen For Idiots post coming soon.

In case you are really looking for food in Tokyo, do ask me for directions if you would really like to try what we had. Most establishments we patronised had names we couldn't read and so I really can't give an address. Addresses are in Japanese anyway, and Google maps doesn't do English translations.

So break out your kimono and get ready to bite a shrimp head off!


Next: Getting Around Japan - Yes We Can!

America's Got Talent? Why we're addicted to "Reality"

Some theories about America's (and a large part of the American-pop culture-watching globe) obsession with Reality TV hold that the people in general have a voyeuristic curiosity about their fellow people. This might partly explain why shows like American Idol or Big Brother attract a following that doesn't seem to abate.

I don't know all the theories postulated about this quirky but revenue generating phenomenon, but as an avid couch potato, I have some thoughts of my own.

I've been watching TV since childhood, my earliest brush with the "reality" genre must have been World Wrestling Federation (WWF), though my belief in WWF's inherent reality was rudely shattered when I was told by my father that it was all theatre. Then I was mesmerised by the Amazing Race, I fell in love if you will, with the first season of competing "pairs" because each played to our most fundamental caricatured stereotypes: the roly-poly best friends who were the de facto comic relief (my faves); the bickering engaged couple who had no direction sense to save their lives; the cliched underdog mother-daughter team whom everyone openly rooted for but secretly thought were damn weak. This type of competitive shows (with the million dollar "reward" of course) played my social self like a violin -- we all "know" these strangers on TV, because we've "seen" them all our lives, in our newspapers, stories, our friends and family. That's why we feel impelled to watch and root for people we've never met and never will meet - because they represent who we know, what we think we know, and yes, who we ARE.

What do I mean? Well, forget biodegradable trash disguised as television like The Simple Life (Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie cavorting with cows and shocking American Midwesterners with their seeming allergy to menial labour) or that show with the plain vanilla couple that has 10 or so kids. The only reason why people would waste their limited brain cells watching Paris Hilton select her "best friend" over 12 episodes is because their fascination with Celebrity stems from their innate hatred of their banality.

Whoa, you say, hold on there, am I saying you watch E! News because you hate your boring little life? Absolutely.

Celebrities have been catapulted this century to the forefront of global awareness by the ubiquity of mass media and the defencelessness of us globally-connected citizens to control what's on TV. At most, we can change channels but what you don't see is the insidiousness of a program like The Simple Life or American Idol which taps into your most fundamental psyche: your hopes, your fears and your dreams.

"Reality" television shows like American Idol tap into the ordinary person's secret desire to be - you guessed it - great. Great as in: successful, famous and most of all, to find their Place In the Sun (or Hollywood, whichever you prefer).

When I watch Project Runway (the only reality show I bother with) the moment that gives me greatest satisfaction is in seeing the emotions of the winner as her name is announced. It's different from Survivor or shows where people fight tooth, nail and shamelessness to get to the million dollars. No, Project Runway (as in many other shows with a similar concept)plays on the viewer's sense of MERITOCRACY - that talent and perseverance will win you the day. The winners say the same things each season: "I worked at it, I believed in myself and my vision, I didn't quit". These are words of vindication, and the subtext? "People with talent and the passion to pursue their aspirations can achieve what you and I only dream of in our drab little everyday lives."

And why not?
I'm not begrudging them their trophy or triumph. In fact, getting this not so subtle message even gives me a little twinge of feel-good Hopefulness that perhaps even myself, ordinary old Viv, might someday find her place in the sun. And I reckon I feel this way because every day I carry within me the gaping hole that is my inner emptiness.

