I keep forgetting this is my personal blog, and keep writing long-form articles that I slave and slave over. Part of this is because I enjoy crafting something good, the other part is because I know how bad my spur of the moment, unedited posts can be. As a writer who wants to get better, it’s embarrassing to see rubbish I write posted on the World Wide Web for all eternity.
But I’ll try this. Because I know my friends read this, and I’d like to share what’s in my life from time to time and maybe get some advice. And I also know how much I enjoy catching up with them on their own blogs, so hopefully they’ll enjoy reading my blog too.
Work, Fulfillment & the Big Bucks
I love my job at Hardware Zone – a great mix of technology (a love) and writing (a big, big love). Or at least, I used to, until the great pile of nonsensical projects came raining down and took time and effort away from writing a few things really well to writing a lot of things really bad.
Plus, a couple of big bills got me down lately, and brought home again the hard point that I’m not making enough of the bucks, and that no matter how much I love what I do at HWZ, it will never get me to where I want to go financially. And I want to change that, not just for me, but for my family, and especially my dad, who’s going through his own tough times. Read More →
One of the perks of being a tech reviewer is getting the newest toys and trying them out for free. One of the non-perks is doing a ‘shootout’, getting a bunch of said toys together and trying them all out at the same time.
So there I was, trudging up Bukit Timah Hill at an unprecedentedly early hour on a weekend (yes, working weekends, woot), trying to get decent photos for publishing with six cameras. A couple of them were excellent; easy to use, fast and responsive, like extensions of my eyes. A couple were average. A couple were bricks; using them to take photos was like using a rock to write.
(At some point, I wanted to hurl said bricks down the hillside, just to see them go crunch against the rocks.)
About halfway up the hill and over a hundred pictures later, I discovered something interesting: I was actually taking better pictures with the cameras I enjoyed using. Big duh right – would you do better using a big granite slab to write or a pencil – but you know what? It brought home closer to me that using the tools you love not only help you love what you do so it makes you do more, it also helps you do it better.
It isn’t easy making facts and statistics interesting. Lots of things fail at it: textbooks, movies, teachers. But Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals makes a smashing job of it.
There are 2 reasons why I love this book: one, it’s made me smarter. It’s taught me more about my food and it’s made me think more about my food. Two, it’s damn good reading. I’ve added Pollan to the list of writers I want to be when I grow up.
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley, he wrote both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and its sequel, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I read them out of order (sequel first), but discovered it doesn’t matter.
In Defense of Food was written as an answer to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it was written as a practical guide for the person who wants to eat consciously, whereas The Omnivore’s Dilemma centers around Pollan’s quest story to understand food. It tells a story about walking in the cornfields, being knee-deep in cow manure, working as a farm-hand, and hunting for dinner. It’s what makes this book so much fun. And personal. Pollan isn’t a distant observer, he reacts and responds to what he sees and how it changes his perspective on food, and I couldn’t help but do the same as I read along. Read More →
Caveat: If I sound like an experienced authority on self-defense, you should know I’m not. I’ve only been attacked once in my life and then managed to talk my way out of it. The other parts of my personal experience come from books, teachers and simulations. I actually consider it a blessing not to be an experienced authority on self-defense, as I like living a peaceful, happy life where people don’t try to change my lifestyle for me without my permission.
Where a lot of martial arts fail is in not addressing the mental and emotional aspects of self-defense before, during and after the fight. Nobody gets attacked in a vacuum, everybody gets attacked in a context. Nobody goes through a violent attack with the same mental and emotional response they go through a kata drill. And nobody goes from normal life, to violence, then back to normal life the same way again.
I trained for years without even once addressing the mental and emotional response to being attacked, then I donned a High Gear suit and had a partner go at me high speed, strength and intent and experienced the “oh fuck!” freeze for myself. It wasn’t as pretty as the kung-fu movies. Even though they were real fake training simulations, I went through the whole gamut of surprise, shock, fear, lock-up, despair, anger, aggression, indignation, all the while trying to defend myself physically. Conclusion? It wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be.
And yet. Read More →