This Friday, a man will be killed, for no good reason

Press message from the Singapore Anti Death Penalty Committee
Yawning Bread article on Tochi's case
Amnesty International appeal
Nigerian government to apply diplomatic pressure

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III

Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?

Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a tree standing in the rain?

-Pablo Neruda
The Book of Questions

2006 Lists and New year's crises

Um, yeah, kinda late. But what the hey.
In no particular order:

My 2006 Shit List

1. Moving away from my ‘self-created community’ in Vancouver
2. Moving back in with my parents
3. Having my 9-year-old laptop konk out
4. Peeing in a cup for Canada Immigration
5. Moving from full-time community organizing/activism to becoming a 8:30 to 6 zombie worker
6. Voting for the first time in my life, and having it feel so completely disempowering
7. Lebanon
8. My trip to Aceh (Christians are mind-boggling, NGOization is a fucked up process, government inaction is infuriating)
9. Being single all year…burn


My 2006 Hit List

1. Being around lots of family again
2. Not spending ¾ of the year with my hands in my pockets and shuddering with cold every time I get on a toilet seat
3. Char kway teow, and lots of it
4. Having a stable income every month that is enough for food, shelter, clothing, a few extras, and some savings to boot
5. My trip to Aceh (viva the kampong life, yo)
6. Finally reading Life isn’t all Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal and loving it
7. Improving my Punjabi (sorta, I mean, thora jia)
8. Having a dog again
9. Beginning to blog (Even though I post so rarely, and most of the time they’re cheating-posts and even though no one really reads it anymore – which might actually be a good thing – it’s done wonders to help me chip away at a writer’s block that’s been a perpetual problem since my mother found my diary in my teenagehood.)

In the wee hours of 2007, after ushering in the new year in a Kejang in the middle of the craziest traffic jam ever in downtown Jakarta (any thoughts of making our 10:30pm dinner appointment long ago abandoned), after learning a harsh lesson about never leaving home without a swiss army knife (it’s the new year’s countdown, you’re stuck in traffic, you’ve got an enticing bottle of wine, and you can’t friggin get to it, man!), after finally finding a place to eat at 1:30 in the morning, after getting sufficiently buzzed to pay your respects to the year past and the one now open like an unwritten book before us, I make myself a New Years’ Resolution. I am embarrassed to admit it, but here it is: at 3:30am on January 1st 2007, I resolved to become a bimbo. I figured, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. If it’s been so hard for me to find people I can connect with politically, socially, intellectually, if I’ve had such a hard time breaking out of my inherited community in Singapore now that I’ve lost touch with so many of my non-Punjabi friends from before, if the only way I won’t go crazy is to keep spending time with my cousins and friends who love shopping, watching movies, chasing celebrities, gossiping, and not much else, then it’s time for me to get wid the program. Get Wid The Program.

So I spent the first 12 days of January shopping, reading only fashion magazines (no non-fiction allowed, exception: celebrity gossip columns), watching only mindless tv (no documentaries allowed), gossiping about other peoples’ problems, talking about my hair and allowing political positions I disagree with to fly over my head.

But then, on the morning of the 13th of January, I woke up, opened the front door, and felt a flap of sheets brush past my ankle and land on my feet. I jumped with a start, thinking I’d stepped on the dog’s feet again, and rushing to get away from her angry bite. Feeling no needle-jab of a pain in my foot, I looked down, and there it lay, in all its glory, tempting me with its in-depth analysis of current events and interesting tidbits about the latest in the arts scene: the Saturday newspaper.

Keeping my cool, I repeated my routine practice of picking it up off the floor, placing it on the dining table, and heading off into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. Once coffee was ready, though, I began to panic. I’d finished reading the only fashion magazine I had left, and I couldn’t check my email because the computer remained beyond my grasp in that space behind the firmly-shut door from which emitted the low, rumbling sounds of, no not Miffy, but of my brother enjoying his weekend away from the army and in his own comfy bed.

And then my curiosity started to get the better of me. Had they found the rest of that missing Adam Air flight? Somehow having ridden the same airline to and from Jakarta during the new year’s break made me feel some strange sense of camaraderie with those missing (and probably unfortunately dead by now) people. It could’ve been me, so the least I could do is find out if there was any news. What about Iraq? What was the joker in the White House gonna do now? What kinds of white-man-imperialist excuses was he gonna give this time? And what new propagandist rhetoric was the Singapore government trying to feed its population this new year? I had to know, I just had to know.

And so, with my head bent low and bits of coffee bouncing onto my hand as my fingers dug deep into each other around the mug with anticipation, I did it. I read the Saturday newspaper. And that, as they say, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I can talk about my hair for maybe 20 minutes and then probably won’t wanna revisit that conversation for another 3 months. I can look at the pretty (yeah, pretty sexist!) pictures in Female for awhile, but then need to get back to finishing Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth because it just seems so much more important to understand the psychology of the colonized than it is to understand the physiology of peep-toed shoes (yikes, I know what they’re called now!). I can let one comment about freeloading immigrants go, but anything more and I will defend to the death the principle of open borders for labour.

And I am no longer ashamed to admit this one fact. I am, like, sooo not a bimbo. I am a nerd. I am a geek. And I’m sorry if it makes you feel uncomfortable that I challenge you. I’m sorry if you’re bored that I can’t give you the latest gossip about which marriage announcement is gonna top the one nobody thought could be topped at the beginning of the year. I’m sorry I’ll never dress as well as you, never bother with as much make-up or as many accessories, never keep up with the latest cellphone design. But I’m not sorry for who I am. So there.

I feel I have come out of this experience with more of an understanding of those who are labeled ‘bimbo’ (actually a somewhat offensive term, I think. I wish people didn’t use it so carelessly so often). I really don’t mean to sound like I’m belittling people who are into the kind of stuff I tried. In fact, I must say I’ve gained a lot more respect for people who take the trouble to look their best all the time. It’s just, well, it’s just not what I’m into, most of the time.

Now I’ll just head back to my blissful, guilt-free reading of hard-hitting political analyses on the Internet. Ahhh, that invigorating whiff of critique, dissent, debate, commentary, it comes a’calling…