An emptiness that gapes stupidly back at me whenever I ask it: where do I belong?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suffering from loneliness or a lack of natal/cultural rootedness. It is an emptiness that can only be filled by passion. Passion like the stuff you see on Project Runway, where designers sweat and sew their talent into their garments every week, working towards the Grand Objective of becoming the next Miuccia Prada or Alexander McQueen; the passion that drives aspiring chefs to bite down on whatever snarky abuse Gordon Ramsey is going to spew at them on his show. Even the short-term passion you see on American Idol (those winners who slipped back into the mediocre, psychologically-disordered little rocks they crawled out from under before winning American Idol)or Singapore Idol or America's Next Top Model is better than no passion at all.

Purpose.
I asked Daniel what his overarching purpose in life was. It was certainly achievable, given hard work and some smarts which he definitely possesses. It could be mine as well, except if it were, I would not be sitting here at 7pm on the sofa writing an infernally long blogpost about my deep-seated purposelessness after watching a reality show. I would be like many others out there either riding the surf at Wavehouse Sentosa (passion arising from short-term gratification), or working on passing the CFA and landing a job in finance (short term passion arising from financial insecurity) or trying to kickstart a career as lead singer of a band (long term passion arising from wishful thinking).

I look at my friends (not literally) and see them getting married, having a kid or two, being wherever they are in the world because either their spouses or their jobs took them there. I wonder to myself: is there anything more inspiring than roosting and monetary accruance? I have only one friend I know who is putting herself on the line and risking not just her parents' financial investment to realise her aspiration of being self-employed and financially independent. One out of many, many people. Those I knew who poured money into learning the things they loved (art, fashion, music) eventually went on to work for other people because they had bills to pay. But at least they did something out of PASSION, and not because IT'S THE RIGHT TIME TO GET MARRIED, HAVE 2.1 CHILDREN & BUY A PRIVATE CONDOMINIUM AND KEEP WORKING IN MY PASSIONLESS JOB IN ORDER TO SUSTAIN THE ABOVE THREE PRISONS I LANDED MYSELF IN.

Every day I think about this life full of people who live it to its fullest socially-approved mediocrity and I shudder with dread with just as much icy fear that this is all I am hoping for.

2009: Year of Doing

With 2008 behind me like a used plastic bag waving in the wind, I dug in my heels in January without much care for the commencement of another year.

If last year was a year of new people, new things and new challenges, then this year is stock-taking for me: clear out the junk, abandon the gunk. Easier said than done, if those of you who have ever experienced episodic constipation will understand.

Speaking of ballooning behinds, Daniel insists quite sincerely that my ass has expanded since 2008, news that dismayed me greatly, since I have one of those categorically non-existent variety of ass that came aesthetically ready-made and require no additional maintenance. Or at least I used to. (2) This, combined with my increasing sharpei-looking mid-section, has prompted me to go into damage control mode: weekly yoga (to mitigate the effects of (1) and muscle cramping from lack of exercise), weekly tennis (running after balls is an effective workout) and a more discerning diet, comprising namely of cooking twice a week.

(3) Renewing and maintaining friendships and acquaintances has been a surprising yet rejuvenating development this year. I am thankful that many of my friendships from many places in the last 20 years of my life have endured and blossomed till today. I consider this a personal achievement in the aspect of human relationships, which is more than I can say for some people I used to associate with. In any kind of human relationship, I've learnt that my biggest responsibility is in effort. I had been less selective in regard to whom I invest my efforts in. Sarcasm aside, this will also be a year of growth, as Daniel and I continue on our journey of Living Together Without Legal And Social Obligation To Be Nice to Each Other. Lesson of 2009: how to forgive your partner when he keeps calling you an SPG.

Finally, (4) learning how to play tennis and speak German because I have no choice but to do it will round up my year of things to accomplish. As mentioned in point (3), investment in social relationships such as Daniel's non-English speaking parents is one of those things to which I accord importance. So is picking up Competent Tennis in 2 months to prove to Daniel once and for all that women are not disadvantaged in sports by their gender. If I can teach myself to play Chopin's Etude No.2 in 4 weeks, I can do tennis in 8 - after all, it's the same hand-eye coordination except I have use an extra set of muscles while doing it.